Seven Samurai

The movie I choose was Seven Samurai widely regarded as one of the greatest movies of all time and also possibly the greatest action movie of all time. Directed, co-written, and edited by Akira Kurosawa, Seven Samurai was released on April 6, 1954 to great acclaim. Spanning more than three hours the film depicts a story of seven samurai's who are hired for protection of a village that is under attack from bandits. Each of the seven samurai's in the movie have their own personality and their own impact on the film. While to me they were the best part of the film, I felt more and more attached to them as the movie progressed, I choose another aspect of film to learn more about.
The aspect of film that I learned more on was photography. While Akira Kurosawa seems to get all the credit, Seven Samurai's cinematographer was Asakazu Nakai and he also worked with the photography. While Seven Samurai was one of his greatest films he was nominated for an Oscar for the movie Ran. He also has won many other awards for his outstanding cinematography work. The most notable ones are the Blue Ribbon Award for Itsuwareru seiso, the Mainichi Film Concours award for Akazukinchan kiotsukete, and his Mainichi Film Concours award for Nora inu. With so much acclaim it isn't hard to see why many of the movies he has worked on have become classics and studied for the elements that he brought to the table.
Asakazu Nakai used many different shots during the movie Seven Samurai. Pan shots were used to show wide ranges of space especially the beautiful scenery, and also tracking shots were used when the characters, especially the samurai, were sprinting into battle. The way that the camera showed the beautiful scenery and also the characters when they were engaged in battle makes the film very powerful. Some of the most notable techniques that Asakazu Nakai used though were wide-angle lenses and telephoto lenses. Since this movie was released in 1954 Asakazu Nakai was without much of the modern technology that we now use so often in present films. To be able to master the use of these lenses back then is very impressive to me. It shows me that Asakazu Nakai had a great eye and grasp of the concepts he was using and was able to use what he had to make beautiful works of art.
I also choose to learn about the script in Seven Samurai. Seven Samurai was written by a combination of Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Hideo Oguni. The main idea for this film was the class conflict between the samurai nobility and the peasant class. Akira Kurosawa does a great job though of masking that true conflict behind the conflict of the bandits raiding and pillaging the village. Seven Samurai also shows the way that the class struggle gets solved. The samurai and the peasants end up working together and that is what makes the movie really special. To be able to show the conflict go from beginning to end in the way that Akira Kurosawa did is just another reason that makes this movie a masterpiece.