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Harakiri
(Seppuku)
New 35mm print
With Nakadai Tatsuya, Ishihama Akira, Iwashita Shima.
Japan, 1962, 35mm, black & white, 133 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
Print source: HFA
Among the newest additions to the Shochiku Centennial Collection is a stunning new 35mm print, created at Imagica—the renowned photochemical lab in Osaka, Japan—of Harakiri, one of several masterworks directed by firebrand director Kobayashi Masaki (1916-1996) during the 1960s.
Nakadai Tatsuya sets into motion the slow-burning narrative of Kobayashi’s powerful jidaigeki epic as a wraith-like ronin who appears at the compound of the local ruling samurai clan with an unusual request; to commit seppuku, assisted ritualized suicide, in order to end his drifting life. Once inside Nakadai also reveals his equally unusual request to recount a story to his executioners before his death, unfolding a series of increasingly revelatory flashbacks that steadily build the tension until the film’s explosive finale. Harakiri counts among the greatest black-and-white widescreen films of postwar Japanese cinema, with mesmerizing imagery sculpted by master cinematographer Miyajima Yoshio (and Kobayashi regular, filming The Human Condition and Kwaidan among others) who uses the format to make dynamically expressive use of traditional Japanese architecture by allowing the built frames-within-frames to embody the rigid power-structure so fiercely critiqued, and in the end literally destroyed, by Kobayashi’s powerful anti-samurai film. Pioneering composer Takemitsu Toru in turn offers a stark and riveting score that uses period-Japanese instruments to percussively accentuate the film’s haunting austerity and purpose. – Haden Guest