Masahiro Shinoda: Modernizing Tradition

Shinoda was in his early twenties when, in 1953, his mother died, forcing him to break off his studies—he majored in theater history at Waseda University—and get a job. He found one at Shochiku studios, where he worked as an assistant to nearly every major director at the studio, including Yasujiro Ozu. Eager to tap into the booming youth market, Shochiku hired Shinoda to write and direct his first feature, One-Way Ticket for Love (1960), capitalizing on a global hit by Neil Sedaka that had rocketed to #1 on the Japanese pop charts as “The Choo-Choo Train Song.”

Collaborations with poet, artist, and screenwriter Shuji Terayama followed: Dry Lake (aka Youth in Fury, 1960), Killers on Parade (1961), and Tears on the Lion’s Mane (aka A Flame of Youth, 1962). “Tackling such torn-from-the-headlines issues as the protests surrounding the controversial U.S.-Japanese Security Treaty and corporate corruption, this trio solidified the reputations of both director and screenwriter,” wrote Tom Mes for Film Comment in 2010.

“A sumptuous sonnet to unrequited amour fou, Pale Flower remains Shinoda’s most enduring creation,” wrote Chuck Stephens in 2010. “Brooding and nigh unreadable, with its morally murky fusion of modernism and mayhem—fast cars and fatal attractions, Sartrean silences and operatic apogees—the film is a perennial favorite among genre aficionados and art-house cine-sophistos alike.”

Based on a story by Shintaro Ishihara (Crazed Fruit) and cowritten with Ataru Baba (Vengeance Is Mine), Pale Flower stars Ryo Ikebe as a gangster who, fresh out of prison, falls for alluring gambler (Mariko Kaga). Pale Flower features cinematography by future frequent collaborator Masao Kosugi and a score by the renowned avant-garde classical composer Toru Takemitsu. As Stephens observed, “few come away from Pale Flower less than dazzled, and many of us have remained to relish its bottomless blacks and sepulchral whites time and again.”

Also released in 1964, The Assassin stars Tetsuro Tamba as a lone swordsman strategically shifting alliances after four American warships loom along the coast in 1863, aiming to force Japan to open its markets to international trade. “Seen today,” wrote Tom Mes, “what is remarkable about The Assassin is how far removed it is from both the scathing pamphleteering of Oshima and the increasingly inward works of Yoshida. It has far more in common with the later films of Kinji Fukasaku—all frenzied action, freeze-frames, flow-chart narrative, and unwritten history . . . Unlike Fukasaku (and Shohei Imamura), what interests Shinoda is not so much the history that Japan forgot but the patterns of behavior that are repeated throughout that history into the present.”

Producer, director, and film historian Alain Silver has observed that with Shinoda’s Samurai Spy, Kihachi Okamoto’s The Sword of Doom, and Hideo Gosha’s Sword of the Beast—all of them from 1965—“a new type of samurai was defined: pitiless, obsessive, perhaps more alienated than any other genre hero. And the directors supported these new character emotions through heightened violence and stylization: unnervingly orchestrated details, from the muffled rasp of steel ripping into flesh to dark blood spurting from wounds; placid shots of sword blades being carefully cleaned or kimono sleeves being tied back into fighting position; simple inserts of a protagonist’s darting eyes, focused and confident even as he senses imminent attack.”

As Silver points out, Shinoda considered cinema to be “a form with the potential for expressive continuity with the traditional arts of Japan . . . Filmic devices—long takes, with their intensified sense of real time; low-key lighting; or unusual framing, all of which occur in Samurai Spy—become formal transliterations and analogues for the deformation and abstraction that Shinoda perceived to be at work in painterly and theatrical traditions.”

Adapting Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s 1721 puppet play The Love Suicides at Amijima, Shinoda tells the story of a paper merchant’s obsession with his courtesan in Double Suicide (1969). “As in all Chikamatsu’s work, the individual is inevitably sacrificed to the social system, embodied in the family,” wrote Claire Johnston in 2001. “Characteristically, his lovers can only find transcendence in death; their ability to control their own lives is non-existent. Mizoguchi in Chikamatsu Monogatari adapted Chikamatsu’s vision to some extent—death for his lovers becomes a kind of fulfillment when compared with the wretchedness of their lives. But Shinoda retains Chikamatsu’s view of death as the ultimate protest against social structures.”

Silence (1971) is the first adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s 1966 novel, cowritten with Endo himself. Martin Scorsese directed the third and naturally best-known adaptation in 2016, and in his review for Slant, Jesse Cataldo noted that Shinoda’s version depicts seventeenth-century Japan “as a forbidding, fog-wreathed land of wind and shadows. Entering under the auspices of pure-hearted compassion, yet also acting as agents in a simmering culture war, the two Portuguese priests at its center find their cultivation of willing souls complicated by a Conrad-esque morass of competing ideologies and objectives.”

Demon Pond (1979) is an adaptation of Izumi Kyoka’s 1913 play, and like Double Suicide, “which daringly shifts between live action and Bunraku puppet theater,” wrote Michael Atkinson last year, “and Himiko (1974), a wild engagement with butoh dance, Demon Pond is another instance of Shinoda repurposing classical theater.” Demon Pond is “a jolt of delicious weirdness that may have seemed as throwback-wacky when it was released in its home country as it has felt outrageous everywhere else. Maybe more than any other film, Shinoda’s mythopoeic bugout builds a bridge between what the West perceives as ‘realism’ and hellzapoppin’ Kabuki dream-time, the way a rainbow might connect a mundane nursery life to a neverland oasis.”