Kon Ichikawa: Politics and Desire

Conflagration (Directed by Kon Ichikawa)

In a career extending from the mid-1930s to the mid-2000s, Kon Ichikawa directed almost 80 films that ranged widely in genre, form, and tone. He has made ferociously humanist war films (The Burmese Harp, Fires on the Plain) and light-hearted domestic comedies (Being Two Isn’t Easy); formalist documentaries (Tokyo Olympiad) and extravagant period pieces (An Actor’s Revenge); his celebrated adaptations of famous Japanese novels such as Enjo and The Makioka Sisters earned him a reputation as a “deadpan sophisticate”(Pauline Kael) with an elegant compositional style, venomous wit, and narrative daring, but he was also a crafty master of populist entertainments.

The problems of apprehension and evaluation posed by the diversity and magnitude of Ichikawa’s oeuvre are compounded by other factors, notably the formidable influence of his wife and scenarist, Natto Wada, whose withdrawal from writing his scripts in the mid-1960s marked a turning point in his career; and the difficulties he encountered with the studios, who occasionally punished his failures and transgressions by assigning him dubious projects, or hired him only on “salvage operations.” While often referred to as a link between the “golden age” of Japanese cinema and the New Wave of the ’60s, Ichikawa has rarely been given his due as an innovator, even though his experiments with formal elements (the CinemaScope frame, the tonalities of black and white and colour, the graphic design of compositions, the use of freeze frames, masking, flash cutaways), with unconventional registers of dialogue and acting, and with subjective or surreal imagery are among the most daring and influential in postwar Japanese cinema.

In the following excerpt from an interview with Joan Mellen from 1972 Kon Ichikawa discusses his influences as a filmmaker and the political dimension to his films.

Q: How did you start making films?

A: When I was a youth it was the time of the Western film world’s so-called renaissance. There were so many great European and American films. They had a great impact on the Japanese. Japanese then began to pursue filmmaking seriously. This influenced me considerably.

Q: Which European and American films or directors most affected you?

A: I should mention the names of filmmakers who moved me very much rather than individual titles. Among them, in America, Charlie Chaplin stands out, as does William Wellman. In France René Clair. Nor can I forget Sternberg and Lubitsch.

Q: Why have Japanese filmmakers been so interested in historical themes and period films?

A: I don’t think Japanese films lean particularly toward the jidai-geki, or costume drama. Some people are interested in episodes of a certain era, but I would not want to make the distinction between jidai-geki and gendai-geki. To me they are the same. If I may add my opinion, films which have modern themes and modern implications should not be simply classified as jidai-geki, even if they are set before the Meiji era. They are indeed modern films although they may take the form of costume plays.

Q: You don’t think there are more historical films made in Japan than in the United States, although we do have the "Western", which may be thought of as similar to the jidai-geki?

A: We probably have a few more and it may have some significance, in my case for one. It is true of course that there are more jidai-geki made here than gendai-geki. You see film is an art which involves the direct projection of the time in which we live. It is a difficult point to state clearly, but my general feeling is that Japanese filmmakers are somewhat unable to grasp contemporary society. In your country, there seem to be many more dramatic current themes to portray. To render something into film art we really need to understand thoroughly what we want to describe. Unable to do this, many of us go back to history and try to elucidate certain themes which have implications for modern society.

Q: Is it because Japanese society is undergoing great political and social change at the present time?

A: Yes, that is correct.

Q: Are you interested in the theme of political apathy or indifference in the Kogarashi Monjiro stories?

A: Yes, the protagonist is an outlaw and a loner, like an "isolated wold". He is like the character in many Westerns. He is always anti-establishment.

Q: Do you suggest through this character that political action is fruitless, especially in the sense that an isolated individual attempting to do away with evil would find it impossible?

A: You might say that in terms of the political implications, although the political element is not the main theme. I am much more interested in the search for what defines human nature.

Q: In general would you say that you are more interested in psychological aspects than political?

A: Yes, generally so...

Q: What aspect of the original novel, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, were you interested in when you made Enjo?

A: In this film, I wanted to show the poverty in Japan.

Q: Who wanted to show the poverty especially, you or Mishima?

A: No, I.

Q: Is it a material or spiritual poverty?

