14 Facts About Samurai cinema

1.

Samurai cinema 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.

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2.

Samurai cinema directed Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Throne of Blood, Yojimbo and many others.

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3.

Samurai cinema had a long association with Toshiro Mifune, arguably Japan's most famous actor.

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4.

Samurai cinema's characters are often estranged from their environments, and their violence is a flawed reaction to this.

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5.

Samurai cinema largely stopped making chambara, switching to the Yakuza genre, in the 1970s.

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6.

Samurai cinema directed roughly 30 films in the genre, including some the Lone Wolf and Cub films, and a number in the Zatoichi and Sleepy Eyes of Death series.

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7.

Samurai cinema has been played in numerous films by Denjiro Okochi, Tsumasaburo Bando, Ryutaro Otomo, Ryunosuke Tsukigata, Kinnosuke Nakamura, and Tetsuro Tanba.

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8.

Samurai cinema goes against his duty to follow through with his sentence and flees to fight his final rebellion against the central government's army.

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9.

Samurai cinema warrior is often synonymous with his or her own sword.

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10.

Seven Samurai cinema has been remade as a Western and a science fiction context film, The Magnificent Seven and Battle Beyond the Stars.

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11.

Seven Samurai was highly influential, often seen as one of the most "remade, reworked, referenced" films in cinema.

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12.

The visuals, plot and dialogue of Seven Samurai cinema have inspired a wide range of filmmakers, ranging from George Lucas to Quentin Tarantino.

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13.

Elements from Seven Samurai cinema have been borrowed by many films, with examples including plot elements in films such as Three Amigos by John Landis, visual elements in large-scale battle scenes of films such as The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) and The Matrix Revolutions (2003), and borrowed scenes in George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).

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14.

Early wu xia weapon martial arts films from Hong Kong action cinema were inspired by Japanese samurai films from the 1940s onwards.

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