Film Screening: Harakiri (Seppuku)

New 35mm print!

Introduction by Peter Grilli, President Emeritus of the Japan Society of Boston
Directed by Kobayashi Masaki.
With Nakadai Tatsuya, Ishihama Akira, Iwashita Shima.
Japan, 1962, 35mm, black & white, 133 minutes 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. (Description by Haden Guest, HFA)

For tickets & detailed information, please click here.

Special thanks: Jay Sakomoto, CEO; Meri Koyama, General Manager of Shochiku Theaters; Hosoda Hitomi, International Sales—Shochiku Co., Ltd.; Alexander Zahlten—East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard; Andrew Gordon—History, Harvard; Shigehisa Kuriyama, Director; Gavin Whitelaw, Executive Director; Stacie Matsumoto, Associate Director—Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard. Harvard Film Archive special film screenings co-sponsored by the Reischauer Institute

Harvard Film Archive special film screenings co-sponsored by the Reischauer Institute