“There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle…. Perhaps….” Le Samouraï, a 1967 film directed by the French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville, begins with this epigraph. We also see the source on the screen: “Bushido: The Life of Samurai.” But I cannot find an exact line in Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1899) by the Japanese diplomat Nitobe Inazo. The line does not exist in Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai (1716) by the Japanese samurai warrior Yamamoto Tsunemoto, either. (Jim Jarmusch extensively quotes from Hagakure in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, a 1999 remake of Le Samouraï, though.) Internet Movie Database (IMDb) lists Joan MacLeod's novel The Ronin (ronin translates the masterless samurai) as the basis for Le Samouraï. But I cannot find evidence that this novel really existed. So most likely, the epigraph is Melville's invention. How did he come up with this epigraph? Despite the title, Le Samouraï is not a jidaigeki (period drama) set in feudal Japan. No historical samurai character appears in the film. Le Samouraï is a story about a contract killer, Jef Costello, played by Alain Delon, set in Paris in the 1960s. Why did Melville call this film Le Samouraï? By closely examining the film's story, themes, and techniques – particularly cinematography, editing, and close-ups – I answer what Melville's allusion to the samurai seeks to signify.

First, I argue that Melville's idea of the samurai existed in the cultural context of the global film network. Throughout the 1950s, the French film industry and criticism embraced Hollywood's film noir. Melville asserted that Le Samouraï is a tribute to film noir. Le Samouraï is loosely based on Frank Tuttle's 1942 crime film, This Gun for Hire. A significant connection between the two films is animals, who play important roles (the bird in Le Samouraï and the cat in This Gun for Hire) to express the inner state of the protagonists, the lone killers (the samurai or the hired gunman), who do not speak much and change their countenances. The technique of flashback (psychological POV editing) and the motif of dream/nightmare are intertwined with this animal motif. The protagonists of both films feed their pets and identify themselves with them.

Melville's obsessive use of close-ups of the protagonist's face in Le Samouraï also emphasizes the protagonist's subjective viewpoint. These close-ups not only function to represent his psychological state but also reject the viewer's identification with his emotions. What Melville tried to capture in the close-ups of Alain Delon was not so much a person as an animal with an intense but evasive emotion.

Second, I connect Le Samouraï to the art cinema movement, initiated by the Japanese film Rashomon (Kurosawa Akira, 1950), which received the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival. The toned-down color scheme of Le Samouraï is closely related to the cinematography of Miyagawa Kazuo, probably the most famous Japanese cinematographer, the Director of Photography in Rashomon. Rashomon was enthusiastically discussed by French film critics. The success of Rashomon made the Japanese film industry take advantage of international audiences by emphasizing the cultural motifs such as noh and kabuki drama, Zen Buddhism, geisha, and samurai, which were self-consciously marked as traditional Japanese. Melville's thoughts on the samurai were thus connected to the romantic– not necessarily historically candid – notion, a philosophical and moral code called Zen and Bushido that had been drawing popular attention in France. In this regard, the art cinema movement can be seen as a postwar example of cultural colonialism. Speaking of colonialism, Melville's samurai existed when France was struggling with its colonial past. France abandoned its military occupation and the colonial dream of a “French Algeria.” Charles de Gaulle restructured French society with an authoritative policing force under his strong leadership in the 1950s-60s. The narrative of Le Samouraï implicitly presents French colonialism in Africa.

Ongoing thread. More from Daisuke Miyao to follow.