Between the great traditions of on-screen fencing, there is a fundamental difference. In the Western-style swashbuckling film, there are many kicks and thrusts, and the action is punctuated by the clanking of rapiers – or the whir of lightsabers, if we consider Star Wars as a possible variation of the genre. In its Japanese equivalent, the hemp, we go much further, if we can say, “to the bone”: a single blow is enough, clean, precise, and so dazzling that we only perceive the effects afterwards, through the collapse of one of the attackers. There is a spirit of concentration: uniqueness of gesture, quest for the right moment.
Of this cinematographic discipline, one of the greatest goldsmiths was undoubtedly Kenji Misumi (1921-1975), discovered in France posthumously with the series of Baby Cart, then more gradually through video editing. His name does not attach the same notoriety as his contemporaries of the Japanese “new wave”, the turbulent Nagisa Oshima (1932-2013), Shohei Imamura (1926-2006) or Koji Wakamatsu (1936-2012). In the modern era of the 1960s, Misumi remained a faithful studio man, a prolific Daiei craftsman working in the commercial framework of in-house productions, shooting up to five or six films per year.
Virtuoso you plan large
The retrospective devoted to him by La Cinémathèque française in Paris, until May 26, the most comprehensive to date outside Japan, testifies to the breadth of his work, but also to his extraordinary stylistic vigor. It brings together fifty-two of the sixty-seven films made in just twenty years of career (from 1954 to 1974, the date of his last film for the cinema, the aptly named The Last Samurai), by this relentless filmer who died of exhaustion at the age of 54.
Within a codified genre production, Kenji Misumi has been able to create a space of his own. Not that of an author in the literal sense, jealously working on his themes and issues, but that of a true director: someone knowing how to get the best out of imposed material, finding in any narrative framework a wonderful springboard for formal experiences. From the successful series of Zatoichiof which he signed six out of twenty-seven parts between 1962 and 1970, we recognize in him a virtuoso of the wide shot, skillfully digging out his contours, opening dizzying lines of flight.
Around this charismatic blind swordsman hero, played by the robust Shintaro Katsu (1931-1997), the frame compensates for the infirmity by drawing an extended field of perception, reflecting his perfect grip on the environment as much as his burlesque slippages.
You have 55.46% ..