Film against
a backdrop of drama -common to so many Japanese films- and supernatural, the
dilapidation of this atypical feature film in no way taints the unique
experience it generates in the viewer.
Credits are written on images of a dark forest, with unstable and tormented forms. An oppressive rhythmic drive underlines the cloudy aspect of this landscape, its already tangled nature. The true, the most primary already takes on a supernatural dimension within this yet simple editing. Then, it is the day. Near the trees stands a humble dwelling. From the quiet forest emerges a horde of thirsty, hungry samurai. The war seems to have turned them into wild beasts. They drink on all fours, panting and growling like stray dogs. Slowly, they enter the house. the glances exchanged, the kind of sly violence which waits a moment before breaking out, then this sudden shock destroying the precarious balance of forces. One after the other, the animal-men rape the two poor women who have had the misfortune of being in their way. Once the crime is committed, the samurai return to where they came from. The little hut is engulfed in flames.
Strangely
intact, the two remains lie in the smoldering ruins. A black cat settles in the
rubble, licks the wounds of the victims. Heart-rending meows cut through the
silence repeatedly. Then it's night again. A samurai, alone, wanders around the
Rashomon Gate. He meets a pretty stranger, whom he agrees to accompany home to
her home where he is welcomed as a true lord by the young girl's mother. The
man gets drunk, lets himself be seduced; then it is at the height of passion
that the beautiful stranger turns into a cruel demon, slaughtering the warrior
caught unawares. The two murdered peasant women have become vengeful specters,
mercilessly killing the samurai who make the mistake of going through their
cursed forest. Then, one day, it is a familiar figure who ventures on their
hunting ground: the man who, during their lifetime, was to them a son and a
husband.
What characterizes the fantastic form is its capacity to make tangible an interiority otherwise exorcised from the regime of perception. By transforming by its very logic the limits of the sensitive, the genre creates a new territory where the buried dimensions of the human soul, the collective wounds of a people can be openly expressed. Thus, beyond its delusional dreaminess, Kaneto Shindô Kuroneko's second fantastic feature film turns out to be another Japanese film in which the subconscious is branded with a hot iron by the deep trauma of World War II. Pretending to explore the ancient myths of his country, especially its magical and animist beliefs, the filmmaker actually proposes to probe its recent history by roundabout means. From these surreal, hallucinatory images emerge a sort of fable on the themes of mourning and lost innocence.
Onibaba was
already dealing with the same ideas - but Kuroneko proposes to reverse the main
data. Here it is the son who returns from the war to discover that his family
was slaughtered while the opposite happened in the 1964 film: the son never
returning, the mother and the fiancee had to learn to cope with his absence. .
They killed the lost soldiers to steal their weapons and armor, in order to
earn a living. In the second film, all that matters is revenge, the insatiable
need for justice which ends up consuming even the souls of the two women. But
both works look rather pessimistically at the aftermath of the war: the mother,
in Onibaba, refuses her son's wife to give herself to another man, while the
lovers separated by death rebel in Kuroneko against the very nature of this
fateful barrier.
Shindô, in
both cases, is interested in the inability to live normally due to the horror
of war. His speech is not incompatible with that proposed by Kon Ichikawa in
The Fires in the Plain: but this idea of resistance, present in The naked
Island, resurfaces as a last ray of hope. There is always in Shindô this
fundamental belief that it is necessary to survive everything, to pursue in
spite of everything: it is therefore not surprising that one feels a deep
sympathy even in the look he poses on the impossible lovers of Kuroneko, who
struggle against all the supernatural forces opposing the survival of their
love. And it is from this terrible tension that the tragedy of the climax is
born: the ones he loves turn against their will into evil creatures, and he
must, whatever his feelings, destroy them. To continue to exist, the young man
must free himself from the hold of the past - kill the memory he would like to
cultivate.
A veritable
whirlwind of visual inventions, Kuroneko dazzles with the vigor of his
fantastic imagery, by the thunderous dynamism of its form: the editing thus
escapes the rules of cinematographic realism to create a totally sensory,
almost psychedelic vision of the phenomena he puts on. on stage. Onibaba, in
this sense, displayed a restraint that simply no longer has the right to speak
in this demonstration of technical bravery: the actresses are propelled into
the air using harnesses borrowed from the kabuki theater, the ample movements
of cameras multiply on sets lit in an outrageous way, covered with a mysterious
smoke… Then there is this erotic charge, already present within its
predecessor, which reaches dizzying heights with Kuroneko.
The system of sensory aggression that he is developing here touches the limits of the genre without sinking into them. Of course, Shindô is not the most subtle of filmmakers from the humanist current. Even his most delicate film, The Naked Islan, is based on the formal bet of daring delicacy and extravagant thoroughness. But it turns out to be an undeniable precursor of a whole current of horror cinema which will take cinemas around the world by storm some thirty years later, notably with the work of Hideo Nakata. Forgotten in the history of the seventh art, Shindô certainly does not have the coherence of an Ozu or the popular appeal of a Kurosawa, but he is in a way the first cult filmmaker of his country: underestimated , interested in genre cinema, he pushed back the frontiers of the current in which he worked and established himself both as a pioneer and as an outcast deserving to be rediscovered to the extent of his talent.
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