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Comparison Of Kurosawa 's Yojimbo And Leone 's Fistful Of Dollars

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Title: Two Versions of a Single Story: National Perspective and Auteur Approaches to the Outsider “Western”. Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and Leone’s Fistful of Dollars Compared.

Student: I-Fu Chen

Class: CTCS 502
Professor: Priya Jaikumar
Due: Oct 8th, 2014
Films:

Yojimba, Akira Kurasawa (dir.) 1961, Japan (Viewed Sept 17, 2014)
Fistful of Dollars, Serge Leone (dir.) 1964, Italy. (Viewed Oct 1, 2014)

This essay is based on films of the same story, told in different ways, with emphasis, themes, meaning and interpretation shaped or shaded by the situation of the storyteller; the cinematic mise-en-scene. Based on the same story, the films reveal and reflect the film-maker’s social norms and views, emerging from their different national contexts. While exploring the two films, this essay will examine elements of film language or semiotics: color saturation (or black and white), sound, setting, type of camera angles used; repetition of visual motifs (Metz, 1985). The two films explored were made in the 1960s. Neither film is American, yet both reveal influences and reflections on American cinema and American power; the Western film, adherence or detracting from Hollywood Classical cinema tropes, i.e. close-ups, shot-reverse-shot, POV, depth of field (Bazin, 1985: 128-9). The two films are Kurasawa’s Yojimbo (1961) and Leone’s Fistful of Dollars (1964), from Japan and Italy, respectively. How are they different; how similar? Why do they use the same plot,

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