To the Americans, Japanese director Akira Kurosawa was a disciple of John Ford, a foreign film-maker whose sensitivities were closest to the quintessential American art form, the western. To the Europeans, with their worship of technique, Kurosawa was simply one of the modern masters of Cinema, along with Bergman, Fellini, Godard, Tarkovsky and Kubrick.

To the Japanese, Kurosawa, when he was at his peak in the 1950s and 1960s, was the equivalent of an Andrew Davis, a Simon West or a Michael Bay. A resolutely commercial action film director with significant studio backing and a rather tiresome penchant for samurai.

It’s ironic that “Action”, which is after all the most important word in Cinema, the word that on the lips of the director gives birth to the moving picture, seems to have become synonymous with an insignificant form of film, or “low art”. Kurosawa was the first and greatest action director and elevated it to a high art through his mastery of movement on the screen.

His films describe, enact and exploit movement as a cinematic technique like no other film-maker. Entrances of cavalry into shot are a blur across the screen; characters snap into action from a standstill in a whirl of violence; even an actor’s facial movements will go from slow to fast and back. This ‘modulation of motion’ is underscored by innovative and virtuosic editing: at times expository, at others, staccato. The effect is instinctively gripping on the viewer.

Unlike Kurosawa’s natural successors in the action genre, Chang Cheh (Dubei Dao, 1967; Wu Du, 1978) Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch, 1969; Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, 1974) John Woo (The Killer, 1989; Face/Off, 1997) and John McTiernan (Predator, 1987; Die Hard, 1989) it wasn’t just about violence, though his films were certainly violent in parts. Kurosawa used movement in the service of an emotional reaction to the story. This gave his films an extraordinary depth and made them universally popular.

The climactic scene in Seven Samurai has Toshiro Mifune rescuing a baby from a fire and being struck with the realisation that the same event had happened to him as an infant. It’s a moment of chaos, poetry and pathos (the mill behind is ablaze, the baby’s mother has handed the child to him in the act of dying, Mifune is knee deep in water, confusion scorched on his face, shrieking his epiphany). But it isn’t the SMIC.

The SMIC occurs earlier in the film and for me sums up the three things that best encapsulate Kurosawa as a film maker: his innovation, his mastery of movement, and his colossal influence on action cinema. One can only imagine the reaction of the first audiences to the scene, such is its visual impact.

To place the scene in context, the villagers have hired ronin (itinerant samurai) to protect them from repeated attacks by outlaws. In this scene, a samurai runs into a hut to prevent an outlaw from killing the family inside. Mifune and the villagers (and the audience) watch from the outside. Eventually the outlaw emerges.

The sequence remains one of the earliest and (arguably) most memorable uses of slow motion (or overcranking, where the camera is operated at a faster speed to create a slow motion effect when projected at normal speed). Notice that the slow motion is intercut with the shots of the onlookers at normal speed.

[I should like to thank YouTube contributor "Archicinema" for (despite appearing to be barking mad) having the presence of mind to isolate this very clip and upload it for our viewing pleasure.]