The Greatest Samurai Film You've Never Seen

Geoffry O’Brien in his Criterion Film Essay notes:

In an era of Japanese filmmaking marked by such masterpieces as Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri, and when even the most routine samurai pictures tended to look very stylish indeed, The Sword of Doom stands out for the rigor and calligraphic pictorialism of its widescreen compositions.

The Guardian in 2005 published an obituary in honor of Director Kihachi Okamoto recalling him as “one of the least known of [Japanese] postwar directors in the west” despite being one of the “leading exponents” of the “most celebrated genre [of films] to come out of Japan.” Calling the neglect as “unwarranted”, the obituary highlighted the The Sword of Doom (1966) as one such movie that “gained a following” and “is still highly regarded.”

Incidentally, Wendell Jamieson of The New York Times recently recounted his long time fascination with Japanese movies depicting swordfights. Sword of Doom not only happens to be Jamieson’s favorite but one that his Kendo teacher Noboru Kataoka holds in high regards “as the greatest sword fight film of them all.” Jamieson portrays the action in the movie as follows:

Nakadai’s fluid and catlike movements seem hardly human — his maniacal grin adds another level of malevolence — but are almost balletic in their elegance. He completes his strokes with graceful upward arcs even after they have done their damage.

If the beautifully captured art of sword fighting have profoundly captivated many, the Zen-like portrayal of the human condition depicted through the protagonist of the film, Ryunosuke, remains yet another source of fascination. O’Brien, brings to our attention the juxtaposition of opposites in Ryunosuke:

Ryunosuke is at once hero and villain, demon and potential bodhisattva, and Tatsuya Nakadai’s stunning performance incarnates perfectly the paradox at the heart of the character: Does he act or is he acted upon? In what sense does he choose his destiny? He seems at times the spectator of his own destructive course, alternately anguished or blackly amused but essentially powerless to change what happens.

Similarly, Bruce Edgar’s take on Sword of Doom encapsulates wonderfully the portrayal of contradictions and Zen-ness in the film:

His Ryunosuke (“a man from hell,” as one character puts it) is one of the screen’s more memorable psychopaths, a passive-aggressive whose bloodlust is portrayed with dead calm, revealed by the tiniest motion of an eye, the trace of a smile, or the tense position of his body as he ponders killing.

Tonight, Japan Society concludes its Zen & Its Opposite: Essential (& Turbulent) Japanese Art House film series with the [sold-out] screening of Sword of Doom at 7:30pm. The movie illustrates the Realm of the Asuras or the realm of anger, jealousy, and constant war in the “Six Planes of Existence”- a Buddhist concept commonly referred as “Six Paths” or (Rokudō or Rokudō-rinne) in Japan—within “the realm of Birth and Death” (Samsara).

Directed by Kihachi Okamoto, Sword of Doom is based on the novel Daibosatsu Toge or The Pass of the Great Buddha by Kaizan Nakazato which first appeared as a newspaper serial in 1913. After being published for forty-one volumes spanning three decades, the novel was left incomplete due to author’s death. Okamoto, on the other hand, has had direct experience of war being drafted at the age of 19 as a student at Meiji University. His encounter with war and violence is said to have influenced his film making career deeply. After coming back from the war in 1947, Okamoto joined the Toho studios and worked with several directors until his directorial debut came in 1958 working on melodramas. Later, he specialized in action films and joined Toei to become the “undisputed star of Toei’s ninkyo eiga yakuza films.”

A.T.

Going To "Hell"

Enjoy a steaming bowl of "Hell" at Japan Society. Photo (c) Everett Collection

"Jigoku is more than merely a boundary-pummeling classic of the horror genre—it’s as lurid a study of sin without salvation as the silver screen has ever seen," notes Chuck Stephens in his wonderful essay for Criterion.

Regarded as a seminal cinematic depiction of Hell, Nobuo Nakagawa’s Hell (1960), or Jigoku is far less known outside Japan. Serving later as the basis for two remakes, one by Tastumi Kumashiro in 1979 and the other by Teruo Ishii in 1999, Nakagawa’s original was "[b]orn from some unholy union of Goethe’s Faust and Genshin’s Ojoyoshu, a tenth-century Buddhist treatise on the various torments of the lower realms."

Depicting sin, suffering and punishment, Hell brings to screen beautifully the complexities of human intentions, choices and their consequences. Stephens continues:

Resolutely unafraid of incomprehensibility, Jigoku proves ultimately less an articulation of the moral and postmortal consequences of sin than a free-associative head-on collision of righteously motivated evil intentions and well-intentioned innocents who capriciously lose their souls.

Nakagawa started his film making career in 1924 and made some 90 feature films by the time of his death in 1984. During his tenure at Shintoho, he earned a distinction as the "master of Japanesque horror" in addition to his earlier reputation as "the Japanese Alfred Hitchcock". Hell was the last in a "nine-film string of innovative and deliriously eccentric horror films" made by Nakagawa during the 1950s at Shintoho and given the backdrop of the studio going out of business, the film was subject to budget-saving strategies.

In anticipation of Japan Society's screening of Hell, Steve Dollar at The Wall Street Journal wrote that the movie "sits very near the foundations of the Japanese horror film." He continues:

[Director] Nakagawa's stark and gripping imagery has the punch of a surrealist noir, hypnotizing with poetic visual flourishes before diving into the fiery, forsaken pit of the title—which is realized with an extreme flair for the grotesque and hallucinatory.

