Party Without Honour or Humanity

Took time out from the busy schedule of Japanese films to throw a birthday party for my housemate Alexander's 25th birthday, although the theme was, none-the-less, Yakuza and i had to nip out for two hours just as it was getting off the ground to see School of the Holy Beast. There were red lightbulbs, a TV in the hall playing Yakuza films, Sake, and various Japanese snacks, although it turned out I was the only one dressed for the part with my overly ornate 70s shirt, suit and sunglasses. A list has been made of those who did not show up. The Yakuza do not easily forget. Fingers will be lost...

Wild Japan Day 7 - The School of the Holy Beast

I'd heard the name of Norifumi Suzuki's notorious 'nunsploitation' film spoken in hushed tones by cult film enthusiasts for a while, but nothing could prepare me for the experience of seeing The School of the Holy Beast on the big screen for the first time. It is quite simply jaw dropping in every respect. For one thing its almost impossible to make a more provocative film about Christianity, although Jasper Sharp's cautionary note regarding Japan's tiny and oft persecuted Christian community gives the film a very different shade then if it had been made in, say, Italy where the subject matter would carry a more relevant and politicised charge. But then I'm not sure that this makes the film necessarily conservative.

The film centres on Maya, a liberated woman of the sixties who joins St Clore's convent in order to discover the fate of her mother. The nun's are all lined up, like a military parade, and as Maya is introduced to them, the camera emphasises the rigidity of the life there by tracking between the lines of grim faces. The film is full of such striking compositions, which along with the sumptuous colour photography demonstrates the director's aesthetic talent, and the film's surprisingly high production values (the sexploitation film in the ailing film industry of the seventies wasn't merely a subgenre, but the bread and butter genre for studios like Toei and Nikkatsu, the latter of which moved its output exclusively to this area).

One of the film's alternative titles is 'The Transgressor', and this applies as much to the film's formal and generic transitions than it does to its protagonists. Beginning as a sex comedy with ample scenes of titilation, most notably the sequence in which Maya sneaks her over-sexed boyfriend and his sidekick into the nunnery to pleasure the frigid mother superior in her sleep, the film lurches into the horror genre, becoming increasingly dark in tone. Revelations are made concerning the death of Maya's mother, tortured to death at the hands of the Mother Superior after she was inpregnated by the priest Father Kukinuma, who bares the scars of Nagasaki on his back in the director's excurision into that most horrific of Japan's recent experiences. History seems to be repeating after another nun is found to be with child and is tried as a witch (she is forced to drink a bucket of salt water, then a crucifix is placed between her legs and the nuns form a circle around her, waiting for her to soil the lord and thus demonstrate her guilt). Such transitions also occur in individual scenes, such as the one in which Maya is punished by being whipped naked with rose stems whilst bound by thorned vines; starting in a fairly disturbing and sordid vein, it becomes increasingly poetic and beautiful with an impressionistic flurry of rose buds and tossed hair.

School of the Holy Beast takes the theme of sexuality in the convent, the subject of Michael Powell's excellent Black Narcissus and takes it to an extreme that is almost unthinkable in its capacity to shock. The truly astonishing thing is that whilst from the title and synopsis little would suggest a film of any depth, the end result is, somehow, utterly beautiful and sophisticated.

Wild Japan Day 7 - Funeral Parade of Roses

Funeral Parade of Roses perfectly integrates the disparate techniques of documentary, narrative and experimental cinema, whilst exploring the gay and transexual subculture of Tokyo. Director Toshio Matsumoto, couldn't have chosen a more subversive theme to comment upon his society, still struggling with the nationalism that had brought about the war and deeply patriarchal. Like his contemporary Hiroshi Teshigahara (Woman of the Dunes) Matsumoto also drew on influences from the French new wave and American avant garde, integrating them into a Japanese context and using them to deconstruct the dominant ideologies. Matsumoto incorporates and plays with the Oedipus legend, leading the film to a startlingly grotesque ending that has seemingly influenced Takashi Miike's attacks on the family unit such as Gozu (2004). The use of Oedipus is appropriate given that Nagisa Oshima has referred to the new wave as the 'fatherless generation, both literally (as a result of the war), but also as a symbolic act of defiance. A beautiful and disturbing masterpiece.

Funeral Parade of Roses has just been released by Eureka, which has recently emerged as one of the best DVD labels in the world and is particularly strong on releasing pivotal but neglected 1960s Japanese films. An essay on the film by me is forthcoming on www.firecracker-magazine.com

Wild Japan Day 6 - Yakuza Graveyard

Kinji Fukasaku is best known for his iconic and boat-rocking Battle Royale, but in the early seventies he was just as infamous, for directing a series of Yakuza films entitled Battles Without Honour or Humanity, which thoroughly drained any modicum of romantic allure from the gangster genre, presenting the tawdry, harsh and brutal world in unrelenting detail. Yakuza Graveyard, made slightly later, continues the theme of the loss of honour in the post war period, this time focusing on the character of a cop whose relationship with the Yakuza allows him a supply of information, but results in his identity becoming increasingly indistinguishable from the gangs he has infiltrated. As a summary of the plot suggests, this film must have been a huge influence on the burgeoning gangster genre that emerged in Hong Kong a decade later, which often features stories of undercover cops whose identities and loyalties have become confused through prolonged association with the enemy. As in these films the resulting moral ambiguity is the subject of the film as much as a product of the narrative.

Tetsuyo Watari plays the wayward cop, Kuroiwa, whose violent impulses earn him the criticism of his superiors, not for any moral reason but because its damaging their public image. But Kuroiwa, it turns out, is not an exception as it seems the majority of the police have business relationships with the Yakuza; they are just as corrupt and morally righteous to boot. This is borne out by Kuroiwa's discovery of the involvement of some high level detectives in a money laundering scheme and the fact that the police are operating a policy of cooperating with one of the gangs in an attempt to avert a gang war. In such a dog eat dog world, morality is the proverbial horse flogged to death. Alienated from the police Kuroiwa is drawn further into the seedy world of the Yakuza, which is itself experiencing an erosion of its code of honour; taking the wife of a man he has killed as his mistress and becoming blood brothers with a Korean crime lord, who leads the gang that the police have decided to persecute. The fact that he is criticised for his actions only serves to emphasise the hypocrisy with which he is surrounded.

Meiko Kaji (Female Convict Scorpion, Lady Snowblood), who surely deserves the accolade of queen of exploitation, plays a half Korean moll, whose alienated sense of self and encounters with racism have lead her to heroin abuse. These two damaged, divided human beings are drawn to one another, and together form a precarious unit somewhere outside both Japanese society and the Yakuza underworld. Hardly romantic outsiders, however, their brief and violent relationship is ended when Kuroiwa is gunned down by the police, after he kills a Yakuza with whom they are doing business. If his death in the arms of Meiko Kaji is something of a cliche, stretching right back to Jean Gabin's performance in Quai de brumes, it is certainly given more spice with Kuroiwa, defiant to the last, raising his fingers in rage at his killers and to death itself. Kuroiwa's increasingly schitzo actions make the film an interesting but confusing ride, but the its ultimate point is unescapably clear: in this world honour is dead and buried. Fukasaku's cynicism is immaculate, as always.

