Virtually all the films produced, during the 1960’s, in Japan were considered anything but artistic. Around this time, a new wave erupted giving birth to films more aesthetically compatible with the politics of their era. Directors paid closer attention to frames, lighting, and distanced characters from their single dimensions giving them broader and more universally-conscious meanings. One of the main rebel directors of this new wave was Shinoda Masahiro. His film adaptation of the 1721 bunraku [puppet] play Shinjû ten no Amijima [The Love Suicide], by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, proved to be more dramatic, and thus more socially conscious than the original. Masahiro titled his film Double Suicide. Atop greater character depth, he also used multiple film techniques to relay a sense of social consciousness. The beauty of Japanese culture blended with ancient traditions to turns this Shakespearian-like tale into a political satire.
The main characteristic of Japanese new wave film is to address ideology and politics within film. Shinoda Masahiro gained a reputation for being an avant-garde film maker, who was radically cutting edge, but still conservative. This view, of course, came from the west. He is classified as conservative because the culture he is representing is considered conservative by American standards. In Double Suicide Masahiro subtly pokes fun at the hegemonic principles of his society, in a way I’m sure his fellow Japanese would consider anything but conservative. He presents human characters as walking live puppets, with no control over their destinies. Critics credit this to his underlying need to connect his films to the Japanese social structure. By portraying them as puppets, he is portraying the rest of Japanese society ruled by these same traditions as puppets as well. It is a simple connection but one of the many symbolic tools Masahiro uses to cross his film over to connect with real world concerns. More so than any conflict addressed is the topic of sexuality and the differences between women and men in the culture. Masahiro juxtaposes man and woman on screen in multiple ways. He uses sexual tension to draw attention to the traditions of the culture as well as keep the audience focused on the plot. The trait that is most common and significant about Masahiro’s work is that there is always more than one plot being carried out. There is always more than one message being told.
The love triangle that occurs among Osan, Jihei and Koharu poses many subtle ironies that can’t be seen as anything else but statements made by the director. An example of this is the scene when Osan confronts her husband Jihei about the agreement she set up with Koharu. It almost appears as Osan and Koharu are the only ones making decisions to address the situation, and Jihei comes across as being very weak. When it is found that Koharu is to be killed, Osan swallows the pride she has to help her husband save his mistress. This only makes Jihei more despicable. This male weakness isn’t just depicted in how the women tend to make the hardest decisions, but also in the facial expressions of the characters. Jihei is often very passionate. In moments when it appears he might burst into tears Koharu’s face is stern and steadily focused. The women seem disconnected from the plot, carried along by the plot of the bunraku play and by the social confines of their society. Their objectification is the most substantial political trait of the film.
The symbolism behind the relationship between the two main characters is mostly obvious to the common western eye. This is due to commercial comfort with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare was loved for his ability to target the stories that best connected with the fears, loves and concerns of the people. His tragic stories targeted the sympathies of common people. They were sympathetic because they didn’t want to experience the same fate as Shakespeare’s main characters. Macbeth and Hamlet’s tales were tragic, but when Shakespeare made Romeo and Juliet, he cut a cord that would touch people forever. This is the same cord Masahiro stumbles across by remaking Chikamatsu’s play. This is the type of tale that transcends sexist ideals and misogynist theory. The two main characters are so deeply in love that love rules over all, and you’re just waiting for it to win. The only problem is that Japanese culture is more conservative than Shakespeare could even imagine. There are conflicts that need to be addressed that European, or western thinking isn’t even prone to think of. We are talking about a film made in 1969, which addresses the social conflicts of the 1700’s. No matter how introspective of a thinker you are, somewhere you’re going to fall short. But, as Cornyetz reveals, though Masahiro fails to provide a solution for his community’s social problems, he did acknowledge the modern day’s view of the future within the traditions of the past.
A common trend that formed in Japanese films around the 1960’s was the commercial use of soft pornography. Japanese women were presented as a commodity within Japanese culture. The objectification of women in Japanese culture is taken so far as to consider them pieces of artwork. This was a major confine of Japanese life in the 60’s and evenmore so during the 1700’s. Masahiro depicts this side of the culture very well with Osan and Koharu. In her article, Gazing Disinterestedly: Politicized Poetics in “Double Suicide,” Nina Cornyetz analyzes the film’s aesthetic metaphors and sexual subtleties for meaning. She connects Japanese theorist Kuki’s ideal of iki, which is anything or person personifying the Edo period (1603-1868), in a restrained, open-minded, unselfconscious, indifferent or unintentionally coquettish way, to the Japanese woman.
I believe that Kuki’s notion of iki (his twentieth-century invention that, it is important to remember, incorporates his imaginary of Edo culture), evolved in conjunction with other factors (including Buddhist detachment and twentieth-century Zen) into a modern valorization of the disinterested gaze in film and other arts. This “disinterested” gaze is, however, constitutively eroticized–frequently elicited by the prostitute’s body–, distinguishing it from high Kantian disinterestedness. This gaze is also linked (sometimes only covertly) to a national imaginary and implicated in a particularized, and culturally exceptionalized, narrative and filmic gaze. Double Suicide cites–I believe in order to critique–this modern reformulation of iki as complicitous with an essentialized and homosocial transhistorical notion of Japanese “culture,” which relies on the commodification of the Japanese female erotic body as the repository of “tradition.” (Cornyetz)
Here Cornyetz caters Japan’s objectification of women to more than just a simple tradition, but she actually gives the custom and the women carrying it out credit for keeping track of Japan’s history. It gives a double edged quality to the practice. The artistry of this concept comes across in Mashiro’s film. Koharu is not just an object to be admired, but she also has an implied value by her being a courtesan. In a society that objectifies their women to such a degree that they ultimately end up viewed as unattainable or unreal, a woman for hire is a great commodity. It is no surprise how these customs could have lasted for so long. They hold many similarities to the way American women are objectified.
By theatrically citing the exteriorized subjectivity and ideal of iki that informed Edo puppet theater, Double Suicide suggests in modern filmic time-space a way out of the impossible dilemma and at least gestures toward the Real.(Cornyetz)
Mashiro uses many revolutionary film techniques. The film opens with Mashiro and the author of the script debating where the two lovers will have their death scene. This adds to the predestined nature of the character’s outcome and the theme of them being puppets with no control over their future. It also puts Mashiro in the class of directors like Hitchcock and Tarentino, who just can’t seem to keep himself out of his films.
Mashiro’s use of mis-en-scene keeps everything on screen relative to his message. He depicts intricate and ancient aspects of Japanese culture, while presenting new wave themes we now consider modern. He connects the live characters to the ancient puppet show by having stage hands fallow behind them. He also glides in and out of the puppet show back to real life in a way that almost makes them indistinguishable. His use of black and white, in an era when he easily could have used color, signifies the importance he was trying to place on the black garb of the stage hands, the shadows, the light and the contrast between male and female. He also designates the power of the characters through scene placement. There are many scenes where Jihei is seen sitting, while Koharu is standing. As he ponders over the anguish he feels about his lack of money, and the dishonorable nature of his actions, Koharu stands indifferent jaded by her place in the social structure. In the opening sequence of the film, when the stage is being set, you already know the outcome for these characters is predestined. The way they lie dead next to each other after committing suicide is symbolic of their relationship transcending death and the director’s way of subtly saying they are still together.
Shinju, the act of double suicide, is a well known part of Japanese culture. Its popularity in the west, in American films like The Last Samurai, can largely be credited to the contrast between Christian ethics and Japanese ideals of nobility. In the west suicide is largely viewed as a sin, and an easy way out of life. This is in part due to the major influence of Christianity in the west. The reason why I think Americans are so intrigued by the Japanese concept of suicide is because their ideals are completely the opposite. Suicide is not only viewed as a difficult path, but a noble one. In his journal, Tragedy and Salvation in the Floating World: Chikamatsu’s Double Suicide Drama as Millenarian Discourse, Steven Heine goes over the many aspect of Japanese culture he studied on his trips to Asia. Heine feels that shinju, and specifically the suicides carried out in Chikamatsu’s plays embody Buddhist ideals. Themes like impermanence of pleasure or happiness. For example, the idea that no matter how comfortable you are in a chair, you will eventually become uncomfortable in a certain position and have to switch it. This is a concept of impermanence and therefore a Buddhist belief. This idea is present in Chikamatsu’s plays as well in Masahiro’s film. It’s present in the fact that the audience is always given the impression time is fleeting. Even during Jihei’s moments with Koharu, they are both aware that their love is temporary. The conflict of the film is with the impermanence and frailty of human nature. The agony and anguish is not over the fact that they can’t be together, but that they can’t be together forever. Even if Jihei is able to buy Koharu, they are both still forced to acknowledge that death is inevitable. Since there is no guarantee they will die together, committing a double suicide becomes the only noble act they can carryout in honor of their love, and the only way they ensure one never lives without the other.
References
Cornyetz, Nina (2001). Gazing Disinterestedly: Politicized Poetics in Double Suicide A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 12.3 (2001) 101-127 Copyright © 2001 by Brown University
Goodman, Walter (1988). Tea and Tragedy In Japan. Section C; Page 15, Column1; Weekend Desk. October 28, 1988, The New York Times
Heine, Steven (1994). Tragedy and Salvation in the Floating World: Chikamatsu’s Double Suicide Drama as Millenarian Discourse. Significance of Double Suicide. The Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 2 (May 1994):367-393
Slantchev L. Branislav (2001). Double Suicide (Shinju ten no amijima, 1969) Retrieved November 13, 2006, from http://www.gotterdammerung.org/film/shinoda-masahiro/double-suicide.html
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