ending was super exciting with one enemy and many, and the final battle was shocking.
Kihachi Okamoto's "The Sword of Doom" may strike an unsuspecting audience in a weird and violent way. The movie tells the story of a ranger who kills an unarmed old man for no reason, and finally falls into a rehearsal that looks like destroying the world: in the psychedelic, he fights with countless enemies in delusions and reality. The extreme and typified violence shown in this film, filmed in 1966, is the epitome of Japanese film circles at the time, and it deeply influenced Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone (Sergio Leone). ) And many other directors. You can simply use the cynical anti-hero trend that swept the world in the 1960s to interpret the film and speculate that it exhibits the same type of anti-heroism as Italian westerns, but this view is not entirely accurate. In any case, please remember that the novel "Big Buddha Ridge", born a year after the death of Emperor Meiji (the monarch who made Japan from a closed feudal country to a modern industrial country), became very popular as soon as it was published, and it is still popular today. Unabated. Okamoto’s religious-themed film is just the latest of many stage plays and adapted film versions of this mega-series.
The novel "Big Buddha Ridge" was first published in newspapers in 1913 and has been serialized for more than 30 years. The author Zhong Jieshan (1885–1944) had published 41 chapters before his death. Zhong Lijieshan is a part-time telephone operator and teaching assistant, who claims to be a believer of Dostoevsky and Victor Hugo, and has been greatly influenced by Christianity and socialism. During the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), he belonged to the peace camp, and in the 1930s and 1940s he stayed away from the cultural world kidnapped by the military regime. His novels are regarded as an expression of Mahayana Buddhism. Through the real behavior of the characters, especially the evil swordsman Ryunosuke, everything is nothing but cause and effect. The political background-various shadow groups sometimes fight for the rights of generals or advocate the revival of the royal family-is no different in Nakazato's worldview, because in his worldview the heroes' seemingly evil roads cannot be controlled. Dominate by yourself. In any case, Ryunosuke seems to be a character free from the author's control and living his own life. He is the embodiment of the "worship of evil", a symbol of this popular culture, "evil gives him almost absurd charm" (scholar C´cile Sakai). Ryunosuke is a typical image of a fallen angel in modern Japan. His unyielding and tough attitude towards the path of self arouses people's sympathy, even if that path leads to darkness.
When the novel was still in the serialization stage, the initial story was put on the stage. Later in 1935, two more (presumably lost) movies were released. The director included the Samurai Trilogy and the 1962 edition of the "Samurai Trilogy". "Chushingura" (Chushingura) is the famous Horishi Inagaki (Horishi Inagaki). After the war, "Great Buddha Ridge" was repeatedly remade, such as the trilogy directed by Kunio Watanabe in 1953, the trilogy directed by Tomu Uchida in 1957-59, and Kenji Misumi ( A trilogy directed by Kenji Misumi and Kazuo Mori in 1960-1961. The freeze frame at the end of Okamoto's version should not be regarded as the end, but should be a pause for a subsequent series that will never appear (including the protagonist's blindness and the easy-side support of the royal family). The jumps and unresolved story lines between the movie plots are easy to make the audience unfamiliar with the original feel puzzled, but it is not a problem for the audience familiar with the original storyline. Okamoto's shots replaced more coherent narratives with jumping clips, which may have been called "classic shots in the Great Bodhisattva Ridge".
This is not to say that the mystery of this movie mainly comes from the ignorance of Western audiences. The mystery of violence is as important to Nakamoto's novels as Okamoto's movies. Ryunosuke is both a hero and a villain, a demon and a bodhisattva, and Nakadai Tatsuya's fascinating performance perfectly visualizes the contradictions in the character: is he spontaneous or forced? In what sense did he choose his destiny? Sometimes he seemed to be a bystander of his own tragedy, intermittently heartache or gloomy happy, but unable to change everything that happened. His unique genre of swordsmanship-silent swordsmanship-is deduced by Nakadai Tatsuya with a peculiar negative trait. He seemed to stagger and retreat into his own world, as if his all fatal strikes were not made by the initiative, but achieved by abandoning the will. As far as the body language of the film industry in the 1960s is concerned, in the standing position of the noble swordsman Shimada played by Toshiro Mifune, Ryunosuke's posture also symbolizes a gloomy decadent manner, sinister and cunning.
A character in a movie pays too much attention to the form-relentlessly paying attention to the angle of attack, the movement of the feet, the pauses and the line of sight-it also exudes the beauty of form, which is a good saying. In an era marked by Akira Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood" and Masaki Kobayashi's "Harakiri", even the most common samurai movies are full of In the age of style, "Big Buddha Ridge" stands out with its strict and calligraphic style and photographic screen composition. It is like the orthodox quality of the samurai spirit shown in detail in the feature film-such as the duel with Fuminojo in the temple and the aftermath, Ryunosuke visits Shimada's Budokan, and Shimada solves Ryunosuke in the snow. The companions of the movie, as well as the world-shaking ending of the movie-can be shown in the extremely precise scene scheduling and the continuously changing camera movement.
Okamoto used to be Mikio Naruse's assistant, who was one of the famous guides in the era when a hundred flowers blossomed. Kihachi Okamoto is well-known for his war films ("The Longest Day in Japan" 1967, "Meat Bomb" 1968, "Blood Battle of Okinawa" 1971) and such as "Samurai" (1965), "Slash" (1968), "Red Hair" "(1969) historical film, he often created a humorous tone. Okamoto completed the filming of "Era of Murderers" in 1966, but the film was hidden by the company for a year. In fact, Toho was out of dissatisfaction with the overly personal "Era of Murders." Give him the guidance of "Great Bodhisattva Ridge". Okamoto is neither a passionate filmmaker like Akira Kurosawa nor an experimentalist like Kiyoshi Suzuki. Despite this, with the help of Murai Hiroshi’s superb photographic skills, Okamoto was able to be featured in "The Great Bodhisattva Ridge". Demonstrate the control that makes the film enduring. (Thanks to Sato's wonderful soundtrack, the film is also fascinating aurally.)
Some people might say that the "surface" of this movie is the "inside": if the evil soul reveals the evil sword, then the form and posture are the display of the turbulent dark tide. The immortal visual creativity of "Big Buddha Ridge" does not lie in the flashing pictures, but in the essence of the film. This kind of visual creativity culminates in the final massacre, in countless ways of killing people with swords. Here the posture is given life. The killing machine stumbling blindly in its own blood has turned into a kind of beast, a destructive creature. The visual beauty that is hard to ignore in this scene is inseparable from its terribleness. The protagonist's perversion controls the movie itself, and maybe we don't need the unsuccessful sequel that Okamoto did. What can truly surpass the freeze frame of a swordsman who is burning with anger and killing himself at the end of the film?
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