Wild Japan Day 6 - Branded to Kill

Finally saw Seijun Suzuki's classic Branded to Kill (1967) a brilliantly abstract gangster film and perhaps the closest Japanese cinema has come to the playful abandon of Godard's early experimental pieces - before he lurched into Maoist didacticism. No. 3 Killer Hanada, played by chipmunk faced Joe Shisido who had surgical implants in his cheaks to increase his star appeal, has returned to town with a wife in tow. Despite his marriage he is soon recruited by the Yakuza and then by a beautiful femme fatale Misako, on a series of missions that will ultimately see him taking on his rivals for the spot of no. 1 Killer. To be honest the story is rather impregnable on first viewing, but the film's visual style and inventive set-pieces make up for any lack of clarity. Suzuki's studio, Nikkatsu, however didn't feel the same way and famously fired the idiosyncratic director on the basis that his films made no sense (Branded to Kill was apparently his last chance to make a 'normal' film, and the chaotic result amounts to the director giving the studio the finger in defiance).

In narrative terms the film fluctuates between bizarre set-pieces showing Hanada's escapades as a hitman and various bedroom scenes with his new boss Misako and his wife, who is eventually recruited by his enemies as a spy. I use the term 'bedroom' advisedly, because Hanada and his frisky wife (who wanders around much of the film naked save for a rather contented fox fur) seem to have a penchant for screwing anywhere but the bed. In what must be one of the most brilliant sex scenes ever filmed Suzuki alternates shots of the immaculately crisp white sheets of the bed and shots of the newleyweds fucking on the stairs, on the floor, in the kitchen etc... At one point the camera tracks from the bed and prowls around the house, checking all the likely locations, eventually finding the couple screwing in the rain outside the window. These scenes sum up the ethos of the film, which does anything but what is expected of it. Hanada, for instance, has a rather random fetish for boiled rice and can often be found in a corned, a rice cooker wedged between his thighs, inhaling the smell and muttering 'it doesn't get any better'.

The scenes with the wife are in sharp contrast to those with the morbid and ice-cold Misako, who is always shot in the pouring rain (even if she is indoors), indeed she enters the film driving a convertible with the top down in a storm, picking up Hanada at the road side after an early mission goes awry. Our first insight into her character is the dead starlings that are nailed to her rear view mirror in the place of the more conventional fluffy dice. Her bedroom is a dark, surreal space decorated by thousands of butterflies and entomological specimens, one of which Hanada is destined to become.

This is a film that recalls Godard's famous statement that 'to make a film all you need is a girl and a gun', and not necessarily even a plot. As Hanada makes love to the two women he is never far from a firearm - call it a professional precaution - indeed he often makes use of his pistol as a sexual aid, caressing smooth naked flesh with the metallic barrel in a juxtaposition that hints at the violent nature of his sexuality, or the sexual nature of his violent career, and explores the lack of boundaries between these two parts of his life.

The final sequences, in which Hanada is besieged in his apartment by the seemingly omnipresent Killer no. 1, leads to a hilarious Billy Wilder-esque episode of the pair eating, sleeping and living together at gunpoint. No. 1 is so unwilling to let Hanada out of his sight that he urinates down his own trouser leg and then casually takes off his shoe and empties a cascade of water onto the floor.

Wild Japan Day 5 - The Great Melee

Having never been released anywhere before this is the rarest film in the Wild Japan Festival, and deserves a slightly longer entry.

Virtually unknown in the West Eiichi Kudo has been linked to Masaki Kobayashi (Hara Kiri, Kwaidan) and Kihachi Okamoto (Sword of Doom) for producing jidai-geki that contain in allegorical form lucid commentaries on the political climate of 1960s Japan. Set in 1678 against the political intrigues of the Edo period, The Great Melee (1964) has thus been read as a commentary of the student movement of the sixties, which was also subjected to scrutiny in Yasuzo Masumura’s A False Student (1960). But quite apart from its social relevance The Great Melee, which follows the efforts of a group of reformists to assassinate the corrupt official Sakai who is gunning for the throne, deserves recognition as one of the great Samurai films (chanbara).
The film opens with the intimate scene of Jinbo, a high-ranking retainer, taking a relaxing bath with his wife Kayo. However their idyll is rudely disrupted by the arrival of Nakajima, a friend of Jinbo’s on the run from the Shogun’s inquisitors, who are zealously purging the country of dissidents. His decision to shelter his friend implicates him and he is arrested, but as he is led away his wife runs after him and is brutally slain. Jinbo barely has time to cry her name before his captors are themselves attacked. Managing to escape in the confusion he is taken in by a self confirmed wastrel, a ronin who lives by gambling and has sold everything but his sword. This man, though utterly apolitical, gives a fine speech critiquing the samurai class rejecting their code of honour and insisting instead that it is bribery and corruption that perpetuates the system, his words echoing many a student's. Jinbo drifts back out onto the street only to be recruited into a radical reformist group by a mysterious and beautiful robed woman named Miya.

Meanwhile the captured samurai are tortured for information by Satai and his inquisitors in a sequence shot in a style that is very almost cinema verité, which lends it a sense of immediacy and links the material more closely to the real life events of the time, the aftermath of the student’s violent run ins with the riot police – who, with their wooden batons, were the closest thing to the Samurai in modern, demilitarised Japan. Just as a trace of 1960s politics has entered the genre film, so too has some of the filmmaking techniques of the period. In particular the film alternates between the gorgeous static compositions and fluid tracking shots typical of the chanbara, and the spontaneous hand held camera-work that was emerging within the aesthetic of the new wave directors. Used almost exclusively in recording the chaotic scenes of arrest and the final epic battle sequence from which the film derives its name, this violent change in aesthetic lends these scenes a force of impact that is lacking in more classical renderings of the genre.

But if this is an allegory of the student movement it is certainly not a morally clear-cut one. As in Masumura’s A False Student, the anti-authoritarianism of the student movement, Zengakuren communists in its most radical manifestation, is also found wanting. The reformist group that the largely sympathetic Jinbo finds himself connected to is made up of a colourful cast of characters, which includes Kasaka, a mad monk who believes Buddha has requested him to assasinate Satai; Hayao Bessho, an impoverished samurai whose large family lives in a cramped, tumble-down house; and Okabe, an official who is prone to bouts of drunkeness. It is Miyo, however, who is the centre of the group, its chief recruitor and the only one who makes an effort to reassemble its members after the Shogun’s crack down. It is clear that they would be lost without her leadership, although she herself is loosing faith in the movement, most probably because the majority of its male members see her more as a comfort woman than a collaborator. In one of the films many brilliant set-pieces Kasaka rapes Miyo in a Buddhist temple, to the sound of monks chanting, and dissuades her from screaming by tearing a hole in the paper wall so she can witness the Shogun’s men who have the area staked out in search of her.

