Speaking of the bamboo forest drama, Hu Jinquan's "The Chivalrous Woman" and Li Ang's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" are the most famous, and another Asian director Shinto Kanto's 1968 work "The Black Cat in the Kusano" also photographed the bamboo forest. Extreme. "The Black Cat in the Grass" is called his medieval trilogy together with "The Haunt" and "The Evil Party".
The Heian era in the movie is under war. General Gintoki is ordered to go outside the city to capture the evil monsters, but he discovers that the monsters are his mother and wife, who were raped and killed by a group of escaped samurai. After their death, they lingered and turned into ghosts, vowing to drink up the blood of the samurai. Gintoki had to kill them as a samurai, and finally he went crazy and died in a piece of snow.
The film uses the contradiction between man and ghost to show the class conflict between the samurai and the peasantry. Contrary to the image of the most respected samurai in the Japanese tradition, the samurai in Shinto Kanto's movies is not open and upright, and even screams and kills. At the beginning of the movie, the camera stared at an atrocity. The bamboo forest in the background was lush and dense, like a wall. We heard the screaming of insects and the rustling of the wind. The bamboo leaves were swayed by the wind, and there was a thatched hut. A group of samurai came out of the bamboo forest and broke into the scene, searching for food and women hungry. They broke into the house and confronted the two mistresses. The camera showed a close-up of the woman's face, then switched to a close-up of the face of one of the samurai, and then a distant view. The samurai rushed forward.
Kazuto Shinto always puts female characters in the most tragic environment, and the tragic fate of women runs through his film career. In "Black Cat in the Grass", they are destroyed by fate, and in "Miniatures" they are numb in shame. The beloved wife in "Beloved Wife Story" is the projection of the director's ideal female in his heart. In the movie, the heroine springs to death. The silk is exhausted, and finally sublimated in the tears of her husband.
Kazuto Shinto once witnessed the decline of his family. During his childhood, his mother had been dealing with creditors. His eldest sister married away for the bride and his second sister worked as a nurse in the radiation zone of Hiroshima... From his perspective, Women are the biggest victims of extreme poverty. This kind of respect for women runs through all of Shinto's works.
The process of the monster killing the samurai is a counterattack from the women. In the illusioned cabin, the daughter seduced the samurai and bite off the samurai's throat, while the mother danced in the form of a cat mimicking the cat. The expressionistic audio-visual style enhanced this ritual sense of revenge.
This is also a revenge for the peasant against the samurai. Kanato Shinto also has a deep affection for the peasants. In the war, the samurai gets everything, but the land is ravaged. "Naked Island", Kaeto Shinto’s most outstanding and internationally acclaimed work, focuses the camera on the farmers’ three meals a day, birth, old age, sickness and death, making people feel like a throat after watching; "Children of the Atomic Bomb" tries to evoke the bloody pain caused by war The conscience of society...Kanto Shinto resigned from Shochiku in 1950, and Kosaburo Yoshimura established the Modern Film Association and started independent production. Many of his films are not popular, but the humanitarian spirit contained in the films is precisely the greatness of Kanto Shinto.
Many people regard Shinto Kanto as a realist director, but "The Black Cat in Kusano" is very expressionistic. The simplified set, the bright and dark lights, and the bamboo forest with clear lines all bring a strong visual effect, and the rapid drumbeat makes the movie nervous.
The strongest passage appears at the end of the film, when Yin Shi and the monster face-to-face confrontation.
In the fierce and rapid editing, the camera moved to a close-up of the mother's face. The mother bit a hand that was chopped off by the son, and her eyes were tearful. Yin Shi yelled "Mother", then yelled "Youkai" in pain to correct himself, and slashed the sword at his mother. Kanto Shinto even used a wire stunt here to keep his mother in an ascending state when he escaped. Yin Shi chased after him and returned to the bamboo forest from the heavily guarded palace without warning, and flashed back to the picture of Yin Shi and his wife hanging in the bamboo forest, prolonging the moment when he gradually realized the error. In the end, the exhausted Yin Shi fell into the snow, and the strange drumbeat rang again, and several cats cried like weeping.
The most ingenious is the use of bamboo space. On the one hand, as a warrior under Gen Raiguang, Yin Shi had the obligation to slay demons and demons; on the other hand, he wanted to be a good son and husband and be responsible to his family. The imperial palace is a more public space, more like the source of evil. In the imperial palace, he saw samurai enjoy wealth and women, and he was confident about destroying evil monsters in the bamboo forest. The transformed hut is a more private space, where Yin Shi's integrity and conscience are awakened. The bamboo forest acts as a passage between the two spaces, a lustful entity hated by women.
In the end Yin Shi died. The movie did not explain whether it was the monster that gave him the last blow, but I think Yin Shi is like Oedipus, a hero in the sense of tragedy. His death is like Oedipus's own eyes, another surrender of mankind under the torture of fate.
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