Fighting Elegy (Seijun Suzuki, 1966)

Hideki Takahashi and Junko Asana in Fighting Elegy

Kiroku Nanbu: Hideki Takahashi
Michiko: Junko Asana
Turtle: Yusuke Kawazu
Takuan: Mitsuo Kataoka
Principal: Isao Tamagawa
Kaneda: Keisuke Noro
Ikki Kita: Hiroshi Midorigawa
Kiroku's Father: Seijiro Onda
Yoshino Nanbu: Chikaku Miyagi

Director: Seijun Suzuki
Screenplay: Kaneto Shindo
Based on a novel by Takashi Suzuki
Cinematography: Kenji Hagiwara
Production design: Takeo Kimura
Film editing: Mutsuo Tanji
Music: Naozumi Yamamoto

Seijun Suzuki's Fighting Elegy is a coming-of-age story, ostensibly about a hormone-crazed teenager who tries to sublimate his lust for the pretty Michiko and to expiate his Catholic guilt for that lust by joining one of the warring gangs in his town. But what's really coming of age, as we find out at the film's end, is the militaristic imperialism of prewar Japan. So much of the film depends on Suzuki's mastery of tone as he shifts from the mostly comic story of young Kiroku's plight to the wholly tragic outcome. Kiroku becomes increasingly adept as a fighter, and his rebellious antics at school are not punished so much as increasingly tolerated -- even his father refuses to punish him, taking a boys-will-be-boys attitude. When he's forced to go live with his uncle and transfer to another school, he only gets more bellicose, but although the school has a motto that stresses the necessity of "seemly" behavior, at the end of his stay there the principal is so impressed by Kiroku's fighting skills that he removes his coat and challenges Kiroku to a duel. The scene ends with the two squaring off, suggesting that part of the reason for the military's takeover lies in the older Japanese generation's admiration for the violence of the young. The film ends with Michiko going into a convent, but not before she is forced off of the path she is traveling by a troop of jogging soldiers and her crucifix is trodden into the snow, and with Kiroku on the train to Tokyo, where he plans to join the fight for control of the government. It's not clear from the film which side Kiroku will fight on this time, although the novel on which it's based has him joining the army and dying in China. Suzuki scripted this part of the novel and planned to film it as a sequel before he was forced out of his job at the Nikkatsu studios. Fighting Elegy is an exhibition of Suzuki's original and innovative technique, which audiences loved but studio management thought was out of control.

Kuroneko (Kaneto Shindo, 1968)

Kichiemon Nakamura and Kiwako Taichi in Kuroneko

Gintoki: Kichiemon Nakamura
Yone: Nobuko Otowa
Shige: Kiwako Taichi
Raiko: Kei Sato

Director: Kaneto Shindo
Screenplay: Kaneto Shindo
Cinematography: Norimichi Igawa, Kiyomi Kuroda
Art direction: Takashi Marumo
Film editing: Hisao Enoki
Music: Hikaru Hayashi

Sometimes mood is everything, especially in a ghost story. The film that starts creepy and stays creepy tests our tolerance for creepiness. Kaneto Shindo seems to know this. He starts Kuroneko with a peaceful pastoral scene: a hut with a small brook running past its door, and in the distance fields backed by the wall of a forest. He lingers on this scene just long enough for it to register on us before ragged samurai begin to emerge from the forest, approach the brook in front of the hut, and drink thirstily from it. Then he cuts to the inside, where two terrified woman are watching the approach of the samurai, who enter the hut, pillage it, rape and murder the women, and set fire to the hut. Then we cut to the opening frame as the samurai return to the forest and smoke begins to billow from the hut. It blazes up, and Shindo cuts to the aftermath: the ruins of the hut and the bodies of the women, strangely unconsumed by the fire. A black cat enters and sniffs around the women, then begins to lick their wounds. Then it's nighttime, and the scene changes to the Rajomon (or Rashomon) Gate in Kyoto, where the supernatural story begins: The women are now ghosts, their former rags replaced by fine garments, who lure the samurai who violated and killed them to their handsome dwelling in a bamboo grove, where they bite out their throats and drink their blood. Shindo's mastery at setting up a plausibly real opening and slowly transitioning to the eerie vengeance of the dead women, who seem to float and sometimes move with, well, catlike grace. News of the deaths of the samurai reaches the emperor, who orders the chief samurai, Raiko, to deal with the problem. We then cut to a fight between a young soldier and a huge man armed with an iron-studded club. The soldier vanquishes the big man, cuts off his head, and rides home to bring the news that he's the only survivor of a battle. Raiko rewards the soldier by making him a samurai and giving him the name Gintoki. The interpolation of the fight scene and Gintoki's ride again break the mood, providing a welcome contrast with the ghost scenes. Proudly, Gintoki goes to see his wife and his mother, only to find the ruins of their hut -- they were, of course, the victims of the marauding samurai. And Raiko then orders Gintoki to prove his valor by finding and killing the "monster" that has been slaughtering his samurai. Eventually, of course, Gintoki will discover that the killers are the ghosts of his wife, Shige, and his mother, Yone, setting up an impossible moral dilemma. It's a tense, beautifully photographed, often surprisingly erotic, and subtly terrifying film that even I, usually immune to the shocks of horror movies, can appreciate.

Onibaba (Kaneto Shindo, 1964)

A dark shocker, with a close kinship to its contemporary, Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964), Onibaba -- which translates as "Demon Hag," and has been released under the titles Devil Woman and The Hole -- takes place in the grasslands alongside a river during a devastating civil war in medieval Japan. A woman (Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law (Jitsuko Yoshimura) share a hut there. The older woman's son, who was married to the younger woman, has been conscripted into the army. The two women survive by waylaying samurai who have strayed into the tall grasses, killing them, stripping them, and tossing their bodies into a deep sinkhole. They then exchange the armor and weapons for food and supplies. One day, Hachi (Kei Sato), a neighbor who was conscripted into the army along with the older woman's son, returns and tells them that they had both deserted but the son/husband was killed when he tried to steal food from some farmers. Hachi begins to make a play for the young widow, who is soon sneaking out at night to have sex with him, to the older woman's dismay and jealousy. One night, while spying on Hachi and her daughter-in-law, she encounters a lost samurai general (Jukichi Uno) wearing the mask of a demon. When she asks why he is masked, he says that it's to protect his face: He is, he says, extraordinarily handsome, and if she shows him the way out of the grasslands he will reward her by removing the mask. The woman, however, lures the general to the hole and he falls to his death. She climbs down into the hole, which is filled with skeletons, to retrieve his armor and weapons and to remove the mask, which comes off only after great effort, revealing that he is terribly disfigured. She decides to use the mask to frighten the younger woman off from her liaison with Hachi, but with suitably horrifying consequences. Writer-director Kaneto Shindo plays with the fear of female empowerment and sexuality: The hole, like the sandpit in Woman in the Dunes, is a pretty obvious symbol. But Onibaba makes its way around such heavy-handedness with ferociously committed performances and cinematographer Kyomi Kuroda's striking use of its setting. It has an unusual but effective score by Hikaru Hayashi that blends such disparate elements as taiko drums and jazz saxophones.