Eventually the reformists hatch a plot to assassinate Tsunashige, the heir to throne and the man through whom Sakai seeks to weild power, during a formal ceremony, demonstrating beyond doubt to the bombed-out postwar generation that traditions can only lead to trouble. The narrative is brilliantly paced, with the screw of tension turning tighter than one of Satai’s torture devices until all hell breaks loose in a closing battle that is both horrific and farcical; wading through paddy fields and fighting outside the gates of the town, which are opened and closed and then opened again in a gesture of futility, the assassins are seemingly incapable of bringing the death blow to their target although they do manage to finish off a few innocent bystanders in the process.

The film is profoundly concerned with death and the meaning of life in death. In an earlier scene, when one of the reformists broaches the possibility of turning in their comrades for clemency, his comrade pulls him over to the coffin of his dead brother and knocks of the lid to reveal a mangled corpse captured in a striking overhead shot, to remind him of the consequences of such a decision. Miya recruits Jinbo on the verge of suicide over his wife’s death, convincing him to lay down his life for a worthy cause instead. However after the plot is laid down and Okabe announces that ‘our deaths will bring peace to the land’, several close-ups of the conspirators’ morose faces indicate that life is not so easily squandered. In the calm before the storm Kudo takes time to gauge the reactions of his assassins, one of many moments in the film that contribute to the excellent characterisation and ensure the success of the complex plot. The poor samurai enjoys the company of his family for the last time before killing them, so that they don’t starve after he has died, and lays their bodies out carefully upon the tatami. We don’t see the act of murder, rather the film marks the transition between a happy family and a mausoleum with a single cut; the sound of the children laughing still lingering on the soundtrack and in the man’s ears as he walks away for the final time. The film reminds us that the divide between life and death is a blink of the eye. Later he will carve into a wooden post the words ‘Hayao Bessho lay down his life for justice’ in a final bid to be remembered, before erasing the words himself.

Finally, and ironically, it is not either of the assassins who kill Tsunashige, but the gambling wastrel, who happens upon his friend Jinbo’s body and, taking his broken sword, launches a singlehanded attack on the heir, who, having only just recovered from the last attack, is walking with Sakai, both of them engaged in relieved laughter. The film closes with a stunned Sakai, sent mad by the realisation that he has lost his opportunity to gain power, he places the corpse of Tsunashige back in his palanquin and sets about attempting to convince his men that he is still alive and they should carry on with the ceremony as planned.

Wild Japan Day 5 - Hausu

This running commentary on the Wild Japan Film Festival has become more of a staggering commentary. However i think i have caught up with myself, until the double bill tonight that is...

Imagine, if you can, a combination of Sailor Moon, The Wizard of Oz, Scooby Doo and The Evil Dead. Then imagine that this bizarre hybrid was shot on the cheap with special effects and backgrounds applied directly onto the frame in gaudy primary colours (by director Nobuhiko Obayashi personally), with a saccharine sweet soundtrack that occasionally descends into incongruous sections of funk, the whole thing being shot with pop art visuals so wonderfully and excruciatingly kitsch that they would make Andy Warhol pale in shame. The strange image that is now pirouetting in your brain is still a million miles off the synaesthetic madness of Hausu, which is quite frankly beyond the capabilities of language to describe.

Six Japanese Schoolgirls, who are introduced with cheesy poses as Melody, Mac, Sweet, Fantasy, Scholar and Kung-fu, take their school vacation in a mansion owned by the wheelchair bound aunt of one of their classmates. It soon transpires (to the audience at least – the girls, though cute, are far from bright) that the house is possessed by the bitter spirit of the aunt, who actually died waiting for her husband to return from war - his departure is shown as a flashback in silent movie footage, which in any other context would seem stylised. She has now taken it upon herself to kill all virgins dreaming of marriage who have the misfortune of wandering, like Goldilocks or Hansel and Gretal, into the imposing crooked house on the hill.

The film’s humour lies in the girl’s utterly naïve worldview, which is expressed by the film’s twee visual style and consciously cheesy acting, being very slowly hacked away by the schlock horror unleashed upon them by the house and an evil white cat named Blanche with glowing green eyes. One girl is electrocuted by a light, the screen flashing white with yellow lightning bolt sparks in the fashion of a child’s drawing, another is decapitated, her head levitating around the screen biting backsides until it is finally turned into a melon and served for dinner. But the film’s most triumphant, silly and grotesque set-piece occurs when Melody is eaten by the grand piano shot from above as her mangled limbs fly around the room and the piano fills with blood, painted on the screen in bright scarlet. The only things that remain are her severed fingers, bouncing up and down on the blood-spattered keys.

Trapped in the house the girls dream of their prince charming Mr Togo, a man with far too large sideburns to ever be a reliable hero, coming to rescue them. However after he is turned into a pile of bananas(!) after an argument with an insane melon salesman, the rescue mission falls on the new stepmother of one of the girls, eager to demonstrate her maternal worth. This is a woman who is so perfect that her scenes are shot like 70s haut-couture adverts, with her silk scarf and preened hair billowing out behind her by an industrial fan that seems to follow her wherever she goes. In short she is too perfect, too oblivious to the violent reality of the world that she spontaneously combusts on entering the house, an image of flames superimposed onto her petite silhouette.

If you thought that A Chinese Ghost Story (Siu-Tung Ching) was strange, with its incompetent stop-motion zombies and break dancing monk, then this will take you to a new transcendent realm of strangeness. It is quite simply the essence of cinematic innovation, or in the words of someone I met outside the screening ‘I feel like I never need to go to the cinema again’.

Wild Japan Day 4 - Jigoku

Personally financed by the director, Nobuo Nakagawa, Jigoku (Hell) was made for ShinToho (New Toho, a company formed by prominent figures who left the legendary studio during a series of strikes in the heady years following world war II) in 1960, the year the company went bust. It was plucked from a potential life of obscurity a few years later and put out for distribution by Toei, setting a new standard for the emerging horror genre; its influence apparent in the fact it has since spawned two remakes including a recent interpretation in 1999 by Teruo Ishii, most famous for his Joys of Torture series.

Yet it would be wrong to write Jigoku off as a prototype for the later works of J-Horror, which have come to dominate the western perception of Japanese cinema from the late nineties. An utterly original execution of a director’s unique vision, the film is consequently both a brilliant invocation of the stylistic and narrative concerns of its time and a landmark of the genre, which still seems fresh today. Peculiarly structured, the film’s first half is set in the real world, although one coloured by a darkly absurdist humour, whilst the latter part is set in an invocation of hell ingeniously constructed from minimal materials and staged against a black backdrop in the style of a Kabuki morality play. The only connection between these two sections, vastly different in form, are the human characters, who move through their lives like pathetic bugs sinning and then answering for those sins in the eight hells of Buddhism, where their bodies are hacked apart, skinned, flayed or simply doomed to languish forever beside the river Styx, which flows languidly across the set in an unhealthy greenish hue.

After a brief prelude, which shows the menacing fires of hell waiting for our eternal souls, the film opens in a university lecture theatre where theologian professor Yajima is speaking of the depiction of hell in world religions. The camera zooms in on Shiro, a student with a bright future ahead of him, who is due to marry the professor’s beautiful daughter, Yukiko. However he is haunted by the presence of fellow student Tamura, who, representing something of a bad conscience, is the mirror opposite of Shiro’s upright sense of tradition and morals (whilst Shiro wears the traditional school uniform and wooden sandals, Tamura dresses in shocking red shirts and sunglasses). He is also racked by guilt over the fact that the night before the two of them, whilst driving back from Yajima’s, hit a man and left him for dead. Little does he know that this man was a yakuza and that his amoral stripper girlfriend, Yoko, and his manipulative mother are out for revenge. After Yukiko is killed in another car accident - the brief match cut of Tamura’s face in place of the taxi driver’s indicating his diabolical origin - the characters are all drawn out to the countryside, where Shiro’s father runs a retirement home and here the increasingly outlandish plot developments come so thick and fast that it would take a small book to record them.

Here Shiro learns that his corrupt father is skimming money off the business for himself while feeding the emaciated lodgers dross. Furthermore he spends all day in bed with his mistress within earshot of his wife, who lies on her deathbed in the next room. Meanwhile a drink-addled artist lives with his daughter, a spitting image of Yukiko, painting a mural depicting the horrors of hell. The otherworldly Tamura reappears and, like the mysterious inspector in J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, begins to denounce all present for their sins. Very soon everyone is dead and their souls pitched into hell; the circumstances of their deaths a series of brilliantly burlesque accidents and misadventures, building into an orgy of fatalities so ridiculously sublime that it will have you in tears. For instance Shiro is invited onto a rickety suspension bridge by Yoko under the pretence of an amorous encounter, but when she attempts to lunge at him with a knife she instead trips and falls to her death, followed by her mother, and finally by Tamura. Suffering from shock Shiro returns to the retirement home where he finds that the artist has hung himself and the inmates are all dying of food poisoning during the celebrations of the institutions’s ‘twenty years of caring for Japan’s senior citizens’.

The general consensus seems to be that the part of the film set in hell is the best, whilst that of the secular world is more conventional. Although it is easy to see anything as conventional in contrast to the surreal excess of these later sequences, which can’t help but stick in the mind much like the spike rammed through Shiro’s throat as he dangles above a pit of flame, the early part of the film is none-the-less a brilliantly successful farce that seems to draw on the French absurdist theatre movement as well as anticipating the dark humour of the Czech new wave (Milos Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball springs to mind), especially in its irreverent approach to death. Just as the directors of the new wave, especially Nagisa Oshima and Hiroshi Teshigahara, were beginning to incorporate a radical European aesthetic in their films, in order to counter the classicism of the Japanese studio system, drawing on surrealism and existentialism to deconstruct prevalent ideologies, Jigoku successfully melds new European theatrical influences and traditional Japanese forms respectively in the two halves of the film. The result is an important and thoroughly entertaining film.

Wild Japan Day 3 - Sword of Doom

With Sword of Doom Kihachi Okamoto has crafted an intensely beautiful and chaotic samurai film (chanbara) infused with a stoic sense of destiny and a complex study of morality. It opens with former swordsman of the Kogen school, Ryunosuke Tsukue, casually cutting down an elderly pilgrim whilst out for a morning stroll in a lonely mountain pass. A menacing and mysterious appearance, his face completely covered by a large wicker hat, Ryunosuke seems to answer the pilgrims prayer for the Buddha to remove him from the secular world so that his grandaughter may escape the hard life of the pilgrim. Leaving the scene Ryunosuke passes a merchant and continues back to town where his ailing father tries to persuade him to lose a fencing match organised for the next day in order to preserve the honour and status of his opponent, Bunnojo Utsuki. He refuses and, after killing Bunnojo, leaves town with the man’s wife, who has already slept with him in a futile attempt to save her husband. As he leaves through a misty forest path, a setting that shows off the film’s remarkable lighting and use of locations to the fullest, he knowingly walks into an ambush and unflinchingly dispatches a dozen more men who attempt to avenge Bunnojo’s death; their corpses left scattered about the forest floor behind him, lying in limpid pools of light. Meanwhile the merchant comes across the pilgrim’s traumatised grandaughter sobbing over his body on the mountain pass and adopts her. The arbitrary death of the pilgrim and Bunnojo at the hands of the feckless Ryunosuke, sets in motion the film’s parralel narratives, which gradually converge throughout the film thanks to destiny, in the form of a number of plot contrivances, connected by the vengeful brother of the murdered man, Hyoma Utsuki.

After Ryunosuke strikes the old man dead with merciless efficiency he lifts his head sufficiently for the camera to get a glimpse of this manifestation of evil; his gaunt face set with cruel staring eyes, and the twitch of a manic grin on his lip. This is Tatsuya Nakadai. His character, thus established, Ryunosake continues in a similarly callous vein until the combined weight of his evil deeds leads to his decent into insanity, which seems etched on his face from the very beginning. Despite the film’s confusing story, partly due to its parallel narrative but also because it chronicles the chaotic political intrigues and divided loyalties that marked the end of the Edo period, firmly at its centre is the stony heart of Nakadai’s callous samurai, whose stoic performance binds the film’s fragmented elements with all the strength and compassion of concrete. Nakadai appears regularly throughout the sixties in some of the finest jidai-geki (period films) of the decade including Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and Sanjuro, but especially those of Masaki Kobayashi (Hara Kiri, Kwaidan and Samurai Rebellion). Nakadai is also the star of Kobayashi’s nine-hour anti-war epic The Human Condition, in which he plays a soldier who experiences the hell of war in Manchuria in excruciating detail. It is in the light of this performance that his role in Sword of Doom as an utterly emotionless killing machine can best be comprehended; a product of a dehumanising society whether it be the brutal civil war brought about by the fragmentation of the rigid samurai code in the Edo period, or the unchecked militarism of world war II. It is no surprise that Okamoto, unlike the new wave director's that made their debuts at a similar time, was a disgruntled veteran of the Pacific war. In an excellent survey of Nakadai’s career Chuck Stephens charts the ascendancy of this ‘eighth samurai’ (one of his first appearances is as an extra in Seven Samurai, a potential sword for hire passed over by the desperate peasants) within the jidai-geki, alongside that of the some-what better known Toshiro Mifune, and perfectly describes him thus: “Nakadai displayed an unadorned exterior that tended less toward suave than somehow slightly embalmed. The qualities that truly define him are those that seem sprung from electrifying forces deep within—a stentorian baritone that might belong to the devil's own ventriloquist dummy, and a pair of orb-wide eyes as alabaster as snake's eggs so eerily inner-illuminated they threaten to rupture into liquid light.”

