Film Screening: Double Suicide (Shinju Ten no Amijima)

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Shinoda’s best films find their stylistic and narrative resting place nowhere; instead, they dart back and forth between fiction and historical document, present and past, reality and illusion. For the boldness and the merciless logic with which it pursues this oscillating movement, Double Suicide can stand as Shinoda’s masterpiece. Adapting a bunraku (doll theater) tragedy by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Shinoda embraces the presence, conventional in that theatrical tradition, of black-garbed and black-masked stage hands who manipulate characters, props and scenery. The push-pull between utter impassivity and expressive excess, between decorative abstraction and wild terror, is a great stylistic achievement that brings out the modern quality of Chikamatsu’s play, with its deft and sophisticated combination of psychological realism, social criticism and theatrical surprise. – Chris Fujiwara

Screening on Film

Directed by Shinoda Masahiro.
With Nakamura Kichiemon, Iwashita Shima, Kawarazaki Shizue.
Japan, 1969, 35mm, black & white, 105 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
Print source: Janus Films

From the Shochiku Collection at the Harvard Film Archive: Sixties Shinoda film series co-presented by the Japan Foundation and co-sponsored by the Reischauer Institute