A: I started from the economic and naturally pursued the spiritual also, because it is the story of man. The economic side represents sixty per cent and the spirital forty percent.

Q: Doesn’t this indicate a strong political element in your words?

A: Only for this film in which spiritual poverty is caused by economic poverty. Usually I don’t consider myself a politically minded director. When I am making a film, I don’t think of the political side of the film very much; it is not the main thing.

Q: Maybe political is the wrong word. By "political" I mean social consciousness, the relationship between the individual and society, not in the sense of political parties.

A: Then yes, that is important to my work. I am both aware of and concerned with social consciousness.

Q: Is there any similarity between your private Mizushima in Harp of Burma and Goichi Mizoguchi in Enjo?

A: They represent the youth in Japan. In the case of Mizushima the time was the middle of the war, and with Goichi it was just after the war. In this sense, both whether a soldier or not, represent Japanese youth.

Q: What is the origin of their disillusionment with the world? Are they each disillusioned about in a general way? Although their behaviour is, of course, different: one leaves the world to become a Buddhist monk and decides never to return to Japan and Goichi in Enjo burns down one of the most famous shrines in Japan.

A: Both are very young, and both are in search of something. Neither knows exactly what he is after, as they are still young. Both thrust themselves against the thick wall of reality and disillusionment trying to find out what they desire.

Q: As in the burning of the temple. What do they desire?

A: Truth.

Q: Is it the truth of themselves or of the world?

A: The truth of their own lives.

Q: Is the meaning they seek in their lives similar to that of Watanabe in Kurosawa’s Ikiru? Watanabe of course is an old man.

A: Possibly so. I can say it is close. It depends on the viewer’s interpretation.

Q: What is the statement about the nature of war that you are making in Fires on the Plain?

A: War is an extreme situation which can change the nature of man. For this reason, I consider it to be the the greatest sin.

Q: Do you use a social situation like war as a device to explore the human character? The social situation would be a means of showing what the human being is capable of – as in Tamura’s cannibalism, homicide, or the massacre in the film – as opposed to showing what happens in a society that leads to war?

A: I use the situation of war partly for this reason, but also to show the limits within which a moral existence is possible.

Q: Why do you have Private Tamura die at the end?

A: I let him die. In the original novel he survives to return to Japan, enters a mental institution, and lives there. I thought he should rest peacefully in the world of death. The death was my salvation to him.

Q: What he saw made him unable to continue to live in this world?

A: Yes, he couldn’t live in this world any longer after that. This is my declaration of total denial of war, total negation of war.

Q: In Alone in Pacific you seem to be saying that determination is important, not what you do, nor the nature of the act.

A: Yes. That was my precise conception.

Q: Isn’t what we do important? Wouldn’t you say that there is some distintion between doing some useful thing and voyaging alone on the pacific?

A: No, no difference.

Q: In Japanese films and in yours in particular, much more so than in Western films, there seem to be mixtures of styles or rather varied methods of filmmaking which are combined sometimes even within a single film. Many of your films, and those of Oshima and Shindo for example, are so completely different from one work to the next. Is this a special characteristic of the Japanese film? I am thinking in particular of your segment of A Woman’s Testament.

A: [Laughs] Do you think so! Probably you are examining the films in great detail! We don’t see this particularly. I believe that expression should be free, so this notion may affect the fact that you have just described. But I am never conscious of differentiating my methods or that I have one single special style. All depends on the story or the drama on which I am working.

Q: This seems to be something unique about the Japanese film. In American films one director’s works are generally similar, especially among the older directors.

A: I think each should differ according to what is being expressed. As I am Ichikawa and no one else, even when I try to change the style according to the theme there is always some similarity from one film to the next. Right now I am working with an Italian director, Pasolini. I have really been influenced by him. I consider him one of the greatest filmmakers today. Do you know his work?

Q: Which films of Pasolini do you admire the most?

A: Oedipus Rex, Medea, The Decameron, The Gospel According to St. Mathew, Teorema. I consider Pasolini the finest director making films today. Among American directors I was impressed with Peter Fonda, not with his Easy Rider, but with The Hired Hand. He seems to be very young, yet he has a very good grasp of his subject. He understands love so beautifully. How old is he?

Q: He is about thrity-five. Whom do you admire among the younger Japanese directors?

