Movie history: Seven Samurai and Casablanca
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Hello, this is the History Hour with Max Pearson. This week's story is as featured on Witness History here on the BBC World Service. We're going to the cinema. Great moments from the world of film, including propaganda or art. The Nuremberg Nazi rallies in Lenny Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will.
I was not interested in politics, not a little bit. Only how I can make it that it is not stupid, that it is a little more interesting. That was my desire.
Also, the social impact of an Indian blockbuster.
It was a very new way of storytelling, how you can use history as a trigger, how you can use something from the past which comes to effect in the present and transform people in the present.
Plus the making of Casablanca and the mixing of fantasy and fascism for the young star of Pan's Labyrinth.
I had to understand the depth of it and the suffering behind the civil war in Spain and what a child in war must have felt like. So we had a lot of rehearsals and so I was exposed to all of it.
But first, Jen Dale takes us back to the 1950s and the release of a Japanese movie, one that is widely acknowledged as among world cinema's most influential films.
Wait! I'm not doing this alone!
Seven Samurai, a Japanese film directed by Akira Kurosawa and produced by Sojiro Motoki, is released in 1954. It's a three-and-a-half-hour black-and-white epic set in 16th-century Japan. Farmers from a village threatened by bandits hire a veteran samurai for protection, and he finds six other samurai to join him. It was being filmed when I was about 9 or 10, so I probably saw the film when I was around 10 or 11. I was a child when I saw it, but even so, I found it interesting. Hiso Kurosawa will grow up to become a movie producer himself, but when Seven Samurai is being filmed, he is a young boy living in Japan's capital, Tokyo. His childhood and the movie industry are intertwined, as he lives with his mother, an actress, and father, the director, Akira Kurosawa.
Occasionally, he sees his father at work. When they added some sound to Seven Samurai, I went to the studio and saw it. Editing was probably the most important thing for Akira Kurosawa. He edited all his films. In the studio, there was a scene in A Seven Samurai where Mifune was speaking. He's talking there about Toshiro Mifune, one of Japan's leading actors, who stars as one of the samurai. And I remember his lines being re-recorded. I imagine the sound recorded during the shoot hadn't been good enough, so they called Mifune in to re-recorded his lines. The film is due to take three months to shoot. Kurosawa is known for his authenticity and attention to detail. He doesn't want to film on sound stages, instead choosing outdoor locations, some of them near the Toho studios in a suburb of Tokyo.
There was still some woodland right next to Toho at that time, and filming was done there. His work ethic is later summed up by a film critic in a 1972 BBC TV documentary.
In the case of Kurosawa, it's straight through. He knows exactly every effect he wants. He knows how to get it. And the question is having enough patience and having enough time and having enough money to get this effect that he must have.
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