I have been watching a lot of period dramas from different parts of the world and it’s amazing that you learn about how those people lived in those times just by watching movies. This thought was kind of forming in my mind about a “Literary Movie” that has a cultural value and yes that is a well known idea but it didn’t struck for me completely until I was watching Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day.

Anyway, I have never really thought about movies in this fashion that, similar to how people reading Tolstoy would say his book is a better history of how people were living in that time then the modern records, but recently some of the movies I have been watching have taught me more about the people and their time and how they lived, more thoughtfully and compellingly than any book I would have to read.

Historical dramas in Japan

Jidaigeki is a genre of Japanese cinema which consists of movies that are set typically in the Edo period but can include any historical period of Japan before the Meiji Restoration.

These films are not all of the same themes and styles, they have various subgenres which are they classified into but if you watch a jidaigeki film you’ll most likely see samurai and ronin and big fight scenes. Akira Kurosawa is a world famous example of Jidaigeki films and his films even illustrate how different movies can be with this big collection of one genre, his “Seven Samurai” and “Rashomon” are both historical period dramas but they are both about different themes and even feel different.

However the film I have taken the screenshot from is not Akira’s but belongs to another genius japanese director by the name of Masaki Kobayashi and it’s from his 1962 drama “Harakiri”

The Two Directors

Perhaps because these are the only two directors I have seen making historical dramas, I have this feeling of comparing them. I love both of their films but I think if you were ever going to watch an old Japanese movie then you would watch Kurosawa’s epic Seven Samurai and be done with them so it’s kind of important to me to talk about their tones and styles of directing.

Kurosawa’s work in Seven Samurai is enormous, magnificent and beautiful but it’s beautiful in a way that it is messy, overly dramatic, romantic and passionate. It is a huge sweeping epic film that pauses here and there to showcase or poke the tender human nature inside the characters in the film but also somehow manages to be completely about the themes of a bigger more pure Justice and whether such a thing even exists. It is also a very theatrical film, with Toshiro Mifune supplying most of the theatrical acts in this one crazy character.

Masaki’s films meanwhile feel much more refined- wait no, I’m not saying Kurosawa’s films aren’t but let’s say that both “Samurai Rebellion” and “Harakiri” are very disciplined movies. Each shot is composed and thought-out beforehand and serves a purpose, there is no weight to the camera as it stays static on an image and cuts to another, similarly the characters walk, talk and behave almost in a more determined manner befitting the closed , organized and designed sets around them.

Both of them are also much dramatic then theatrical and offer us a glimpse into the societal everyday life of Samurai and how their government works in the 1600s. They have action swordplay scenes too sure but these aren’t the main focus of the movies. They are more about family issues, questions of personal honor, desperation of a human soul and are powerful stories which showcase great determination and will from their main characters.

Even my one complaint about Harakiri is that the fight scene near the end almost looks goofy today and unbelievable, even though there is clear purpose and style to the way it’s carried out and shot. The sound design is out of this world good, it’s mostly loud bangs and rolling drums but man they add so much to this film.

This is an intense-from-start-to-finish, mesmerizing beautiful movie that is so wonderfully restored by Criterion Collection and trust me, these black and white films look so good even today, because of efforts like these I can watch older movies that would have been near unwatchable.

Harakiri 4.5⭐/5