A: None among the young ones. I don’t know any of their films.

Q: How about among the older ones?

A: Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, of course.

Q: In connection with Mizoguchi’s Oharu I visited the Rakanji Temple in Tokyo. Didn’t he film one of the main scenes there?

A: But it could be that he made that movie in Kyoto. Is Oharu the American title? The title in Japanese is Saikaku Ichidai Onna. You know, there are several Rakanjis.

Q: Is there a contradiction in the fact that you seem to praise the family system in Ototo (Her Brother) but attack it in Bonchi? Or were you criticizing the matriarchal family in particular in Bonchi?

A: "Attack" is a strong word, but yes, I have criticized the family system in Ototo and yes, in Bonchi I attack the matriarchy. Ototo takes place in the Taisho era, before the war, about forty years ago, but today we still have much the same problem in our family system. I hold the opinion that each family should be accustomed to respecting the individuality of every member. This is what I wanted to say.

Q: What is your viewpoint in Hakai (The Outcast)?

A: The theme is racial discrimination. Japanese discriminate against burakumin. Originally when the Koreans emigrated to Japan, they brought their slaves with them; these were segregated and called burakumin.

Q: Were you then treating the great discrimination against the Koreans by the Japanese?

A: I think all human beings should be equal.

Q: Could you say something about how you used the visual details of the architecture in Enjo to reveal the psychology of the boy?

A: Yes, I sought to do this. This beautiful structure was simply nothing but old decayed timber, no more than that. The boy didn’t think so at first, but he gradually realized it.

Q: What is the relationship bewteen his feeling about himself and his feeling about the building?

A: Let me add this. It doesn’t have to be the Golden Pavilion. It can be any one of the so-called great monuments in our history. They are so fine. Nobody questioned their greatness because many generations were taught to revere them. Well, in actuality some people think the particular monument, in this case the Golden Pavilion, is great, but some think it is not. Varying opinions should be accepted because excellence is solely dependent upon the viewer’s conception.

Q: Does he hate the building and burn it down as an act of self-hatred?

A: Yes, he hated himself and destroyed himself.

Q: The building represented everything which oppressed him?

A: Yes, that expresses it.

Q: Is that why people are shown as very small and the building huge in some scenes? They are individuals very vulnerable to and unable to control outside influences which dominate them, of which the Kinkakuji stands as a symbol.

A: Yes, that’s right. One further thing, I wish to stress is that Goichi was handicapped. He stutters and cannot express himself well and in a sense he closes himself off from society. He has a sense of inferiority in relation to that magnificent building and he suffers from his isolation. I myself did not think the Golden Pavilion so great or beautiful a structure. I may be wrong but my point here is that the presence of this great structure does not secure the well-being of human beings around it, or make them happy.

An Actor’s Revenge and a Director’s Triumph

An Actor’s Revenge (Directed by Kon Ichikawa)

Kon Ichikawa is likely the least recognised and the least well understood among Japanese filmmakers who garner worldwide respect. The first of his pictures to gain worldwide distribution was The Burmese Harp (1956), which depicted the colourful native music of Burma. In 1959, Fires on the Plain, a moving World War II drama, also took advantage of this new distribution outlet. Other titles with international distribution in the 1960s were The Key (1959), Alone on the Pacific (1962), and An Actor's Revenge (1963). 

While Ichikawa's films lack the evident integrity of Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Kurosawa, on the surface, their sheer diversity reveals an underlying unity. Although everyone recognises Ichikawa's technical prowess, he has had to labour under more difficult circumstances than the other masters of Japanese film. Several projects (including one of his most renowned, An Actor's Revenge) were placed on him by the studio as a punishment for the financial failure of his more personal efforts. However, he was able to imprint his own personality on many works. Ichikawa categorised his films into "bright" and "dark". 

However, as most critics have emphasised his diversity, it is worth noting those aspects of Ichikawa's filmmaking that appear over again. His visual style was influenced by his early interests in painting and animation training. Ichikawa's use of manga-like storyboards, his preference for site work over studio shoots, and his own creation of sets, as well as his talents in makeup artistry, composing soundtracks, and cinematography. The approach to absolute control is similar to that of the cartoonist, and he made his debut in the cinema industry in 1933 as an assistant animator. One may see the influence of cartoons and painting in his career in the artificial staging used in such films as Ten Dark Women (1961) and An Actor's Revenge, where the style of film noir is heightened to mimic manga.

