By all accounts, Samurai Banners, a sweeping three-hour history lesson/war film/samurai epic, was director Hiroshi Inagaki's passion project. It is said that only this one and Samurai Trilogy were regarded upon favorably by the director at the end of his career. Much as with Kurosawa and Red Beard, it took Inagaki years to set up the project. At the time of shooting, it was the biggest Japanese production ever mounted. And, like Kurosawa's film, it is both a challenging viewing experience and an instance in which the director distilled his style to its purest form, thus offering what I would be inclined to call the definitive entry in his filmography.
If I ventured to arbitrarily categorize Inagaki’s movies, I would group Samurai Trilogy and The Rickshaw Man into the character study category and leave Incident At Blood Pass in the plot-oriented/caricature category. Samurai Banners falls somewhere in between. The characters are all pretty simple archetypes and the focus is clearly on dominant and conquering masculinity; the plot machinations are laid out in great, sometimes tedious details; the movie, however, still finds a few moments in which characters can be characters without having to advance the unrelenting plot-steamroller. Especially the scenes between the main character Yamamoto Kansuke (Toshiro Mifune) and Princess Yu, a woman he secretly loves but is a concubine of Kansuke’s employer Takeda, serve to make Mifune’s character, a ruthless, calculating and brutal individual, a little more likable and tragic.
But most of the time, Kansuke, a real historical figure, is a monstrous and cold-blooded bastard. Not that it’s a bad thing for a film character. It would be too much to recap the details of the plot, so let it suffice to say that Samurai Banners chronicles the expansion efforts of Takeda Shingen, ruler of Kai Province, who, during the 16th century, sought to control neighboring provinces and eventually possess coastal land. The climatic battle of the movie is fought with Uesugi Kenshin of Echigo Province who would give Takeda access to the Western coast of Japan (for those of you more knowledgeable than I am in the intricacies of this war, feel free to correct me if I got anything of this wrong).
But while Inagaki stages the battle sequences with all the confidence of a master director, shows us meetings in which Kansuke and Takeda discuss strategy, and even gives us title cards detailing the year of the respective battles, the exact location of the battle and the names of the parties involved (at one point we can marvel at Takeda's imperial venture on a map that highlights the shifting power dynamics in medieval Japan), the movie's true aim is to spotlight the relationship between Kansuke and Takeda. If the sheer mass of historical details wouldn't distract from it, Inagaki would have delivered a convincing intimate play of two people invested in an informal tug and pull over who has real power and calls the shots.
For Kansuke murders his way into the court of Takeda Shingen by staging a robbery of a vassal from Takeda clan with another ronin, then killing off his partner to shine in front of the emperor. Thankful for his heroic services, Takeda offers him a job and Kansuke quickly becomes the emperor's chief advisor. His bold stratagems are not always met with approval but they all work in the clan's favor and we get a sense that Mifune's character might be manipulating Takeda and having a private agenda that doesn't necessarily benefit the clan. When he is asked what his motivations are, Kansuke replies that he simply wants to acquire "more and more land!" and that he dreams of a unified Japan under one single ruler. Earlier, while musing about the neighboring provinces, he soon has a vision of the ocean, thus convincing himself and then the emperor that Takeda clan needs to get land access to the coast - something that can only be achieved by wars of aggression.
But the ronin-turned-army-general is also constantly reminded that he is a far cry from being part of the ruling class. He has to accept that Princess Yu offers herself to the emperor. When she bears Takeda a son, Kansuke tries to place him as the emperor's heir but his aides torpedo the plan. And he messes up the strategy for the final climatic battle with Uesugi Kenshin. Kansuke is a man who dreams big, knows how to enroll people to work in his favor, but he also battles his origins and his emotions at all times. He is restless and always plots the next coup because pausing would mean reflecting, and reflecting would mean accepting his true nature. When Princess Yu confesses to him that she plans to murder Takeda, he finds himself in loose-loose situation and struggles to find a solution.
In the second half of the film, Takeda and Kansuke are both inducted as Buddhist monks, seemingly to acquire more ferocity in warfare. It is interesting that Kansuke's self-effacement in the light of his imperial ambitions goes so far as to offer himself to a sect that is supposed to bring out his worst impulses, and even manages to drag Takeda into it. Surprisingly, Inagaki's depiction of militant buddhism goes against the philosophy of his previous movies. If, as Isolde Standish argues in her New History of Japanese Cinema, "Buddhism tempers the violence of judo/bushido through compassion and self-abnegation through 'transience'" (2006: 281) in Samurai Trilogy and arguably in Incident At Blood Pass, Samurai Banners depicts the opposite. Kansuke is not out to attain a higher mental state, to be a more valiant warrior or to engage in any "transience" whatsoever. He is simply trying to fulfill geopolitical goals and, from what I was able to deduce, not for the sake of any form of enlightenment, but for wholly selfish reasons.
It is unfortunate, then, that we don't get to spend more time with the characters and delve deeper into their psychologies. Visually, Inagaki showcases once again a solid if mostly unagitated style. The battle sequences harbor many highlights, although the editing seems confusing at times. Frequently, Inagaki will use long POV shots with soldiers coming at the camera, as if they wanted to fight the audience. The camera shakes and tumbles, creating a disorienting and distressing effect that intensifies the dread of the battle scenes. One bravura shot, and I'm sure his most famous among connoisseurs, is a glorious image of an army of 22,000 advancing through the mountains. We get a wide areal shot that shows us the trail of soldiers marching through woods and the camera slowly, very slowly pulls back, gaining in height, revealing more and more soldiers until they are reduced to mere points on the landscape. It's the opening shot in Werner Herzog's Aguirre, only in reverse.
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