The U.K’s Eye for Film comments on the movie's capacity to shatter reality:

Jigoku is a beautiful film. Its play with lighting effects, colour gels and jarring camera angles makes everything - both on earth and below - seem an off-kilter nightmare, while the soundtrack of jazz, wood percussion and theremin only adds to the sense of disorientation. Realism this is not, but Nakagawa is nonetheless concerned with depicting a society that has lost its moral balance, at a time when memories of war-time horror were still fresh in the Japanese mind, while post-war modernisation was engendering its own anxieties about over-permissiveness and the dissipation of traditional values.

Hell plays today, Friday, January 21, as part of the monthly classics series Zen & Its Opposite: Essential (& Turbulent) Japanese Art House. Tickets are $12/$9 Japan Society members, students & seniors. The Zen & Its Opposite series concludes February 18 with Okamoto's Sword of Doom.

T.D.

Limbus Limbo: How Low Can You Go

We are greeted by swiftly swaying reeds, a deep pit and silence. No sounds comes out but clearly words are printed across the screen:

Deep & Dark, Its darkness has lasted since the ancient times, Onibaba

Onibaba is a film set in 16th century Japan. With the land ravaged by war and famine, men and boys are taken from the fields to be pawns in the chess game of the elite--clan against clan, neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother. Those left behind must fend for themselves against the beasts that conspire to wipe them from their small existences.

Two women cling to each other and solemnly decide to live the unscrupulous life of marauders, taking the valuables from wandering samurai. Surrounded by wilderness they pillage corpses and throw them into a pit. They have been alone for years, waiting patiently for their loved ones to return and end their hell. But only their boorish neighbor returns, setting into motion conflicts between their most primal desires and their bleak reality.

Onibaba is a cinematic masterpiece that is intensely erotic but steeped in the Buddhist mythology. Part of Japan Society Zen & Its Opposite series, Onibaba represents one of the paths of the "Six Paths of Existences", the Realm of the Animals. In this realm, you are a servant to your desires and instincts. You have no sense of morality and you have a devil-may-care attitude about life and people. If that sounds like nihilism, Onibaba goes far beyond and pierces deep into the human  psyche.

The film is an exploration of Sigmund Freud’s concept of das Es--literally "the It" but better known as the Id.  Freud stated in his study of "The Interpretation of Dreams (1900s)", later republished in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents:

It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, what little we know we have learnt from our study of the dream-work and of the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of this is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast the ego. We all approach the id with analogies; we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations. It’s filled with energy reaching it from instincts, but has no organization, produces, no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.

The Id is in control of Onibaba's three main characters; their daily existence is governed by finding life's 'pleasures' (shelter, food, water, sexual gratification) and extinguishing anything that gets in the way of attaining them. In wonderfully intoxicating, 60s Japanese cinematic form, Onibaba exemplifies how the Id can dehumanize us to mere beasts and keep up from attaining our ideal life--a valuable lesson for the world's weary wanderers.

Onibaba screens at Japan Society Friday, November 12. Tickets are $12 general admission, and $9 for Japan Society members, students and seniors. You can read more about Onibaba in The Wall Street Journal's recent article "Haunting Films of Japan" or check out the Criterion Collection DVD.

S.H.

Five Films You Might Want To Watch With The Buddha Before Killing Him

To thine own self be... ouch! Via.

"If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha."

Linji Yixuan, Ch'an Master (? – 866)

Zen practices help people achieve serenity, better focus and greater understanding of the self. But as with everything in life, light must co-exist with darkness.

Enter Japan Society’s Zen & Its Opposite [watch the trailer], five classic films that show the relationship between Zen and violence, often overlooked when discussing Zen philosophy. Historically we can look to samurai meditating in order to center themselves before violent combat. Metaphysically, we can look at the constant battle between our spiritual selves and earthly desires.

A good example of the latter is the 1964 supernatural Japanese fantasy/horror film Kwaidan, which launches Zen & Its Opposite tonight. Each film illustrates one or several of the "Six Planes of Existence" in Buddhism's realm of birth and death. Kwaidan is four ghost stories elegantly strewn together, but at its core represents "The Realm of Humans", where beings are both good and evil--enlightenment within their grasp, yet blinded and consumed by their desires.Each of the short stories that comprise Kwaidan creates worlds where one must be on constant alert – something Zen Buddhism strives to improve upon – and nothing is as it seems.

Though the film was made by Japanese people, who might readily understand these Eastern concepts, the book on which the film was based was actually written by noted 19th century Japanologist Lafcadio Hearn, who was British-born and naturalized as a Japanese citizen in 1895, taking the name Yakumo Koizumi. So great was Hearn’s affinity for Japanese culture that his stories read like a born and bred native Japanese who has never stepped foot in the West.

After Kwaidan Zen & Its Opposite continues through February with screenings of Onibaba, Fires on the Plain, Hell  and Sword of Doom. Tickets are $12 or $9 Japan Society members, students and seniors.

For those who can’t get enough ghost stories before Halloween, Japan Society invites you to check out OBAKE! on October 29 for an evening of fun with ghosts, costumes and one of the most insane Japanese horror films of all time. More on that later!

T.D.