The Masters of Cinema Series

Catalogue

Shindo’s Onibaba

by Doug Cummings, 2006

Onibaba (1964) is a film that is often overwhelmed by interpretation, partly because its minimalist and primal elements encourage metaphorical readings, but also, perhaps, because its visceral sights and sounds frustrate literary description. First and foremost, director Kaneto Shindo’s second major international success is a work of startling cinematic juxtapositions: extreme close-ups with long shots, acute compositions with handheld camerawork, silence with thundering drums, physical isolation with sexual conquest, serene beauty with ruthless violence. Its widescreen vision of pampas grass endlessly waving in the breeze seductively conveys natural undulating motions and whispering sounds, but beneath its beauty lies savagery, supernatural terror, and death.

The opening scene depicts an exhausted samurai hurriedly carrying a wounded comrade through the marsh, but the noble archetypes are quickly speared by the real protagonists, a middle-aged woman (played by Shindo’s business partner and future wife, Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law (Jitsuko Yoshimura). The two women forge a tenuous existence in the neglected marshes of the Warring States Period, hardened by survival, preying upon random wanderers and selling stolen goods to subterranean misers. The story may be set in medieval times, but it could just as well be a post-apocalyptic tale; its human characters are pitiless survivors living by instinct and determination alone.

Rather than impose judgments, however, Shindo suggests a complex degree of empathy with his characters, starving commoners who have been forced by social chaos and war to live hand to mouth. The many low-angle shots amid the swaying reeds reinforce the film’s visual and thematic preoccupations (the few high angles usually tilt below the horizon), suggesting physical and political submersion — destabilized and abandoned by society, the women struggle in obscurity. (The theme is a natural concern for a filmmaker who devoted several works to the effects of the atomic bombing of his hometown of Hiroshima.) It’s a time when “the earth was turned upside down,” the older woman muses, and even the rumoured food sources crawl along the ground — snakes, rats, and earthworms. In a shocking scene, a wild dog is brutally captured and roasted. “I wanted to convey the lives of down-to-earth people who have to live like weeds,” Shindo explained. The lowest point in _Onibaba_’s world might be the bottom of the deep hole used to deposit the samurai bodies, and Shindo emphasizes his social concern when the older woman gloats in the pit to an aristocratic victim: “You made others die; now, it’s your turn.”

Paradoxically, the film abounds with images of birds that reflect the protagonists’ will to live — small, competitive scavengers, the birds seek their own freedom through sheer physical effort. Their watchful and predatory eyes reflect the women’s emphasis on awareness and privileged gazes, a major determinant of power in their secluded setting. When Hachi (Kei Sato), a returning combatant, meets the women and suggests they join forces, the older woman barks, “We’re us. You’re you. Stay out of it!” Interdependence is everything in this cutthroat milieu, and the shifting winds of loyalty could prescribe life or death; the subsequent sexual rivalry between Hachi and the women becomes more than an erotic game — any new bond could define a new outcast, and quickly spell his or her doom. The younger woman hides her affair just as the older woman hides her knowledge of it, each hoping to outmanoeuvre the other.

While Shindo emphasizes the fervour necessary for survival, he also suggests its limits. Despite the older woman’s attempts to seduce Hachi (exposing her breast to him, propositioning him, and frightening off her competition), she ultimately fails to compel a sexual relationship; Hachi simply isn’t interested and no amount of persuasion will change his mind.

The eroticism of the film is genuinely potent despite its often violent and aggressive components. The first tryst between Hachi and the young woman qualifies as a fight scene as much as a love scene; she initiates the encounter by throwing a rock into his hut, he grabs and gropes her, she slaps him, and they fall to the ground in a mutual embrace. However, their physical relationship evolves over the course of the film, and their last scene together portrays them running happily through the fields, their laughter echoing over images of playful pursuit.

Shindo conveys eroticism in various ways in the film, from the young woman working at the river with her bare thighs extended before Hachi’s leering gaze to the matter-of-fact presentation of nudity in both day and night — the sleeping women lie on mats in the summer heat, revealing their naked torsos in the gleaming moonlight. Sexuality is connected to survival as eroticism reveals a life force. And Shindo doesn’t shy away from overt symbols: after a sudden tantrum of desire, Hachi encounters the landscape’s dark hole and gazes within, murmuring, “I want a woman.” A mirroring scene depicts the older woman — after spying the lovers — clutching her breast and rubbing her body against a tree as Shindo’s camera tilts up its extended length.

In addition to its effective social and sexual material, Onibaba becomes an evocative thriller by dipping into the supernatural roots of the Buddhist tale that inspired it. The film’s haunting atmosphere intensifies its suggestions of unnatural realities: early rumours abound of a horse birthing a calf and the sun turning black, and later conversations refer to Purgatory and eternal damnation. While the latter initially seems like a cheap manipulative tactic on the older woman’s part, the brooding conversation between the two women sets the stage for the shock appearance of the “demon”. Yet Shindo cleverly emphasizes rationality — the demon is a mortal in a mask and the younger woman’s growing fear is the result of her mounting psychological guilt. He also reverses this paradigm in the penultimate scene when the mask cannot be removed until it’s physically ripped from her blistered face, suggesting a contagious disease as well as the supernatural justice and personal penance expressed in the original tale.

The film’s aggressive style — its most singular characteristic — is a startling symphony of graphic, rhythmic, and sonic elements that never loses steam. Made a few years after the French New Wave, Shindo combines the ethereal beauty of Mizoguchi (whom he previously assisted) with the spontaneity and formal experimentation of Godard, shifting the film’s tempo from ghostly slow motion to furious action and back in a matter of seconds. The lighting oscillates between natural and strikingly artificial sources; hut interiors are unnervingly illuminated from below and offscreen (presumably by firelight), and pools of light sporadically punctuate the marsh like invisible lampposts in the enshrouding darkness.

The film ends as it began, in a chase. The younger woman, terrified by the brutal face of her mother-in-law, fearfully flees the hut as the older woman follows close behind, oblivious to her physical condition yet overjoyed by her liberation from the mask. It’s a sequence that terrifically encapsulates the film’s central conflicts: the women survivors, powerfully compelled by primal emotions, race through oblivion attempting to evade death by physically leaping over it, a vertical ascension that momentarily defies their lowly existence. Yet the hole also contains their own guilty deeds, and gravity will eventually demand their return. What’s in store for their future? “I’m not a demon!” the woman cries, “I’m a human being!” With compassionate truth or bitter irony, Shindo ends the film with the scarred and penitent woman in mid-flight, emphasizing her jump through visual repetition that postpones her fate. Demon or human — or some complex measure of both — she is, for the moment at least, exultantly free.