Word: harakiri
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...showers abuse on the unsuspecting and inoffensive Hangan. Pushed beyond sense and patience, Hangan draws his sword and strikes at Moronao. But he is in the sacred precincts of the shogun's palace, where even to draw a sword is a crime. The shogun orders Hangan to commit harakiri. He does so, but not before his chief retainer swears to avenge his cruel death. That is what the next seven acts are about, making Hamlet seem like a speed demon in the revenge department...
Hamburg's approach sounds like a formula for box-office harakiri, but, as General Manager Rolf Liebermann says: "Our job is to try out new things and to find new directions. In such a context, a flop or a hit today is of no consequence whatever." In practice, the company has many more hits than flops, selling out a seasonal average of 86% of its 1,670 seats, attracting opera buffs from around the world to its occasional week-long programs of contemporary opera, and having its pick of top festival tours...
Kwaidan. Beauty and boredom are richly intermixed in this trio of Japanese ghost stories by Director Masaki Kobayashi, whose last exercise in horror was the classic Harakiri. The boredom stems from three supernatural tales by Lafcadio Hearn, each unfolding with the grace of a water lily and at approximately the same pace. The beauty lies in the film's imagery, the delicate, dreamlike balance of sound and light and color in every frame...
...minutes during which Macbeth is killed are literally the most terrible I can recall on the screen. Japanese directors seem peculiarly able to treat extremes of violence, neither leering nor covering up the gore. In Throne of Blood, as in Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain or Kobayashi's Harakiri, the violence leaves one shaken and, in something close to the Aristotelian sense, purged...
...HARAKIRI. A gory, sometimes tedious, sometimes beautiful dramatic treatise on an old Japanese custom: ritual suicide...