Onibaba

The name of Japanese director Kaneto Shindo ought to roll off the tongue with the familiarity of that of Akira Kurosawa or Kenji Mizoguchi. Contemporary to the former, apprentice to the latter, Shindo's maverick themes, artistic range and rigorous independence have won him a following equal to both masters in Japan. Yet in North America, while his stunning ghost story Onibaba (literally "demon hag") retains a wide following, his other work is relatively unknown.

Shindo's family were farmers near Hiroshima. The poverty he endured in his childhood emerges in his first internationally acclaimed film, the deeply felt Naked Island, which won the Grand Prix at the Moscow International Film Festival in 1960. It portrays the bitter life of a family living away from all civilization on a tiny island in Japan's Inland Sea. Without a word of dialogue to soften the harshness of their lives, they haul water, tend their thin crops, face sickness, death, and occasional small joys. Today this lyrical jewel might serve as an uncomfortable reminder of Japan's past as a Third World country, but the strength of its rural family values outweighs all the physical hardships.

The films for which Shindo is best loved in Japan are his commemorative efforts. His 1952 Children of the Atom Bomb tells the story of Hiroshima from the point of view of a school teacher who goes back after the holocaust to look for her students. Studio contract directors like Kurosawa could not have tackled this sensitive matter so soon, but by 1951 Shindo was already Japan's first successful independent film director, having won numerous awards for Story of a Beloved Wife, full of autobiographical elements about a young woman helping her struggling screenwriter husband. Its leading lady, Nobuko Otowa, also won her first awards for this film. (She would much later become Shindo's wife and play the mother-in-law in Onibaba.)

Shindo has produced many very personal films, the most successful of which was Life of a Certain Film Director (1975) about the great perfectionist Kenji Mizoguchi. It took great courage and artistic discipline to portray so objectively the man who called Shindo to apprenticeship in his youth and then summarily fired him, nearly ruining his career. The shaping of interviews and commentary of this remarkable documentary again won Shindo many top awards in Japan. He has also written screenplays for other directors, and written and directed many very personal films that explore the nature of human sexuality. One of the pioneers, and survivors, of independent production in Japan, he has fashioned a unique viewpoint and a striking style.

Onibaba, one of Shindo¹s least known films in Japan, has captured an American audience. The rural setting in the age of samurai warfare recalls Mizoguchi¹s Ugetsu, while the grisly story rivals the best of Edgar Allen Poe. Shindo provides a unique twist by probing the sexual tension between a mother and daughter-in-law. The universality of its themes -- sex and starvation -- gives it a timeless appeal, and its period setting of a simple hut in the reeds relieves it of the cultural clutter in modern stories.

Using an earthy score by Hikaru Hiyashi and eerie play of light and dark cinematography, Shindo spins a tale of two women, the only survivors in a war-ravaged village, bound together by a man who does not return from the wars and torn apart by another man who does. Facing a daily threat of starvation unless they can find a samurai whose armor they can sell, both women nonetheless experience the spark of lust. Their responses reveal the rivalry and brutality beneath the surface of a cross-generational relationship sealed only by marriage, not blood. As the jealousies play out, the film crosses into the realm of the horrifyingly surreal.

An aura of the macabre permeates Onibaba. Shindo's brilliant writing keeps dialogue to a minimum and allows the raw human emotion to flow through body language, lighting and camera angles, and the throbbing and screeching score. As the music echoes the roar of the wind and the beating of the heart, Kiyomi Kuroda's intense cinematography alternates stark close-ups of the anguished, raging, or lusting characters with rapid cutting and tracking as they fly through the reeds into each other's arms, or to their deaths. Former painter and sculptor Shindo uses chiaroscuro to shape the atmosphere and depth of every scene and the movement of each actor in the desperate ensemble. The result is a full-blown masterpiece of black and white widescreen cinema. The setting and period may seem remote at first, but Shindo's ability to penetrate the depths of the soul makes Onibaba a landmark in the cinematic portrayal of the most basic of human instincts.

--Audie Bock

Audie Bock is the author of Japanese Film Directors and Mikio Naruse: un maître du cinema japonais and translator of Akira Kurosawa¹s memoirs, Something Like an Autobiography.

CAST

Woman Nobuko Otowa

Young woman Jitsuko Yoshimura

Hachi Kei Sato

Ushi Taiji Tonoyama

The warrior Jukichi Uno

CREDITS

Directed and written by Kaneto Shindo

Produced by Kazuo Kuwahara

Edited by Kazuo Enoki

Cinematography by Kiyom

About The Transfer

Onibaba is presented in its original Tohoscope aspect ratio of 2.35:1. This new digital transfer was made on the high resolution Spirit Datacine from a new 35mm composite fine grain master.

Telecine colorist: Gregg Garvin/Modern Videofilm, L.A.

Telecine supervision: Maria Palazzola

Audio restoration: Michael W. Wiese

Digtal subtitling: Levana Shkedi/Modern Videofilm, L.A.

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