Seppuku (1962) and Japanese Modernism

     Seppuku is one of the major achievements of black-and-white cinematography and its moral urgency is directly connected to its complex treatment of space. Director Masaki Kobayashi (1916-1996) began his postwar film career as an assistant to Shochiku’s Keisuke Kinoshita, and his early films reflect Kinoshita’s influence in their precise delineation of environments and naturalistic mise-en-scene. In this respect, Kobayashi pursued a different path from his contemporary rival Akira Kurosawa, whose montage-oriented compositions tended to maximize tension among triadic figure groups and between spatial planes. Like Kurosawa, Kobayashi used diagonal motion to dynamize perceptions of space, but he tended to reserve it for dramatic eruptions of violence like the climactic car collision at the end of Black River (1957). From the time production began on The Human Condition (1959-1961) through the release of his last samurai film Inn of Evil in 1971, Kobayashi worked exclusively with anamorphic lenses, and the increased breadth of ‘Scope compositions strengthened the aesthetic preferences of his earlier work.
     With Seppuku, which he later described as an attempt to “challenge Kurosawa,” Kobayashi added an additional context for his compositions by highlighting the geometric repetitions fundamental to traditional Japanese architecture. Physical structures like beams and shōji screens, clusters of figures, and pockets of open space are made to echo back-and-forth across the screen, creating the impression that space is both deep and compressed. The juxtaposition of slow, graceful dolly shots and plane-flattening zooms simultaneously reinforces and disrupts this sense of formality. Kobayashi’s two most important and enduring collaborators, the actor Tatsuya Nakadai and the composer Toru Takemitsu, contributed greatly to these paradoxical effects. Nakadai was trained in the modern shingeki theater, which synthesized Western developments ranging from Ibsenian psychological realism to Stanislavsky’s mnemonic gestures. His bold facial expressions, supple movements, and nuanced vocal inflections epitomized the new style of acting introduced in the 1950s, and his performance in Seppuku offered a riposte to the conventions of the samurai film (Kurosawa cast Nakadai as the gun-toting villain in 1961’s Yojimbo for similar reasons). This sense of anachronistic modernity was strengthened by Takemitsu’s atmospheric approach to scoring, which, informed by contemporary developments in avant-garde music, replaced the melodic lines used prominently (sometimes too prominently) in Kobayashi’s earlier work with modular clusters of instrumentation that extend and develop concrete sounds.
     Indeed, the greatness of Kobayashi’s best films derives in part from the complex and sometimes ambivalent ways in which they modernize and re-inflect traditions (and ideas of tradition) that had been disastrously co-opted during the war. After systematically breaking down the power and class assumptions embedded in the Tokugawa government’s samurai codes, Seppuku later shows the protagonist fulfilling his promise and committing the titular act just before he is shot by matchlocks employed by Iyi clan soldiers. Ironically reaffirming his position as the film’s most sincere follower of bushido, this gesture suggests that his actions should be understood less as an abnegation of the established order than as an idealistic attempt at renewal, a reform-from-within that is brutally erased from the historical record.
    Appropriately, Takemitsu’s modernist score features one of the first substantial use of the biwa, a four-or five-stringed instrument that was promoted by the Tokugawa shogunate and used for militarist propaganda from the 1890s to the 1940s, in the postwar period. Takemitsu boldly structured his score around only a single biwa chord, which, like the chord that opens the Prelude to Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (1859), seems never to resolve itself. Takemitsu's use of the biwa provides a perfect counterpart to both the film’s depictions of human suffering and of the gap between human ethics and the inexorability of history.