Samurai cinema
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Chanbara, also commonly spelled "chambara", meaning "sword fighting" movies, denotes the Japanese film genre called samurai cinema in English and is roughly equivalent to Western and swashbuckler films. Chanbara is a sub-category of jidaigeki, which equates to period drama. Jidaigeki may refer to a story set in a historical period, though not necessarily dealing with a samurai character or depicting swordplay.
While earlier samurai period pieces were more dramatic rather than action-based, samurai movies produced after World War II have become more action-based, with darker and more violent characters. Post-war samurai epics tended to portray psychologically or physically scarred warriors. Akira Kurosawa stylized and exaggerated death and violence in samurai epics. His samurai, and many others portrayed in film, were solitary figures, more often concerned with concealing their martial abilities, rather than showing them off.
Historically, the genre is usually set during the Tokugawa era (1600–1868). The samurai film hence often focuses on the end of an entire way of life for the samurai: many of the films deal with masterless rōnin, or samurai dealing with changes to their status resulting from a changing society.
Samurai films were constantly made into the early 1970s, but by then, overexposure on television, the aging of the big stars of the genre, and the continued decline of the mainstream Japanese film industry put a halt to most of the production of this genre.
Actors
- Sonny Chiba
- Chiyonosuke Azuma
- Ryunosuke Tsukigata
- Raizo Ichikawa
- Shintaro Katsu
- Tomisaburō Wakayama
- Hiroki Matsukata
- Toshirō Mifune
- Tatsuya Nakadai
- Kinnosuke Nakamura
- Denjiro Okochi
- Ryutaro Otomo
- Hiroyuki Sanada
- Tetsuro Tamba
- Tomisaburo Wakayama
- Ken Watanabe
- Masakazu Tamura
- Tsumasaburo Bando
- Utaemon Ichikawa
- Hiroki Matsukata
Directors
- Kinji Fukasaku
- Hideo Gosha
- Daisuke Ito
- Kon Ichikawa
- Hiroshi Inagaki
- Masaki Kobayashi
- Akira Kurosawa
- Kenji Misumi
- Kihachi Okamoto
- Kaneto Shindo
- Masahiro Shinoda
- Takeshi Kitano
- Yoji Yamada
- Sadao Yamanaka
- Tokuzō Tanaka
- Kazuo Ikehiro
- Kimiyoshi Yasuda
- Kazuo Mori
- Sadao Nakajima
See also
- Cinema of Japan
- List of historical drama films of Asia
- List of samurai films of the 2000s
- List of samurai films of the 2010s