Sanjuro
2018
Inkjet on watercolour paper
90 x 60 centimeters
I have long been a fan of Japanese director Akira Kurasawa’s 1962 film Sanjuro and I recently had the pleasure of watching it again on a streaming service, a very different experience to seeing it the first time at a university film club in the early 1970s. At the time Japanese cinema and the samurai film were completely foreign to me and I was immediately struck by the effectiveness of Kurosawa’s use of the camera to tell the story, by the stylised movements of the actors and how they were framed in the interior and exterior spaces.
The film’s story is based on clan rivalries and a frequently recurring narrative device is the surveillance of the enemy which involves crouching behind shrubbery, peering over walls and lurking in the inky shadows of the night-time village. In this reimagining I’ve pared back the number of samurais in frame, partly to ease the work load and partly to simplify the composition. Also, the figures have been westernised into warriors clad in jeans and sneakers, much like how American film director John Sturges adjusted his characters to become cowboys in his remake of Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai and similarly Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars, a remake of Kurosawa's Yojimbo, the companion piece to Sanjuro.