An Actor’s Revenge is set in the rarified realm of nineteenth-century kabuki theatre and chronicles a female impersonator's quest to revenge his parents' murders at the hands of a trio of unscrupulous men. Ichikawa subverts melodramatic norms, bringing the hero's wounded psyche to life in startling widescreen arrangements saturated with vivid colour, pop-art inspirations, and painstaking choreography. Anchored by a beautifully androgynous performance by Kazuo Hasegawa repeating a part he portrayed on-screen three decades previously, An Actor's Revenge is a stunning investigation of how art's illusions collide with reality. 

When we encounter Yukinojo for the first time, his group has travelled from Osaka to perform on the Edo stage. From the balcony, he overhears two of his three intended targets. Later, the emotional actor confides in his mentor, Kikunojo (Chusha Ichikawa), that he wants to develop a relationship with the men and, rather than just disposing of them, wants to torment them until they go insane and suffer like his parents did. 

Hasegawa also plays a secondary part in the film, as a thief who chooses to assist Yukinojo in obtaining his vengeance, a guy who, as one of the characters comments, looks a lot like Yukinojo. 

The film's aesthetic never settles on one genre. There are sequences where Ichikawa frames them securely with lines of windows and doors, yet others, particularly the ones with no set location, seem to live on an eternal stage, surrounded by floating, enveloping darkness or mist. The use of light is bold and very theatrical even in scenarios that take place outside the theatre. Conversations are often observed by an “audience” of observers. 

The flowing, dream-like story is echoed in the delicate portrayal of Hasegawa as Yukinojo, who seems delicate and dreamy when compared to his villainous portrayal as Yamataro, who is earthier and funny. Yukinojo is like the theatre itself; as he fades away at the end of the play, his audience takes away memories of his performance, which lingers in their minds.

By the time Yukinojo's scheme is realised, An Actor's Revenge has devolved into a terrifying examination of a mind falling apart. Though Ichikawa was known for his active dislike of kabuki, the complex layers of actor and audience relations call attention to their role in both film and theatre. An Actor’s Revenge is more experimental than anything Ichikawa had created before and is attempting much more than a straightforward vengeance story. Rather, An Actor's Revenge is a contemplative look at destiny and the numerous masks we wear in order to get what we want, even if it is something genuinely dreadful.

In the following essay, Michael Sragow elaborates on the role of theatre and performance, in Ichikawa’s film.

An Actor’s Revenge, the English name given to the 1963 Japanese film Yukinojo henge (Yukinojo the Phantom), is the perfect title for a killer blend of cinema and theater. The director, Kon Ichikawa, transforms a standard period revenge plot, rooted in the cross-dressing kabuki theater of the 1830s, into a hypnotic prism that generates fresh colors as he holds each facet to the light. The palette of the film is psychedelic: the opening performance explodes in red, pink, gold, white, and purple. The kabuki proscenium, letterboxed against the darkness, looks wider than widescreen—it’s an incandescent ribbon that tests the limits of the frame. And in Ichikawa’s hands, even the shape of the screen seems changeable. He breaks up the space with exhilarating audacity, whether by adopting an artful version of picture-in-picture or literally spotlighting his characters (in the theater or in the street) or dissolving boundaries so that a snow-blanketed stage stretches out in all directions like a vast Arctic landscape. The story runs the gamut from farce, soap opera, and action-packed chanbara all the way to heart-crushing tragicomedy. The supporting characters cover the emotional spectrum. They can be satirically rapacious and grotesque yet still transfix us with their pathos and terror.

If any movie requires a protean protagonist to pull everything together, it’s this one. Yukinojo (Kazuo Hasegawa) fits the bill. Orphaned at age seven, trained as an onnagata (a male performer of female roles), and schooled in martial arts, Yukinojo has become a star whose soft face and physique belie his physical strength and steel will. His experience and expertise do more than make him a top performer; they also put him in a position to observe Japanese culture and society, high and low, with ruthless, flexible objectivity. As Yukinojo plots vengeance against the three powerful, greedy men who drove his mother and father to suicide, he analyzes their ambitions and sets them at loggerheads. Being an actor and thus déclassé, close to “the people,” he knows how dangerous it is for big shots to wheel and deal in basic commodities like rice as the masses face famine in the turbulent Tenpo era, beset by droughts, fires, and floods. Warehouses become targets for hungry mobs. This movie is an aesthete’s delight that’s also socially aware. As a pickpocket at the theater remarks in one scene, “People spend more when times are hard.”

