Samurai Cinema

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Samurai cinema, which includes both chanbara (action-oriented sword-fight films) and the historical jidai-geki film, focuses on the nationally mythologized samurai warriors of the twelfth to sixteenth century. Like the American western, the samurai film lends itself to tales of loyalty, revenge, romance, fighting prowess, and the decline of a traditional way of life. Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films have arguably been the most influential both in Japan and around the world; certainly the range of his approaches—from Seven Samurai’s epic scope to Yojimbo’s acidic black humor to Ran’s poetic despair—established the genre’s creative possibilities, influencing generations of filmmakers, including George Lucas and Quentin Tarantino. Key works of the genre, in its more traditional form, also include Masaki Kobayashi’s Samurai Rebellion, Masahiro Shinoda’s Samurai Spy, and Hiroshi Inagaki’s Musashi Miyamoto, the first part of his epic  

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Samurai Spy

Masahiro Shinoda

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Samurai Rebellion

Masaki Kobayashi

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Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto

Hiroshi Inagaki

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Seven Samurai

Akira Kurosawa

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New German Cinema

Written and signed by two dozen German filmmakers pledging themselves to “the new German feature film,” the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto boldly announced the arrival of New German Cinema, with young, innovative, and politically radical directors taking up arms against the propriety of West German society and its failing film industry.

 

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Luis Buñuel

As made clear in his seminal works Viridiana and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie—delirious screeds against, respectively, religion and social conformity—Luis Buñuel was one of cinema’s great subversives and mischief makers.

 

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Ricky Jay’s Top 10

Author, actor, and historian Ricky Jay first worked with director David Mamet on House of Games. They have since collaborated often, including on seven films, the TV show The Unit, the one-man Broadway show Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants, and Redbelt.