Thoroughly amoral, Ryunosuke’s only loyalty is to his sword and he is notorious for fighting dirty, encouraging his assailant to attack by feigning weakness only to lunge at the opportune moment. However he begins to doubt even his skills as a swordsman on encountering Shimada Takahashi, head of a rival school of fencing, appropriately played by Toshiro Mifune, Nakadai’s regular rival for the title of number one samurai. The pair have been in showdowns before Sword of Doom, most notably in Kurosawa’s films, and will be again after this, in Kobayashi’s Samurai Rebellion for instance, but here the volatile dual billing remains curiously unconsumated by violence. Instead, the scene in which Nakadai, after botching an assassination attempt, watches powerlessly as his small army of assassins is decimated by Takahashi’s sword is nothing short of brilliant. Over-awed by the sudden and unexpected violence of Takahashi, who leaps from his palanquin like a jack-in-the-box just as one of the men plunges the sword into the side of the box, Ryunosuke can only look on in disbelief as Mifune demonstrates the kind of controled explosion of swordplay he has mastered in films such as Seven Samurai and Sanjuro; the would be assassin almost ceasing to exist as he is completely ignored by Takahashi, who moves with astonishing agility under the falling snow. This scene is the only moment in the film where Nakadai fails to hold frame and it provides a neat commentary on the status of the two actors whose careers, due to their similar trajectory through the jidai-geki, were destined to be reflections of one another.

Takahashi has the uncanny ability of understanding Ryunosuke from the word go, telling him when he comes to the school to challenge its champion, that ‘the sword is the soul. To under stand the sword you must study the soul. Evil soul, evil sword.’ To say that Ryunosuke lives by the sword would be an understatement, it represents for him his entire philosophy, and so before the opening match that starts the characters off on their road to misery, he makes it clear that when he is fighting ‘his family cease to exist'. This statement is born out in the many domestic scenes of Ryunosuke knocking back sake as his new wife complains and his baby screams, all framed over the shaft of his sword standing menacingly in the foreground.

The ending of Sword of Doom must rank amongst the most impressive and baffling ever committed to film. Set at a party in a Kyoto brothel the Shinsin group, one of the splinter groups loyal to the shogun that Ryunosuke serves for money rather than ideals, has developed a split in its leadership and our cruel hearted anti-hero is poised to gain a position of power if only the evening goes as planned. Meanwhile outside Hyoma Utsuki, the vengeful brother, has finally tracked down his quarry with the help of the old merchant and the granddaughter, who is a courtesan entertaining Ryunosuke within. Before all hell breaks loose the young girl informs Ryunosuke that the private room in which they are seated is haunted and tells the story of a courtesan’s suicide. The film’s brief dip into the supernatural, not such a large jump in terms of genre in Japanese cinema as one might expect given the strong tradition of ghost stories embedded in period dramas (Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monigatari being the obvious example), perfectly coinsides with Ryunosuke’s enevitable and long-awaited mental breakdown. After learning the identity of the girl as the grandaughter of the pilgrim he had slain at the start of the film he drops his sake cup in shock and begins to see distorted shadows and hear the voices of all those that he has encountered or killed on his road to evil. Unable to bear this onslaught of ghastly shadows thrown upon the walls, as though he were trapped within a Banruki shadow play, he begins to slice up the room with his sword, prompting an all out battle with his fellow Shinsin members that rivals the crazy 88 scene in Kill Bill for sheer intensity, only here Ryunosuke is driven by a profound madness that makes the scene an utterly devastating depiction of flawed humanity rather than simply an exercise in stylised violence (although viewers are certainly not short-changed on this front either).

After several minutes of increasingly brutal hacking and slashing, building into a cacophonic crescendo of violence, the dynamic camera rests on a close up of Ryunosuke’s face and the image freezes in a manic blur of disrupted action. Slowly the words ‘the end’ form upon the frozen image, removing all doubt that the projector has broken down or that the projectionist has forgotten to load the last reel, and the lights were raised upon a packed out auditorium of sweating and confused people. It was a moment that prompted my cinema-going buddy to loudly exclaim ‘what the fuck!’ Not an unjustified reaction given that the film’s climactic fight, still apparently in process, completely fails to resolve the narrative’s many loose ends, like the small matter of Ryunosuke squaring up to his antagonists the sword master Shimada Takahashi (Toshiro Mifune) or even his sworn enemy Hyoma Utsuki. The effect is not unlike that produced by the ending of the American release of Shogun Assassin, an abridged version of the first two parts of the six-part Lone Wolf and Cub serial adaptation, when it seems as though its protagonist, hell bent on revenge, has suddenly and unexpectedly had second thoughts. The main difference being that here Ryunosuke doesn’t seem to have the benefit of a choice in the matter, cut off as he is by the editor in mid sword stroke, bleeding profusely and still surrounded by a plethora of assailants. The abrupt ending is perhaps due to the film being an adaptation of only a small part of a long serialised novel by Kaizan Nakazato, making it intended as a rather dramatic cliffhanger. But given that no sequel was forthcoming this final freeze-frame image carries an undeniable charge. Left in a limbo of pain and madness, from which we are uncertain whether he escapes, Ryunosuke’s freedom is removed and his driving ambitions left unfulfilled. The punishment for his evil deeds: to be left forever in suspended animation, trapped beneath the celluloid of a film print in the Japan Foundation Film Library. Although available on Criterion DVD, isn’t it about time Tatsuyo Nakadai was released in the UK?

Wild Japan Day 2 - Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter

In the seventies struggling Japanese studios attempted to lure audiences back to cinemas by concentrating their production on sexploitation films, resulting in Nikkatsu’s so-called Roman Porno cycle and Toei’s Pinku films, which became perfect vehicles for formal experiments for many ambitious young directors, among them Yasuharu Hasebe whose name is synonymous with the sexploitation genre after debuting with The Black Tight Killers in 1966. One new genre that emerged as a result was the girl gang film in which Meiko Kaji rose to stardom. In Sex Hunter, the third instalment of the Stray Cat Rock series, she plays Mako, leader of the Alleycats, who spend their time drinking in go-go dancing clubs, engaging in knife fights and generally stalking the streets looking cool. But when their male counterparts The Eagles, led by the enigmatic Baron, begin to ethnically cleanse Tokyo of its ‘halfbreed’ population (more often than not a product of the union between American GIs and Japanese women), the girls, many of whom have mixed-race lovers, decide to rebel. The last straw occurs when Baron pimps them en masse to a sleazy organiser of sex parties (frequented by Americans). Baron removes Mako from the fray, claiming her as his woman although he cannot bring himself to touch her out of impotence, but when he reveals to her that her friends ‘are being gangbanged as we speak’, she immediately returns to the party armed with a stash of coca-cola Molotov cocktails, which she precedes to lob into the room in what must be one of the best ever uses of the soft drink brand that is synonymous with American cultural imperialism.

Although the title and plot summary would suggest the kind of film where the best you could hope for was a so-bad-its-good brand of entertainment, Sex Hunter is a surprisingly sophisticated film, both in terms of its high production values (scope, lavish set pieces, fine acting) and its intelligent narrative that seriously tackles pointed social issues. The film is of course incredibly subversive in its depiction of strong female characters taking on the male establishment as well as its treatment of race, which had been a mute topic in Japanese mainstream cinema up to that point.