The film’s cinematic reach stems from the peerless range of Ichikawa, who continues to defy critical categorization a decade after his death in 2008. He made An Actor’s Revenge during his peak period, which began with the antiwar fable The Burmese Harp (1956) and ended with the epic documentary Tokyo Olympiad (1965). Studio executives at Daiei intended to punish the director for his costly techniques on Conflagration (1958), Bonchi (1960), and The Outcast (1962) by saddling him with this assignment. After all, it was a remake of a trilogy made by Teinosuke Kinugasa (1953’s Gate of Hell) between 1934 and ’36; it even showcases the same star, Hasegawa, ostensibly in his three hundredth production. Ichikawa, though, made this old chestnut of a tale bloom. With the help of his preferred screenwriter—his wife, Natto Wada—Ichikawa made the project an excuse to go all-in creatively, with a whirling narrative and eye-popping beauty. His virtuoso moviemaking melds stage magic and the uncanny while exploring psychological and gender role-playing in a time of chaos.

Ichikawa and Wada’s storytelling has an ultramodern briskness and edge. As the main attraction of the kabuki company, Yukinojo, born in Nagasaki and raised in Osaka, conquers Edo (later renamed Tokyo) on the troupe’s first appearance in the capital city. The movie begins on opening night, which draws two of the bad guys to the box seats: Kawaguchiya (Saburo Date), an ex-clerk, now an ambitious trader; and Sansai Dobe (Ganjiro Nakamura, who had recently starred in Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds and The End of Summer), formerly a Nagasaki magistrate, now a member of the shogun’s retinue. (The shogun, Japan’s military ruler, controlled the country’s entire feudal structure and government, up to and including the mikado, or emperor.) Dobe’s daughter, Lady Namiji, the shogun’s favorite concubine—played by Ayako Wakao, who had appeared in Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1956 swan song Street of Shame and alongside Nakamura a few years later in Floating Weeds—also attends the show, and instantly falls for Yukinojo’s peculiar masculine-feminine charms. None of them knows Yukinojo’s true identity. Since the onnagata wears women’s clothes and subtle makeup even during his downtime, it’s unlikely that the men will recognize him as the boy they orphaned back in Nagasaki. Yukinojo, on the other hand, knows all about them, as well as the third villain, Hiromiya (Eijiro Yanagi), a rich merchant. Ichikawa reduces the rest of the first-night audience to a blur, then outlines Dobe, Kawaguchiya, and Namiji in the actor’s vision like a group portrait in a rearview mirror. Yukinojo confides in voice-over that he will use Namiji to sunder and destroy Hiromiya and the other two.

Yukinojo’s enemies consider theater people amoral members of the demimonde. Still, it’s a staggering insult when Kawaguchiya offers Yukinojo lifelong protection in exchange for his amorous services. Namiji’s father, Dobe, invites Yukinojo to their home, hoping that she’ll tire of him after one or two visits. All the while, Kawaguchiya bets that if he can put Namiji in his debt by setting up a long-term affair between her and the actor, he can use Namiji’s sway with the shogun to expand his own wealth and prestige. As he leads the way to her room, he thinks he’s the one toying with Yukinojo.

But Yukinojo himself has determined to exploit Namiji’s crush and snake his way into Dobe’s household. Again and again, Yukinojo takes advantage of anyone who underestimates him. Extreme weather has produced catastrophic famines, generating riots against rice merchants who hoard their stores. Realizing that Kawaguchiya has tried to corner the market in rice, Yukinojo advises his third target, Hiromiya, to bring his stash of the grain into the city and unload it. When the unholy trio are weakened and at one another’s throats, Yukinojo pulls off two primal performances: impersonating his dead father for Kawaguchiya, and recreating his mother’s suicide for Dobe, thus shattering his antagonists’ confidence and sanity. Here, the director’s careful preparation and expressionistic masterstrokes of lighting, staging, and composition—for instance, the shadow Yukinojo casts as he plays the part of his mother possesses a life, and death, of its own—take us into a phantom zone as eerie as anything in Shakespeare, Tarkovsky, or the Superman franchise.

