Kaneto Shindō :: Onibaba
A field of reeds that breathes like a body, a pit that guards what's been repressed, a mask fused to the skin like a scar from Hiroshima. Shindō makes horror well up from the soil itself, a jurisdiction older than any shogun.
Kaneto Shindō, Onibaba, Japan 1964. Produced by Kindai Eiga Kyōkai / Tokyo Eiga, black-and-white cinematography by Kiyomi Kuroda, starring Nobuko Otowa and Jitsuko Yoshimura. Shot over three months among the reeds of Inba Swamp, in Chiba prefecture, under working conditions that bordered on siege.
Onibaba, 1964. Kaneto Shindō shoots a field of susuki reeds and turns it into an organism rather than a backdrop. The grass, seven feet tall, bends and closes over the fugitives' path like dark water: a vegetal labyrinth that swallows samurai fleeing civil war and gives them back, stripped, to a pit dug in the thick of it. Two women — the mother-in-law, the daughter-in-law, both nameless, as befits figures of a rite rather than a plot — live off that pit: they kill, they strip the bodies, they sell the armour to the merchant Ushi, they survive. Hunger, here, is no metaphor. It is the only theology left standing in a country wrecked by fourteenth-century warfare.
What concerns this blog, though, is not the plot but the ground that produces it. Shindō said he chose that field because the wind-moved grass struck him as an emotional barometer, almost a seismograph of feudalism in its death throes. But it is something older than that, something almost chthonic: the landscape does not merely accompany the drama, it generates it, it demands it. The scrubland turns into jurisdiction.
And then the pit. A black hole, stubborn, which the two women guard like a family secret, and which psychoanalytic criticism has read, not wrongly, as the repressed femininity of a patriarchal society: that which must be silenced, absorbed, digested by the earth so it does not contaminate the village. The demon mask, one of the women wears to frighten off intruders — and which later fuses to her face, eating into the skin — carries within it, by Shindō's own admission, the echo of Hiroshima's burns: the disfigurement not as gothic invention but as historical scar carried over into myth, as though postwar Japan needed an ancient demon to speak of a wound too recent to be told any other way.
This, I think, is where the film touches hauntology, a notion this diary keeps returning to: Onibaba is not a film set in a landscape, it is a landscape that has made itself into a film, a place that needs to narrate so as not to remain a mute ruin. Erosion — that word we're fond of here — concerns not only the soil of Chiba, where the crew lived for three months in makeshift huts, laughing, eating soba on set: it concerns the bodies too, the faces, the very morality of the characters, gnawed away by necessity the way the mask is eaten by acid. This is cinema that beats Malick to the punch by a decade in treating nature as an agent, yet without the American's pantheistic comfort: here the wind through the reeds redeems nothing, it merely records, with the dull patience of things, the slow unravelling of every human pact.