Mako’s love interest is also a mixed-race stranger, Kazuma, who has wandered into town in search of his lost sister. His entrance, in which the camera shoots his feet before panning up to reveal a man dressed in a flamboyant yellow shirt and lip synching to an old Japanese pop song, is undeniably cool, and, like the westerns from which this film draws its narrative model, the presence of this outsider serves as a catalyst to the tensions between the two opposing camps. Baron’s gang take their quarry to a derelict military base and chase them through the long grass in ex-army surplus jeeps; as they are given a thirty second head start Baron sits nonchalantly flicking through the pages of an illustrated history of hunting. This setting, which evokes the American military presence of the immediate post-war years, becomes the location of the tragic final shoot out in which Baron and Kazuma blast each other to death with rifles.

This is a film that looks and sounds amazing, driven as it is by a brilliantly psychedelic visual design that is often so stylish it hurts, and a supercool Jazz soundtrack, complimented by various appearances from Japanese pop group The Golden Half, who were also of dual origin. It’s available on DVD by the American Cinematheque label.

Wild Japan Day 1 - Female Convict Scorpion

In this sequel to Female Prisoner #701, the second in a long running 1970s feminist sexploitation series, the beautiful Meiko Kaji stars as Matsu, or Scorpion, who emerges to wreak bloody vengeance after a year of solitary in a subterranean dungeon prison. Teaming up with six of her fellow prisoners the group roam the landscape like an all female version of Seven Samurai, donned with long prison robes in place of kimonos. Their first port of call after escaping from custody is an abandoned village, which seems to have suffered some kind of volcanic disaster, where they discover an old witch (actually it is more like she is revealed to them after her house cracks and falls apart around her like an egg). This old hag is not unlike the spirit encountered by Mifune’s character in Kurosawa’s Macbeth adaptation Throne of Blood, and clutching a knife she introduces each of the seven avengers in an eerily prophetic, noh theatre style drone as each of the girls drifts into view, their seated forms extravagantly superimposed on a black screen.

Although all of the girls are responsible for crimes against man in some form, it is Oba (Kayoko Shiraishi) who becomes Matsu’s chief rival within the group. A ranting caricature of evil, she is responsible for impaling her own child in her womb after killing her husband, an event that is restaged in a surreal Kabuki style flashback. From the very beginning she vies for power over the other girls, encouraging them to beat Matsu after she is raped by the prison wardens in an attempt to tarnish her status as a hero to the other prisoners. To stretch the Seven Samurai comparison, if the demented Oba is the self-centred Toshiro Mifune of the group, then Matsu is its meditative Takashi Shimura. Kaji’s adoption of a virtually wordless performance (after she rejected the roughness of the character originally put forth in the script) maintains a quiet authority. Matsu is introduced lying chained to the floor, scraping a spoon wedged between her teeth on the hard rocks until she has fashioned it into a knife, which she later uses to lunge, scorpion like, in an attempt to remove the warden’s remaining eye (having already removed the first eye in the previous film). She doesn’t really attain this level of ruthless force again and so her silent (I won’t say subtle) performance is somewhat at odds with the extreme nature of the film, which is better suited to Oba’s hysterics.

Indeed the only thing that is more violent than the film’s subject matter (which includes torture, impalings and rape in abundance) is its aesthetic style. Despite the somewhat lacklustre narrative and dull characterisation (the remaining six girls are completely interchangeable), director Shunya Ito keeps the entertainment values high with an increasingly deranged series of experiments in lighting, editing and framing, which inspire laughter and admiration in more or less equal measure. For instance when the wardens come to collect Matsu for the governor’s visit at the opening of the film, she is framed lying in a crumpled heap at the lower left hand side of the frame as the wardens stand over her on a platform at the top of the frame, the whole image tilted into a grotesque canted composition. To further intensify the image Ito arbitrarily shines a purple light onto her. Indeed these opening sequences, in which the naive governor inspects the prison, are the most innovative in the film. The girl’s attempted riot is shot in an amusing series of tableaux that reveal the film’s manga origins.

A bizarre kitch, feminist, exploitation film, Female Prisoner Scorpion follows no rules but its own and ends with the striking image of the prisoners silhouetted on a hill of rubbish looking down upon Tokyo; as with Godzilla Japanese society won’t know what’s hit it. But there’s only so much you can do plot-wise with a group of rampaging female prisoners, especially as the hey-day of exploitation began to show signs of wear. Realising its limitations Kaji left the series after its fourth installment, although it was apparent that she had already been typecast as the vengeful girl-power icon as she went on to her most famous role in Lady Snowblood: Vengeance from the Netherworld, in which she plays a child born and orphaned in prison who hunts down those connected with her mother’s death, ticking their names off a list as she kills them. Both this and Female Convict Scorpion have had a clear influence on Tarantino’s Kill Bill, indeed the theme song ‘Flower of Carnage’ (sung by Kaji herself) features prominently on Tarantino’s typically eclectic soundtrack.

Wild Japan Film festival - Day 1 - Pale Flower

I'm a bit behind with entries due to my graduation (MSc in Film Studies) and all of the obligatory parties that accompany it. Last friday was the start of the Wild Japan Film festival at the filmhouse, which was organised by Matt Palmer, founder of Cult! Film Distribution. This is the second installment of the festival, the last one being in 2005, and this year the entire programme will also be shown at the NFT. The line up is a real treat for cinephiles, with a total of twelve films screening on pristine 35mm prints over the next ten days. They range from abstract art house experiments (Branded to kill, Funeral parade of Roses), beautifully crafted genre pieces (Sword of Doom, Pale Flower), and shameless exploitation trash (Female Convict Scorpion, School of the Holy Beast).

Pale Flower - Masahiro Shinoda

The opening film was Pale Flower (1964) an astonishingly beautiful Yakuza film by Masahiro Shinoda (Assassination, Double Suicide). The film follows the fortunes of gangster Muraki following his release from prison and his reintegration into gang Funada. But things have changed and gang Funada have now entered an uneasy alliance with gang Yuazuki in order to counter the threat of youthful newcomer Imai, who is challenging the aging leadership of the other gangs. Given that Muraki was put inside for assassinating one of Yuazaki's men in the first place, this alliance has rendered the sacrifice that resulted in his eight-year prison stretch utterly pointless, creating in him a sense of worthlessness that comes to permeate his entire jaded worldview. The opening montage of denizens of the new Tokyo crowding onto trains sets up the film as a critique of the dehumanising aspect of the economic miracle of the sixties, and Muraki’s voice over commentary draws the conclusion that human life is worthless and therefore murder is perfectly justified (a recurring theme in the work of the new wave directors).

Described by someone on IMDB as a Japanese adaptation of On The Road, Pale Flower follows Muraki as he drifts through the illegal gambling halls of Tokyo, desperately trying to find a way to feel alive. It is here that he stumbles upon a beautiful rich woman Saeko, the pale flower of the title, who is suffering from a similar existential malaise, and together they embark upon a mission to restore their senses through racing sports-cars on empty night highways, high-stakes gambling, passionless sex and, for Saeko, hard drugs. It is this latter diversion that comes between them, taking Saeko to a place Muraki will not follow and making her beholden to a ruthless junkie who occupies the edge of the frame as an enigmatic presence throughout the film, callously observing the gambling slumped against the wall in a stoned stupor. For Muraki he is merely a disgusting, cowardly dope addict, but his illusive nature represents something more sinister; the allure of self-destruction that Saeko succumbs to out of ennui.