What Yukinojo brings down on his foes really is an actor’s revenge, dizzyingly dramatic in its form, surgically perceptive in its manipulation of movers and shakers too vain to recognize their own weaknesses. And Ichikawa’s giddy, experimental movie is itself an auteur’s revenge on his studio, because he treats the timeworn material as an opportunity rather than a punishment. Until the tragic drama of its climax, the movie remains inventive, amusing, antisentimental, and playfully meta about almost everything and everyone, including the downtrodden and even the hero himself. Yukinojo inspires passionate debate among theatergoers who buy cheap tickets for standing room (the equivalent of “the gods” as seen in Children of Paradise or the balcony in The Red Shoes). An Actor’s Revenge doesn’t idealize the popular audience, or the dirt-poor, either. It’s frightening to see desperate men riot for rice; they recall the cutthroat gangs in Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, released just a couple of years earlier. Thugs lurk in the film’s plentiful shadows and around each corner of its stylized sets. Yukinojo shocks even himself with his cold-bloodedness. He doesn’t strike immediately: he waits for the moments that will produce maximum emotional torture. He takes actions that result in the death of an innocent woman who genuinely loves him.

Hasegawa’s performance is extraordinary from beginning to end. Yukinojo’s onstage postures and gestures, generally soft and elegant, are sometimes definite and passionate. They’re always expressive, often of two things at once—the emotions he’s acting out and the ones simmering beneath the surface. It’s significant that Hasegawa was in his fifties when he made An Actor’s Revenge. Watching this weathered, stocky man play Yukinojo is a bit like watching the burly Shintaro Katsu play the blind swordsman Zatoichi. His age and bulk humanize a mythic character, putting the focus on Yukinojo’s intensity and powers of suggestion. Ichikawa is so comfortable in the world he has created that he can be irreverent about the time-honored kabuki theater and the tradition of the onnagata. He allows us to laugh at and with the tomboy thief Ohatsu (Fujiko Yamamoto) when she says she finds Yukinojo creepy. But Yukinojo’s art and presence are potent enough to turn skeptics into converts. Hasegawa interprets Yukinojo’s craft as an elevated form of dissembling. In close-ups, we see from his eyes that he has more going on in his head than whatever he’s miming, dancing, or reciting in the moment. Offstage, he wraps himself in his onnagata guise as if in a cloak of privacy. Whenever a former fellow student from martial-arts school, consumed with jealousy, challenges Yukinojo to a duel in the street—something he does repeatedly—Hasegawa snaps into a fierce, magnetic concentration. Ichikawa’s focus on these galvanizing transformations stokes the film as much as do his nonstop innovation and imagistic dazzle.

In the volatile culture of the film’s setting, the ambiguity of Yukinojo’s gender is an asset. His ability to put a man’s muscle behind an onnagata’s demure composure spellbinds the second female lead, Ohatsu. Why wouldn’t it? Most males she sees are either callow youths or vicious bastards. Ironically, Ohatsu plays the reckless seducer with Yukinojo, while Namiji, the courtesan, acts like a blushing ingenue with him. Yukinojo’s sake-drinking sessions with Namiji are so tender they might be called love scenes. Both clad in elegant kimonos in different shades of purple, the two sip from tiny silver cups and embrace cheek to cheek, as the strings on the soundtrack play a bittersweet romantic theme that would suit one of Sirk’s, Minnelli’s, or Hitchcock’s melodramas. (The gleefully eclectic score also includes an amped-up version of traditional kabuki music, and jazzy interludes and staccato riffs for ruminative moments and action scenes.) Yukinojo doesn’t take an aggressive, conventionally masculine role when he woos Namiji. He’s modest, at times coquettish. And Namiji, though sensitive and gentle, is no shrinking violet. Ichikawa cuts away just after they press their bodies together as if ready to make love.

The director establishes their apparent emotional parity but never lets us forget that Yukinojo controls the power dynamic with his secret agenda. As a revenge artist, the actor has chosen the ideal path to annihilating her father: Dobe’s life will be hell without the apple of his eye and his sole source of power at court. But Namiji gets to “Yuki,” as she calls him, and to the audience, too, so we understand why the onnagata must seek some sweeping expiation for fatally exploiting her.

