🎞 Asian cinema; Japanese film 🇯🇵
▪️ Influence of The Inferno / Jigoku (1979)
The Inferno / Jigoku (1979), a blockbuster film from Toei Kyoto, is still underrated unfairly even though it influenced and is referenced by many mainstream films. Such as Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985), Dream (1990), Juzo Itami’s Sweet Home (1989), Tsui Hark’s Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983), A Chinese Ghost Story franchise (1987-1991), Hiroshi Aramata’s Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (1988), Hideo Nakata’s Ring (1998), and Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell (2009) etc. However, this film wasn’t fairly mentioned by any critics or those filmmakers themselves. It’s the same phenomenon that the filmmakers of Speed (1994) didn’t mention their origin, The Bullet Train (1975). A significant example of the influence of this film is Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985), in which the same leading actor, Mieko Harada, played Lady Kaede, who is similar to the clan killer, Miho, in this film. Undoubtedly, the acting of Mieko Harada is what true acting meant to be in contrast to most actors of today. Even the total negation of acting - amateurism is elevated to a level of mastery - is ridiculously praised as ‘good acting’ in the present world, unfortunately. One example is just reading dialogues mechanically without acting, like a robot (The Westerners don’t understand Japanese unrecognizable of this issue, thus it was an easy ploy for the fraudsters who only want to dominate the stardom without any quality comparable to Akira Kurosawa or Tatsumi Kumashiro). And those irresponsible paid critics and bots praise it for stardom, they even tried to put such fraudsters to the rank of the team of Akira Kurosawa by buying up awards, nominations, and even publicities. Yet, I have to emphasize several points. One, Akira Kurosawa and his team, or Tatsumi Kumashiro and his team who made this film, can’t be manufactured by buying up more awards and nominations for fraudsters, artists of shallowness. Second, as the result of political manipulation to manufacture film maestros, it will only lower or even ruin the once highly regarded standard of filmmaking. This includes acting. Third, why do I love both Akira Kurosawa films and Tatsumi Kumashiro films? Why are both the Akira Kurosawa films and Tatsumi Kumashiro films masterpieces? It’s simply due to their contents and quality, nothing else decides it. Thus, our normal aesthetic values are in crisis today.
Besides, you also need to mention which films influenced this film. For instance, Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1954), Nobuo Nakagawa’s The Sinners of Hell (1960), Kwaidan (1964), Black Sunday (1960), Mother Joan of the Angels (1961; Father Garniec’s tomb is similar to the setting of the tomb of Miho), and The Exorcist (1973). Among these films, Nobuo Nakagawa’s The Sinners of Hell (1960) is the main origin of this film. And this Toei blockbuster project was impossible without the worldwide success of The Exorcist (1973).
▪️Defend the Professional Values
What is true acting? What is the professional value of acting? What is true dramaturgy? The simple answer is to see this film, especially the professional acting of Mieko Harada, who played the clan killer Miho, and her hell-cursed daughter Aki when she was only nineteen years old in 1978. Besides her huge impact, all the cast and crew did tremendous work in which Tatsumi Kumashiro tried to synthesize soft-core porno and high dramaturgy as experimented earlier by another true film maestro, Nagisa Ōshima. First, Nagisa Ōshima successfully synthesized both hard-core porno and high dramaturgy in his code-breaking masterpiece, In the Realm of the Senses (1976), Second, Nagisa Ōshima further synthesized soft-core porno and high dramaturgy in one of the greatest horror films made in Japan, Empire of Passion (1978). Mieko Harada’s acting is outstandingly sexually attractive, compared to Eiko Matsuda in The Realm of the Senses (1976) and Kazuko Yoshiyuki in Empire of Passion (1978), while all the talented actors precisely staged emotions, sensibilities, violence, and sexuality in the tragedies. The significance is their strength. The degree of impact exceeds even Akira Kurosawa or Kenji Mizoguchi, because Tatsumi Kumashiro, Nagisa Ōshima, and Teruo Ishii dealt with certain fields they didn’t dare to touch in the extreme degrees. These are brutal violence and sexual indulgence of humans. Both Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi only implied those aspects without directly staging them, while Tatsumi Kumashiro, Nagisa Ōshima, and Teruo Ishii were unrestrained against censorship. Akira Kurosawa and Hou Xiaoxian thought don’t torture actors in such subjects. I remember Hou taught us in Hong Kong when he was asked to review a short soft-core student film. He and Akira Kurosawa are on the same principle. Thus, they didn’t bring those human sides to direct, apparent expressions on screen ever. In totality, all of them excavated and explored the human aspects to different degrees and from different angles. And all of them contributed to the totality, while none of them is perfect and complete due to historical and personal limitations. Surprisingly, Mieko Harada successfully went through both extremes. One is represented by Tatsumi Kumashiro in this synthesis of soft porno and high dramaturgy; the other is represented by Akira Kurosawa in his masterly localization of King Lear (1606). As a result, Mieko Harada’s Miho and Lady Kaede are flawless. True aesthetics is not any theory at all, like foods. If we want to know what good quality is, we must have it, taste it, and memorize it by ourselves. If it was acting, we must see what genuinely good acting is. Mieko Harada’s acting is that. We shouldn’t lose normal values against the value manipulations of today. Hence, I prefer watching classics.
Besides, another important thing about this film is that a good film is from the social insight and social consciousness of filmmakers, not just screenplays. In contrast to the mainstream teaching of filmmaking in schools, a good film is not from the film or art field itself, but it is only from the social insight and social consciousness of filmmaking individuals themselves at the time of their age. In The Inferno / Jigoku (1979), Tatsumi Kumashiro criticized the inhumanity of the patriarchal system as externalized by the Ubukata family in the closed feudalist village of Oninamida somewhere near Kyoto. The major antagonist, Unpei Ubukata (played by the brilliant actor Kunie Tanaka), is the landlord of the village who conducts extrajudicial killing of his own family. This is seen as odd by the audience if they don’t know the main feature of the past patriarchal system in which it was the right of the patriarch in the feudalist era. Maybe Tatsumi Kumashiro should have explained the historical background. In other words, one major gap or contradiction between reality and drama in this film is that the story takes place in 1955, not in the nineteenth century. Anyway, a film under capitalism covers tearing ties between family members due to the acceleration of capitalist competition among participants in economic activities. This is one of the inherent features of films or any drama under capitalism. In this film, this origin is replaced with the past patriarchal system, while Teruo Ishii directly depicted how families were torn apart by the cult business of Aum Shinrikyo in Jigoku (1999). Interestingly, Teruo Ishii originally planned to direct The Inferno / Jigoku (1979) in 1969 by Toei. Now, we know that all of them fulfilled their projects and cinematic experiments.
▪️Conclusion
What is true acting? Just see Mieko Harada’s acting in The Inferno / Jigoku (1979). In this, Dir. Tatsumi Kumashiro successfully synthesized soft-core porno and high dramaturgy like Nagisa Ōshima’s Empire of Passion (1978). Highly recommend the future 4K UHD restoration!
Note: the ending could be vague for the first time seeing the film, but it means that Miho and Aki are forced to enter the next whole round of their tragedies while Aki is reborn as a baby abandoned on the beach at the end.
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