Like Sharks and Jets facing off on the West Side, or gunslingers at the O.K. Corral, the rival gangs of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo" ("The Bodyguard") (1961) come face to face on the dusty main - in fact, only - street of an isolated village. Pacing slowly forward, the pulsating noise of impending death reverberating between the low-slung shanties, the duelers meet with knees bent and swords drawn.
High above, watching keenly, is the titular bodyguard (Toshiro Mifune), a nameless loner whose arrival in town marks the zenith of a history of violence. The frame captures the tension of blood rising, about to be shed. The two gangs linger at the edges of the frame while the bodyguard peers down, as though orchestrating human puppets.
In a sense, he is. When the wandering samurai enters the town, he contracts himself to both parties, playing them against each other with the goal of eliminating both completely. The fight that ensues leads to lost limbs, castrating the most powerful swordsmen at the arm; justice, in a town where such a word seems to have been stripped of its core meaning, begins to prevail.
That justice, comes with a sacrifice of idealism in the face of dreary pragmatism. The best way to root out the gangs is to kill them off, and Mifune's balletic swordplay succeeds in doing just that.
Amid the gore, something subtler, more insidious, seems suddenly to evaporate. At what price can the code of the Old West (or, in this case, Japan circa 1850), be saved? "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do," Clint Eastwood or John Wayne might reply, but the grizzled faces of the veteran killers suggest a gradual slipping down of the human soul.
The drained reserves of humanity and the consequences of violence inform "Rashomon" (1950) as well. The film centers on three tales of the same event, a death in a nearby grove, which diverge on basic points of fact. However we puzzle over fault, blame and terror, the core belief of the postwar period, it seems, is barely to believe anything at all.
Both films question what it is we pursue in war or local violence. The dance of shade and light in the picturesque grove conjures an optical illusion, fooling the eye and mind with dazzling displays of nature's virtuosity and causing us to hope for a simpler era of the straightforward. What the nomadic bodyguard and the killing in the grove depict, then, are not solely tales of subjectivity and loneliness, but a kind of cultural death, of bereavement.
With loss, however, comes struggling, panting rebirth: The gentle cry of a child moaning under creaking, pounding rain, the lilting thanks of a family restored and escaped to a better life. Thus emerges an essential humanism, a notion of difficult rebuilding possible only with trust in the neighbors and kind strangers on which we rely. Only the deeply, simply human - naturalness, honesty, justice - will suffice.
The questions of violence, the questions of history, may never be resolved, but running hard, undistracted by glinting plays of light and calls for power, we can at least catch up to the history that left us so cruelly, so devastatingly, behind.
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The "Akira Kurosawa Retrospective," including "Rashomon" and "Yojimbo," continues through Jan. 31 at the Aero Theatre, 1328 Montana Ave., Santa Monica. For more information, visit www.americancinematheque.com.
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Matt Brennan's column, "The Filmgoer," runs Fridays. To comment on this article,
e-mail lifestyle@dailytrojan.com or call (213) 740-5645.