Adding to the movie’s gender-role merry-go-round is the general perception around the city’s underworld that Ohatsu, lovely and handy with a gun or knife, isn’t traditionally “feminine” or sympathetic enough to be a desirable mate. The only guy’s guy who can turn Ohatsu’s head is her fellow cutpurse Yamitaro, who operates like an urban Robin Hood without a band of merry men. As he did decades before, Hasegawa plays Yamitaro as well as Yukinojo, and in this part he exudes a gruff, warm charm. It is comical and touching that Yamitaro is attracted to Yukinojo in ways he finds difficult to explain. At the end, he tells Ohatsu that he may give up banditry and girls and beg to become Yukinojo’s assistant. Ichikawa employs the dual casting wittily. It feels organically funny, not at all self-conscious, when Ohatsu tells Yamitaro that, in profile, he resembles Yukinojo.

Remarkably, Ichikawa’s moviemaking wizardry makes this spinning contraption of a film feel all of a piece. Each shot contains something marvelous—such as Yamitaro effortlessly scaling a wall like a figure from a Cocteau fairy tale (Ichikawa adored Cocteau), or Ohatsu popping out from a black nocturnal forest as a royal-blue horizon line streaks across the screen—or something devastating: say, a corpse hanging from a rope like an unstrung marionette. Of course, the film is more than a collection of flourishes. Ichikawa uses classic and contemporary materials to create his own elastic, personal aesthetic.

The filmmaker is perhaps best known today for the tough-minded nostalgia of his 1983 masterpiece The Makioka Sisters. There, he intimately and lyrically evokes the elegiac side of Junichiro Tanizaki’s novel about the fraying of an old Osaka merchant family as it confronts westernization. An Actor’s Revenge does something fundamentally different. It bristles with modernity while miraculously retaining the nuance of an art form that began in the sixteenth century. The director displays an old-time stage, illuminated, as Tanizaki once wrote, “by the meager light of candles and lanterns.” But that’s just a conceit. All the tools in Ichikawa’s studio contribute to his very 1960s light show. At the same time, he treats his star performer lovingly, like a master portrait artist preserving the illusions of gender.

Tanizaki hated the “vulgarity” of kabuki seen in bright Western stage light. (He favored the refinement and simplicity of Noh theater.) For him, the authentic Japanese sensibility rests on an appreciation of darkness. His book-length essay In Praise of Shadows celebrates, among other things, “the mystery of shadows,” “the secrets of shadows,” “the magic of shadows,” and “delight in shadows.” Yet that’s also the basis of the kaleidoscopic, sometimes “vulgar” beauty of An Actor’s Revenge. Working with breathtaking confidence and freedom, Ichikawa shapes both his interior and exterior action so that it always leaps out of darkness. He stages one fight primarily as the clash and clang of a blade and a dagger at night. Steel glints and slashes through the blackness. In another coup de cinéma, two constables try to lasso Yamitaro, and for a moment they snag one of his wrists (or does he grab the rope?). The lasso disappears into the night as if falling down a bottomless well. Shrouded in murk, the constables proceed, hand by hand, along the taut, tingling cable, only to discover that Yamitaro has tied it to a post. All these episodes work visually and viscerally. Ichikawa choreographs camera and actors for maximum punch.

In the movie’s ultimate poetic irony, a benshi (or narrator) tells us that Yukinojo, “the greatest female lead of his age,” the inspiration of so much life-or-death conflict and passion, fades from memory once he gives up the stage. The final shots depict the actor disappearing into the wild flora of a windswept plain. It’s as if Ichikawa is saying, like Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, “Our revels now are ended,” his actors “melted into air, into thin air.” The “gorgeous palaces” and “solemn temples”—the enigmas of sexuality and the moral vanities of justice—“dissolve, / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind.” The glory of An Actor’s Revenge is its infinite suggestiveness. Ichikawa, like Shakespeare, transforms a revenge saga about playacting into a profound masquerade about man’s, and woman’s, fate.

– An Actor’s Revenge and a Director’s Triumph. By Michael Sragow

For original article see here