The breathtakingly polished black and white cinematography (provided by Masao Kosugi) provides further evidence that Japanese filmmakers of this period had absolutely mastered the art of film aesthetics in a way never seen before or since. Its tight scope compositions evoke a wonderful atmosphere of gloom, which is perfectly suited to expressing the stifling world of the Yakuza. The evocation of mood is helped immensely by composer Toru Takemitsu, whose modernist compositions also graced the work of Hiroshi Teshigahara (Woman of the Dunes). But apart from being an utterly perfect example of its genre, the existential gangster film, and an aesthetic triumph, Shinoda’s film, as always, provides a brilliant commentary on the changing values in Japanese society by using the enclosed world of the gangster as an extreme microcosm of wider social transitions.

The film concerns itself with the shift of values that was concurrent with the emergence of the new sixties generation, here presented as alienated and nihilistic. This is particularly apparent in the attitudes of the aging gang leaders who are desperate to hold on to their hard won power in the face of ambitious newcomers and the fatalistic attitude of Muraki, a child of the post war years, who despite having only just been released from prison puts himself forward for the job of assassinating Imai without a thought for himself. This scene, set to an elegiac choral piece (by Britten?), is utterly devastating in its violent emotional intensity. It is seen through the eyes of Saeko, who Muraki invites along as a witness, promising that the act of murder is the greatest kick, but the look on his face afterwards tells another story. The film ends with Muraki behind bars yet again, and it is here that he learns of the death of Saeko at the hands of her dealer. As the prison gates close irrevocably behind him the film ends with his voice over, commenting that without Saeko life has no meaning. A realisation of love that reverses the statement he makes at the very opening of the film about the worthlessness of human life, but a realisation that has come too late…

Shinoda’s film, like Takeshi Kitano’s superb Yakuza films, is also sophisticated enough to contain a critique of the genre without ever rejecting it outright. Thus, whilst they are planning the assassination of Imai, the doom laden and tense atmosphere is broken by a phone call. When one of the gang elders picks up the phone there is a brief pause before he states irritably that ‘this ‘aint no beauty parlour!’ The emergent fashion oriented consumer society here breaks into the traditional world of the Yakuza in a moment of wonderful irrationality and flagrant abuse of the film’s tone. In spite of these undermining moments Shinoda’s film has a stifling coherence and linear progression that is wholly appropriate to the subject, but completely different to the stylistic excess of his other masterpiece Assassination, made just after Pale Flower also in 1964, which was a daring and unlikely fusion of Yojimbo and Citizen Kane. In that film Shinoda transports his theme of existential angst to the genre of the Samurai film, utilising the setting of the Edo period to evoke the lack of certainty in the post war period, when American values were infiltrating society and the emperor was forced to denounce his divine status. These issues are explored through the character of a sword for hire, who plays the opposed camps of the Tokugawa Shogunate’s ‘Free Samurai Army’ and the emperor worshippers against one another, to the point that his own identity became utterly unfathomable to both the audience and himself, as well as the assassin employed by the shogun. Shinoda finally arrives at his nihilistic realisation that “a man should live anyway he wants. What else is there?” a statement that seems to act as an ironic counterpoint to Muraki’s position, tethered as he is by loyalty to his gang over life itself, which to him is nothing more than a pale flower.

Be With Me

Eric Khoo's Be With Me falls into a rich tradition of films depicting themes of love and loneliness using parallel narratives, such as Wong Kar-wai's Chung King Express and, more recently, Hou Hsou Hsien's Three Times, a portmanteau film that follows three sets of lovers played by the same actors in three different periods (there is also the Hong Kong Film 20 30 40, about love at the three stages of a woman's life). Be With Me features four damaged characters, whose stories run parallel and overlap, but a its centre is the true story of Theresa Chan, an inspiring lady who, despite being deaf and blind, has lived a life fuller than most. Khoo was inspired to write the script after meeting Theresa and reading her autobiography, having for a long while attempted to make a film about hope. Watching Be With Me it is easy to feel grateful that Hollywood didn't get to the story first and give it the biopic treatment; turning it into a glib, self important 'inspirational' story driven by star performances and a majestic score (see Iris or A beautiful Mind). Be With Me is, happily, resolutely low key and gains an incredible emotional change simply from having Theresa play herself within a cast of first time actors.

The film opens with an old man cooking a meal with consumate skill, packing it and carrying it on the bus to a hospital ward, where he spoon feeds his ailing wife. This wordless opening sequence is incredible for its emotionally disarming quality. This is in no small part due to the astonishing use of close ups of the man's deeply expressive yet ultimately ordinary face, the grainy delicacy of the shots perfectly accenuated by the Panasonic Varicam. These shots immediately evoke the sense of vulnerability with which Khoo invests his characters. Eventually the man brings his wife home and cooks for her there, but it is only when his son joins them that we are informed that his mother is dead, and we have been witnessing the man's grief visualised as a ghost. Although it is becoming a cliche (not to mention a simplification) to note how Asian cultures have a closer link to the spirit world, it's true that an increasing number of films are using this device, including Pan-ek Ratuarang's Last Life in the Universe, Stanley Kwan's Rouge, and Park Chan-Wook's Vengeance Trilogy. The old man finds his life has a purpose again when his son, who is helping Theresa to write her biography, persuades him to cook meals for her and the film ends with them encountering one another for the first time (another film that uses cooking to bring people together is Ang Lee's brilliant Eat, Drink, Man, Woman).

The film's other characters are less fortunate. An insecure, overweight security guard, who is bullied by his brother, admires a beautiful executive who works in his building to the point of obsession, watching her through security cameras. He attempts to make contact by writing a love letter but he is frustrated by his inability to express his emotions. Although not deaf or blind, the film reminds us that there are other ways that human beings can become alienated from society. It is the forth narrative that is the weakest, and sadly detracts from the accomplishments of the rest of the film. A lesbian relationship between two school girls, and the rejection that leads one to attempt suicide, is treated in a tone that often boarders on kitsch and jars with the emotional subtlety of the central story. Although Khoo may be commenting on the superficiality of the girl's emotion, and the tragic lightness of her decision to end her life in counterpoint to Theresa Chan's perseverance, the fact that she survives by crushing the security guard, who is on the way to deliver his letter, is an irony too far and seems conspicuously out of place.

Although frustratingly uneven in this sense, Be With Me is a film that breaks new ground in terms of using images to convey emotion. Very few words are spoken in the film; instead Theresa Chan narrates her story in a series of subtitles that play over silent images (although this device is perhaps overused) and the two girls communicate via text messages rather than through speech (which may be the source of their failing relationship). Various forms of communication (letters, mobiles, braile) and a corresponding lack of human contact becomes the theme that connects and disconnects the atomised characters. Eric Khoo shows that he is almost as good as Tsai Ming-liang at exploring alienation in the contemporary metropolis, a theme that is becoming more prevalent in Asian cinema, including the sixth generation of Chinese directors (Jia Zhang-ke's Unknown Pleasures and Lou Ye's Suzhou River being good examples. The fact that it was shot in just 16 days is amazing.

