The Twilight Samurai

There's a particular strain of Western that emerged in the late 1960s and throughout the following decade—the revisionist kind, set during the dying days of the frontier, when the gunfighter realised his way of life was being swallowed by barbed wire, railroads, and the encroaching modern world. The Japanese equivalent, the jidai-geki, produced its own variant: films set in the twilight of feudal Japan, when the sam…

Image   This is a Japanese film directed by Yoji Yamada. Set in the Edo period, the story follows the life of Seibei Iguchi, a low-ranking samurai living in a rural village. Seibei is a humble and dedicated man, working as a tax official and caring for his two daughters after the death of his wife. His life is austere and marked by routine, but also by sadness and the struggle to provide for his family. Through…

Intro What would a collection of Japanese films be without a good samurai offering? Similarly, what would a collection of Japanese film reviews be without mention of a good samurai film or two? Hard indeed to exclude such works that demonstrate the countries' remarkable history and the place of its most famous warrior class within it, and so due to this, I turn to the work of veteran filmmaker, Yoji Yamada, and the…

Twilight Samurai (Tasogare Seibei) should have won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2003. Instead, the tepid Canadian film The Barbarian Invasions won. Another excellent foreign film that could have finished a close second that year was Evil , from Norway. Both films are superior foreign films, with Twilight Samurai getting a slight edge. In the late 19th Century, in the waning days of the Samurai…