Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Sanjuro
1962 · Akira Kurosawa · Sanjuro on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch Sanjuro slouch, scratch, and yawn among the formal samurai. (performance)
Mifune plays him loose and unposed against nine young men who hold themselves like drawn bows, and each slouch is timed to deflate a specific pomposity near it.
Payoff: How he sits tells you more about who he actually is than anything he says. In the reading: the gest. The reading calls this the gest: a posture that exposes a social relation better than any line of dialogue.
Watch the nine samurai grouped together facing Sanjuro alone. (staging)
The shrine scenes use horizontal blocking to line the young men up as a crowd, their formal alignment set against his loose, asymmetric stance off to one side.
Payoff: The blocking makes the argument about deference and judgment before anyone has to say it out loud.
Watch for camellias floating in the garden stream. (setting)
The superintendent's wife earlier compares Sanjuro to a fine sword in a plain scabbard and notes that camellias fall whole, unlike cherry blossoms that scatter petal by petal.
Payoff: The flower is carrying the film's whole argument about who is genuine and who is only decorated. In the reading: symbol. The reading calls the camellia a symbol: one object condensing the film's whole relation between appearance and worth.
Listen for the score turning quietly comic instead of serious. (sound)
Satō's music brings in quasi-comic brass and woodwind passages far lighter than his work on Yojimbo, signaling early that the film is in on its own joke.
Payoff: The music tells you not to take the samurai posturing as seriously as the samurai take themselves.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch how much of the film is Sanjuro stopping the young samurai from drawing their swords. That effort is the whole story.