Yasuzo Masumura

DVD releases of Red Angel (1966) and Blind Beast (1969) by Yasuzo masumura.

A figure head of the Japanese New Wave, of whom Nagisa Oshima wrote 'a powerful, irresistible force has arrived in Japanese cinema', Yasuzo Masumuru worked prolifically in the 60s, making features at a rate of four a year exclusively for Daiei studios until it went bankrupt in the early seventies. Perhaps it is partly his status as a studio director and partly his generic eclecticism that have caused him to be neglected by the critical attention that was being paid to Japanese cinema at the time, framed as it was by the dominant discourse of the auteur theory. Although he was criticised for his commercial allegiance by his fellow directors, it is hard to imagine a more extreme and volatile personality working within the studio system. Indeed his influence on contemporary figures such as Takashi Miike and Park Chan-Wook seems striking, no doubt going someway towards justifying the recent revival of his work, first as a retrospective, courtesy of the Japan Foundation, and now these two DVD releases from the emerging label to watch Yume Pictures.

Whilst his interest in the convergence of sex and violence links him to his contemporaries Oshima (In the Realm of the Senses) and Imamura (Vengeance is Mine), Masumura's ability to explore transgressive themes, whilst still working with accepted narrative conventions and maintaining a dramatic arc and mode of characterisation that is able to produce a deep emotional reaction, is his alone. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Red Angel (1966), which is arguably his masterpiece. A stunning anti-war film that follows Nurse Sukura Nishi (played by the stunning Wakao Ayako, a Masumura regular) through the hellish environs of the field hospitals of the Sino-Japanese war, Red Angel is absolutely relentless in its portrayals of the horrors of war. In fact it may be one of the most graphically unsettling films from the sixties, and at times it seems incredible that the operating scenes are not gleened from real war footage such is their visceral authenticity. However the incredible scope cinematography soon puts a stop to such thoughts.

Sent to the front line after being raped by a patient, Nishi meets the morphine addicted Dr Okabe, who has become a master at amputating limbs – whether they need to be or not – and has grown deeply embittered at the futility of war and the brutality of humanity. Ashida Shinsuke’s performance as the doctor is brilliantly subtle, and hints at the former idealism of a doctor beneath the hardened, war weary exterior. Imagine the philanthropic protagonist of Kurosawa’s Red Beard (1965), made only a year before, thrown into the battle field where his job is not to save lives so much as to create cripples and you come close to Okabe’s position. In his character the dehumanising effect of war is only too palpable and he views his dependency upon morphine as a placebo not dissimilar from patriotism; a lie that he tells to himself to avoid madness. However his addiction has had the side effect of making him impotent, and so he is at once traumatised and emasculated.

After her former rapist, Sakamoto, appears gut-shot in the ward Nishi agrees to spend the night with Okabe in return for a precious blood transfusion, because she is afraid he will die believing her to have taken her revenge. Although not the best start to their relationship Nishi and Okabe become drawn to one another. Nishi becomes determined to break his habit and restore his manhood so that there love can be consummated, and she succeeds, but only as the Chinese armies begin their invasion of the camp.

The film balances itself between Masumura's usual cynicism and a surprisingly deep humanism, just as the characters struggle to maintain values such as love in the face of war. During a brief spell away from Okabe, Nishi cares for a man who has had both arms amputated by her beloved doctor. These sequences, in which Nishi helps the pathetic soldier to masturbate and then takes him to a hotel and gives herself to him, and by doing so discovers something of herself and her femininity, epitomise the film’s attempt to show the persistence of love in horror, managing to be deeply moving in spite of the situation. In contrast Blind Beast, about a Blind Sculptor who kidnaps a photographic model with the help of his mother in order to pioneer the 'art of touch', is a more pessimistic report on human nature. The Sadean ending plumbs the depths of depravity in a way that anticipates Oshima's deliciously perverted In the Realm of the Senses (1970).

A Full review of Red Angel and Blind Beast is forthcoming on www.firecracker-magazine.com, a site devoted to Asian film, which comes highly recommended.

Kekexili Mountain Patrol

Kekexili Mountain Patrol by Lu Chuan provides a perfect opening gambit to this blog. Epic, innovative, beautifully meditative and complex; it epitomises some of the reasons why Asian cinema is so exciting, modifying genres and forms to its own narrative ends to create something fresh and utterly compelling. The fact that it has been produced in part by Columbia Pictures Film Production Asia demonstrates that Hollywood has also started taking notice of the talent emerging from the east. The fact that Columbia is owned by Sony indicates that it has perhaps realised this a little too late.

The film follows Beijing journalist Ga Yu to the remotest region of Tibet, where the self styled vigilante Ri Tai and his rag-tag group of soldiers have formed an anti-poaching unit to defend the endangered white antelope in the Kekexili wilderness. There is nothing Hollywood likes more than an inspiring true story, and Kekexili is certainly that, yet this is a film that is firmly beyond Hollywood's imaginative scope. For one thing it tells its story with an incredible visual economy that is worthy of Sergeo Leone's westerns, and makes equally good use of the stunning landscapes in which the rough-hewn, long-coated figures encounter one another. Within minutes of the film starting we witness the poachers capturing and executing one of the mountain patrol, as an antelope is skinned in the background, with barely a word spoken.

The film is unremittedly brutal, depicting the harshness of life with a lightness that Hollywood would struggle to justify with its glib morality. In one scene a group of poachers, one old man and his sons, more victims of circumstances and poverty than criminals, are left to die in the hostile landscape because the patrol are running short of provisions. When one of his own trucks breaks down Ri Tai even leaves behind some of his own men rather than turn back; his single-minded desire to capture the poachers reminiscent of Ahab's obsessive pursuit of Moby Dick, and doesn't end much better. Even so there is a moral complexity at work in the film that prevents it from the kind of didacticism that the environmental subject matter could produce, and the camera often registers the shock etched on Ga Yu's face at Ri Tai's ruthless methods. Short of men, money and guns Ri Tai even submits to selling some of the antelope pelts they have confiscated, thus feeding the very industry he is trying to stamp out.

Despite its harshness Kekexili is also deeply meditative, the violence being tempered by the stillness of the sublime landscapes and the stoicism of the characters, both of which depend more upon Taoism than any generic factors (this is after all an 'Eastern' rather than a 'Western'). These elements are taken to an extreme in the scene in which one man, alone and changing his tyre, is silently and arbitrarily swallowed up by quicksand. Both in its brutal visual economy and its measured moments of stillness, this is a film that triumphs cinematically. Its longshots dwarf the human characters against a hostile landscape, which becomes a character itself coming alive in dust storms and strange rumblings that punctuate the narrative. Aside from Leone's Weterns these shots recall Kurosawa's come-back Dersu Uzala, a poetic study of man's struggle with the harsh Siberian environment.