“That’s the kind of window faces look in at!”

Still from Mario Bava’s BLACK SABBATH (yes, that’s where the band got their name from).

Reading from right to left (I’m still in Japanese mode):

Boris Karloff IS Kurt Vonnegut Jnr, somehow.

A Scary Child seemingly strayed in from VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (”You’re not thinking of atomic energy. You’re thinking of…a brick wall!”)

Some woman.

I love how they all have totally different lighting, and seem out of scale with each other and totally disconnected, like paper cut-outs. Which is actually possible: Bava would use pictures cut from magazines to stand in for anything he couldn’t afford for real, and he was such a great special effects man, and his regular images were so uncanny anyway, that the trick was never obvious. I think, though, that here he has managed the even greater trick of making a real, simple image, look impossible and wrong.

Another trick of scale: Tim Lucas’ magisterial new book, MARIO BAVA ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK –

– is so vast that you can never open it at the same page twice.

– contains secret passages, unread by human eye for centuries.

– reproduces Bava’s trademark hues, Disney Blue and Emerald City Green, with the intensity of madness.

Barbara Steele (she of the fifty-foot eyeballs) was purportedly tricked into believed Bava had invented a device that enabled him to film THROUGH an actor’s clothing, to capture magical images of Stealth Nudity. If we were to train this Nude Lens on Mr. Lucas’ book, we would instantly pierce the Veil of Reality and plunge headlong into the kaleidoscopic ghost-vortex known only as The Olderness.

Dr. James Xavier: I’m blind to all but a tenth of the universe.
Dr. Sam Brant: My dear friend, only the gods see everything.
Dr. James Xavier: My dear doctor, I’m closing in on the gods.

(From X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES, Roger Corman)

Order Tim Lucas’s mega-magnus opus from www.bavabook.com

More Masaki.

 

In Masaki Kobayashi’s SAMURAI REBELLION (196 he starts off with a lesson in montage, reminiscent of Eisenstein, where a simple scene is made intensely dramatic just by being splintered into Ecstatic Fragments.

Here is the blade of a sword.

Here is the man who holds the hilt.

Here is a straw effigy, his target.

The sword.

The man.

Now, onlookers…

We draw in on the straw figure, remorselessly.

We’re all in a field!

CHOP!

“One cannot be betrayed if one has no people.”

Seppuku (AKA Hara Kiri). 1962. Directed by Masaki Kobayashi. Shochiku Co. Ltd.

Masaki Kobayashi (Yes, Pete Postlethwaite’s character in THE USUAL SUSPECTS, quoted above, seems to be named after him) was the nearest you could get to a conscience objector in WWII Japan and still live. Conscripted into the army he refused to fight or be promoted to a rank above private. When he started making films he brought with him a fierce sense of anti-authoritarianism, a contempt for the status quo, and a lust for justice.

Geometric compositions present the clean, rational panels of Lord Iyi’s manor. An ordered world. We drift down perfectly-squared off corridors like the phantom protagonist of LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD. But in a back room lurks a scary suit of armour in smoky backlight, like a creature from Bava’s BLACK SUNDAY.

The armour is Japanese society at the start of the Edo era: fierce, martial, sturdy, and filled only with an inhuman vacuum. “The samurai code of honour is an empty façade,” insists Tatsuya Nakadai, our protagonist, as he waits for death. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing anybody could get away with saying in an Akira Kurosawa movie, although the writer of this one originated RASHOMON, the film that introduced Kurosawa and Japanese cinema to the west.

Scene-setting: Japan is swarming with ronin, masterless samurai, and they roam around begging for money and threatening to chop themselves up if they don’t get it. The nobility is sick of this and has started to call the ronins’ bluffs, forcing them to commit seppuku as promised. Nakadai arrives at Iyi Manor apparently quite determined to follow through on his suicidal mission, but just as we reach the point where it seems likely to be a very short movie (half an hour in) the plot starts jumping and jiving in unexpected ways.

For Nakadai is on a mission not of self-immolation, but of revenge. The House of Iyi has destroyed, in roundabout but unutterably cruel fashion, his daughter, son-in-law and grandson. The film is merciless in coldly laying out the facts of his case. Shots of a sleeping toddler coated with spray-on sweat make us feel like spectators at a cot-death. And while Nakadai has nothing left to live for, he’s determined not to cross to the next world without righting at least some of the wrongs done to his loved ones.

I’m not much of a one for depressing films, but movies like this, and Kon Ichikawa’s FIRES ON THE PLAIN, seem able to go into very dark places indeed and emerge with such beautiful images and feats of narrative that the effect is curiously uplifting and energizing. A Man is going to be Destroyed. He is going to cause considerable collateral damage on his way out. And all trace of this is going to be erased from history. Nothing will be learned. But we, the lucky viewers, will know all about it…

Tatsuya Nakadai is someone I have liked, but underrated. He seemed like the poor man’s Toshiro Mifune in RAN, where Mifune would have run amok and made the film his own.

Tosh entered movies after being demobbed, aimed for the camera department and missed, finding himself, to his own considerable embarrassment, the greatest leading man in the country. He covered his discomfort by attacking every role with maximum ferocity: there seemed no part he couldn’t convey by shrieking and glowering. A neurotic braggart? Easy, just yell and prance around. A quiet, dignified businessman? Glare and bark until pink smoke issues from the celluloid. A wicked bandit? Scream like a maniac. A vanquished nobleman? Scream louder. He could shoulder-charge his way into any character, and the gusto always worked.

Nakadai lacked Mifune’s endless reserves of wanton mania, but in SEPPUKU we see what he had instead: a voice as deep as Mifune’s (I well remember my friend Kiyo explaining, “Japanese audiences like their leading men…extremely masculine.”); a sinewy, tightly-coiled physicality; a stare that bores through the lens, the audience, the fabric of the World.

There is much talk of the World here: how you can’t fight IT, can’t change IT, IT is what IT is. All of which Kobayashi might agree with, but he finds it intolerable. Whatever the cost, whatever the futility of the struggle, we must defy the World, embodied in that spooky damn suit of armour, sitting smugly behind the scenes as death sentences are doled out like sweeties. This film is a cry of rage at that malevolent tinpot general.

Kobayashi, who made the lovely KWAIDAN in wondrously lambent colour, here applies his considerable stylistic verve to widescreen black-and-white. SEPPUKU has the classic flatness and geometrical precision of Japanese graphic art, and at other times it goes into pop-art sixties expressionism, all canted angles and crash zooms, like an episode of BATMAN with added evisceration by bamboo stick. The clashing tricks are a perfect match for the narrative’s dizzying spins and reverses which deliver the required tragic inevitability while provoking spluttering cries of “What fucking next?” every twenty minutes.

Here is a more compassionate use of bamboo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQgXccbxHbM