Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba

Mere days before the BFI's retrospective is due to kick off, the sad news of director Kaneto Shindo's death is making waves across the web. But the man has left us with an amazing legacy and days of films to get lost in. 

Here we look back at one of our favourites.

Onibaba is a glorious and stunning film, and Gary Budden tells us why -

I was about sixteen years old and an interest in what lay outside the confines of Hollywood cinema had begun to grow in me; Japanese films held a particular allure for all the predictable reasons that would thrill a teenage mind from Kent – attractive young women from a very different culture being violent, anime like Akira, Ninja Assassin and Ghost in the Shell (with lots of blood / stuff blowing up), and the general cultural cache of being into cult and foreign movies (or what seemed exotic and underground in Canterbury circa 1998).


I can’t remember where exactly but, I had seen a still from Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba and read a short review – I think it was the NME (yes, I used to read the NME) – and it was being shown very late on Channel 4 back in the days when Channel 4 still screened things worth watching. This was, of course, before the Film4 Channel, but even now you’re only likely to come across a film like this late night in the schedules after the 809th rerun of ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ that week.
The still, rather tragically, reminded me of the Fighting Fantasy book ‘Sword of the Samurai’ where they had, I retrospectively discovered, nicked the iconic demon mask image from Onibaba for one of their more memorable monsters.
I taped the film that night on my mum’s trusty VHS player and dutifully watched the film, slightly annoyed that I’d missed the first half hour due to various programming mistakes. I’d have to wait many years until the Criterion company, followed by Masters of Cinema in the UK, finally released a decent copy on DVD, so for years I was left with the slightly hazy impression of a wonderful film set entirely in swaying reed beds, sometime in feudal Japan during a vicious civil war, with two women in various states of undress murdering lost samurai, pushing them into a black hole and selling their weapons and armour to get by. Which, it turns out, is actually a rather large part of the film.


So years pass, I nearly forget about Onibaba but my interest in cinema in all its forms grows and grows, and when I see that demon-mask once more online, I get my hands on the aforementioned Criterion copy (early on I’d worked out the mysteries of multi-region DVD players) and watch Shindo’s art-house horror, properly, for the very first time.

I am glad to say that it held up to my teenage recollections. Existing in the grey area that makes a film sometimes appears too art-house to horror/cult fans, and too trashy for art-house cineastes, the film focuses on a middle aged woman and her daughter-in-law (whose husband has been killed during the war), who eke out a living in the reed beds from murder and theft. Then a man, Hatchi, arrives, a close friend of the young woman’s deceased husband. A sexual relationship begins to develop between them, threatening to destabilise and ruin the already tenuous relationship between the two women.
The older woman’s sexual jealously becomes, literally, a demonic force in this film; she becomes the very thing she warns the young woman about, personifying destructive lust and corrosive jealousy. Let us just say the demon-mask plays a crucial role in this.


Visually the film is stunning; in fact it is the most appealing thing about the picture, as the bare bones of the story are rather slender, loosely based on a simple Buddhist instructional tale.
But it’s all in the presentation, and the film’s lustrous black and white photography from director of photography Kiyomi Kuroda is beautiful, as is the marshland location which is as much a psychological landscape as anything; the swaying reeds are only punctuated by the river, the hut of the two women, and the infamous black hole. The setting adds a great deal of physical and metaphorical depth to the simple story, and the entirety of the drama plays itself out within this landscape, culminating in one of the most memorable endings in horror cinema that stayed with me even from my initial shaky VHS viewing all those years ago.


Kaneto Shindo has made many other films in his long career (he was born in 1912 and is still not dead), such as Children of Hiroshima, the strange feline ghost story Kuroneko (also available from Masters of Cinema), the remarkable, near silent analysis of Japanese island peasants in The Naked Island, before making a lot soft-core erotica during the pinku eiga era; but Onibaba remains his best and most recognisable film. Highly recommended.

SILENT RUNNING: Blu-ray review

It’s somewhat unlikely that SILENT RUNNING should arrive on Blu-ray with something akin to the fanfare of a returning hero, as it’s always been a film that’s existed in the shadow of its bigger, more serious brother, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. But thanks to some pretty high profile name-checking from some of this generation’s most successful and prominent sci-fi film-makers (Andrew Stanton and Duncan Jones to name two) and a consistent and heartfelt championing from Mark Kermode (who argues that the film is actually superior to the more traditionally critically-vaunted 2001) means that SILENT RUNNING is now slowly achieving the kind of attention from critics and audiences that its fervent supporters have always argued it should.

Set in a not-so distant future where rising temperatures have led to the extinction of all plant life on earth, the film takes place on the Valley Forge, an enormous space freighter where the remainder of Earth’s forests are being held in bio-domes. The Valley Forge is populated by a skeleton crew of four, the majority of whom are bored rigid and eager to return home. The exception is Lowell Freeman (Bruce Dern), the man tasked with maintaining the forests – highly strung and with an extremely close bond to plants and nature, Freeman believes religiously in the importance of his work, and fervently anticipates the day when the forests can be returned to Earth and replanted.

When the order comes through from high command to destroy the forests in a cost-cutting measure, Freeman snaps, and risks everything in order to keep man’s last links to nature alive, enlisting along the way as help three adorable service robots, nicknamed Hewey, Dewey, and Louie.

Comparisons with 2001 are always going to be inescapable for SILENT RUNNING - partly because they’re two of the most high profile ‘space’ science fiction movies ever made, released within a couple of years of one another - but mainly because of the shared involvement of Douglas Trumbull. Trumbull provided the groundbreaking visual effects in Kubrick’s film, whereas on SILENT RUNNING he was also responsible for script and directing duties.

Trumbull himself has noted that SILENT RUNNING was in effect conceived as a rejoinder 2001’s cold, clinical vision of science fiction, and Trumbull’s film is likely to surprise first-time viewers with its earnest, unabashed sentimentality. There is a child-like quality about the whole film – about Hewey, Dewey and Louie, about Freeman’s idealism, even the way the crew race around on those fun-looking modified go-karts – and it’s telling that SILENT RUNNING’s biggest fans are those who saw the film at a young age. Those of us cynical adults who have grown up on ALIEN, MOON, SUNSHINE and the DEAD SPACE video games and, yes, even 2001 might find SILENT RUNNING’s  PG rated version of space madness a little toothless and insubstantial, and the scenes of Freeman making friends with the robots somewhat mawkish, particularly in conjuction with Joan Baez’s hippy-dippy songs, which are just as likely to make you want to put your foot through the TV as enchant you.

As a story, ultimately SILENT RUNNING doesn’t really hang together – the dialogue is occasionally overwrought, and there are some pretty huge plot holes (how can someone be aware of Duck Tales yet not the fact that plants need sunlight?). There are also big pacing problems – there are large swathes of the film where very little happens, and while SILENT RUNNING certainly wouldn’t benefit from shoe-horning in of an action sequence, there are a few patience testing moments and the film feels a lot longer than its modest 90 minute running time.

Despite its many flaws, there’s lots to love about SILENT RUNNING. Firstly there’s Bruce Dern’s incredible performance as Freeman, all twitching intensity and wild-eyed prophesising. He looks and sounds like someone who would collar you at a Grateful Dead concert to tell you about The Man putting fluoride in the water supply, and as such is unique in the history of cinematic spacemen. When asked about the genesis of the character Trumbull brilliantly said (I’m paraphrasing here) “Hey, there’ll be weird people in the future too.”

The reason that SILENT RUNNING has proved so enduring, however, is certainly down to it’s world, conceived entirely with ingenious practical effects before the advent of CGI, and still standing up to scrutiny today. While 2001 may be regarded as the better film, there’s definitely a case for SILENT RUNNING being the more influential, particulary in the realm of hard science fiction. The Valley Forge seems like an early prototype for the Nostromo; Wall-E’s whole aesthetic borrows heavily from the whole film, as well as Wall-E himself being clearly descended from Huey, Dewey and Louie, not to mention R2-D2; and the bored spaceman railing against the man was replicated to great effect in MOON. And we may never have seen RED DWARF or MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 if it didn’t have the template of robots and humans awkwardly bonding on a spaceship to replicate.

 

The ingenuity that went into the design of the ‘miniatures’ (the Valley Forge model was 26 feet long), the sets and particularly the robots (in a genius move, the robots were portrayed by double amputees, giving the machines a real tactile weight and personality) mean that the world of SILENT RUNNING is still as exotic, realised and convincing as it was 40 (!) years ago. There’s no denying that while some moments are overwrought the film does still pack quite an emotional punch, with the plight of Freeman and the robots and the ultimate fate of the Valley Forge being genuinely moving and thought-provoking. There's no doubting that Trumbull is heartfelt about his film and its 'message', and for all its meandering he still crafts a powerful and heartbreaking final shot that is one of the most memorable in all of science fiction.

It’s also great to see a sci-fi film that is so colourful – so often sci-fi has a washed-out, sterile palette, but SILENT RUNNING is rendered in vibrant, colourful detail, with the primary colours of the Valley Forge rec room and Freeman’s space suit, alongside the lush greens of the forest really brought out by Masters of Cinema’s magnificent, razor-sharp transfer.

The Blu-ray represents another winning effort for Eureka and the Masters of Cinema label, with benchmark sound and picture quality that is at very least the best the film has looked since its original 35mm release. Also included is a fascinating, 60 minute documentary on the making of the film from 1972, alongside substantial interviews and a commentary with the always engaging Trumbull and Dern. There’s also a glossy 48-page booklet packed with photos, interviews and concept artwork, rounding out an extremely impressive release of a flawed yet seminal film. 

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