Int'l Symposium, 2 (resend)

[Davis Darrel]

4.  Violence, weapons, and the Other. 

	Bordwell: We have travellers' reports and journalists' descriptions of Jidai geki in the 20s and 30s, but they were all singularly unimpressed, dismissing them as crude, violent and low class.  This applied also to their impressions of the hot, smoky working class theaters in which Jidai geki were shown.  The cutting and slashing and ritual cruelty (e.g. SEPPUKU) that is ubiquitous in Jidai geki, and intensified through the early 1930s, was probably too much for Western tastes.  This alone would have prevented them from circulating profitably in Western distribution circuits.  In the early 30s American films had their own considerable problems with violence, sex and censorship.  By the 1960s, of course American audiences were ready for a lot more gore (and sex), and there were plenty of audiences and filmmakers who enthusiastically took their cues from Asian martial arts generally, and Jidai geki in particular.

	Kato: We can learn a lot from the nature of violence in Jidai geki.  Specifically, the weapon used to inflict harm, the KATANA longsword and in some cases the smaller dagger often used by women.  One must get physically close to the enemy to lop off or eviscerate one's opponents; the katana is an intimate weapon.  Add to that the overall homogenization of Japanese society--in body type, color, dress, lifestyle--and you have a need for rather fine discriminations in the matter of heroes v. villains.  To push matters further, you see a distinctive type of mayhem in silent Jidai geki such as Ito Daisuke and Futagawa Buntaro, where an entire village comes out against an inevitably doomed hero, and you have distinctive, surging rhythms of attack and retreat.  These usually happen in town, on streets in full view of the locals.  Much like you might see today in melees in a village festival, dozens of desperate, halfnaked men all swirling deliriously in an ecstasy of pursuit and destruction.  In Jidai geki you also get distinctive props brought out at climactic moments like the lanterns ("GOYOU") held by the authorities, the ropes used to lasso and entangle the heroes as they fall, wounded and cursing.  The wild camerawork and editing of these early directors were of a piece with this delirium.
	Contrast this with the conflict and violence of Westerns.  Guns v. Katana.  Distance/landscapes v. Intimacy/villages.  And especially you have an aboriginal enemy, the Indian, a red savage impeding the progress of civilization, which can be cut down with rifles or pistols with no more thought than bagging a buffalo.  It's not until much later, in the 50s, that so-called "adult Westerns" considered the humanity of Indians.  But the enemy in Jidai geki was always "us."  The frontier between humanity and cruelty was always interior, and that is where the Japanese weapon strikes.

5.  Contemporary traces.      

	Yang: Violence was always a selling point in the movies, and in storytelling generally.  I don't really much buy this talk of the expanding horizons of movie violence.  Conflict and desire and suspense are all basic tools of storytellers, and filmmakers are storytellers--aren't they?  Too much focus on the technical details of movie violence overlooks the ever-present investment of audiences in the story.  Whether a particular physical attack is shocking depends mostly on how it functions in the overall chain of motivation and outcome, not on how much blood flows. And that chain of events is the responsibility of the storyteller whether he is a novelist, manga artist, or filmmaker.
	What's "shocking" to me is the coldbloodedness of killing in action genres like Jidai geki or yakuza eiga, and this is a matter of character and style more than physical representations of violence.  While not ultra-violent, some of the characters in my films are chilling in their lack of human concern for others; still other characters, like the hero of TENCHU that I saw this afternoon, with Nakadai Tatsuya playing a compulsive assassin, are charismatic in their cruelty, nihilism, or