THE ORIGINS OF CHAMBARA

Action films dealing with Japan's Feudal- to -Meiji time periods became known as Chambara. The term itself is Japanese slang for swordplay or swashbuckler films. This genre has been around from Japan's silent screen, but is especially known from Japan's golden era of film-making (1940s-1960s). These films are generally set in 15th- to 19th-century, with the plot usually revolving around a central character . The first Chambara jidai geki (period films) utilized the fighting techniques found in traditional No and Kabuki theatre productions. The Japanese public showed a great appreciation towards these films because they served as a visual reminder of Japan�s rich and colorful history.

The film titled "The Fight at Honno Temple" was released in 1908 and its director, Makino Shozo, became known as the father of Japanese cinema. Because of this film's popularity, many renowned traditional martial arts at that time became the primary source of inspiration for developing the techniques used in the making of future Samurai and Ninja movie epics. This brought a new sense of realism to the films because the characters used historically proven fighting techniques and styles. The genre as a whole thrived by adapting the military fighting arts to the camera, developing visually stunning choreography and action sequences.

Incorporation of the martial arts allowed the genre to distance itself from the more traditional period dramas, in which action was talked about but never actually shown. With time, serials of the 60s and 70s became more and more concerned with the depiction of often fantastic fight scenes. It is through this that we see the development of the Sentai and Masked Hero sub-genres of live-action film. While the Masked Hero is obviously a derivative of the Ninja epics, the Sentai, or Hero Team can be traced back even to Akira Kurasawa's "Seven Samurai", where the protagonists are clearly defined archetypes usually denoted by a dominant characteristic.

The significance of the Chambara film genre in world cinema is enormous. Inspired by Hollywood's gunslinger films, Akira Kurosawa made a few of the most memorable Chambara films. Among Kurosawa's best-known sword-fight films are "Seven Samurai" (1954), later remade in America as "The Magnificent Seven." Among other films, "The Hidden Fortress" (1957) was acknowledged as an inspiration for "Star Wars," and "Yojimbo" (1961) was remade as "Fistful Of Dollars." Directors like Kurosawa and Masaki Kobayashi ("Hara-kiri" 1962) brought dirty realism to the Chambara genre, evoking a world of immorality, violence and most importantly, agonizing death.