How Does the Film 'Double Suicide' Use Traditional Japanese Theatre and What Are the Stylistic, Narrative and Thematic Effects of This Usage?

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[film studies] How does the film 'Double Suicide' use traditional Japanese theatre, and what are the stylistic, narrative, and thematic effects of this usage?

Introduction

Double Suicide is a film set in Osaka's business class, based on a Bunraku theater. The script was authored by MonzaemonChikamatsu,a famous dramatist in premodern Japan. Due to the merchant Jihei's reluctance to repay his beloved, the courtesan Koharu, they decide to commit shinju (lovers' Suicide) to be reunited in the next life. The author used some stylistic of Japanese theatre-like: staginess use of sounds, imagery, and character. Being one of the four foremost innovative Japanese directors of the modern wave of movie and film stylization developed between the 1950s and 1960s, Shinoda maintained the significant concepts of the story to ensure that the latest transformations of the movie do not contradict the initial storyline of the film (Shirane,2013, 236). Shinoda only employed few stylization techniques and changes of the traditional aesthetics into modern art, leaving the significant components of the story in its original foundational story. During the advent of political transformations in Japan, the story came right that involved using cinemas as new tools or weapons to condemn political repressions (Ebrey, 2012, 295). The connection of the new wave film to the political situation in the country resulted in the ranking of this movie as one of the political-aesthetical Japanese films

A consideration of Double Suicide's historical context will shed light on the film's interaction with and transformation of traditional aesthetics. The director Shinodawas among the four leaders of the late 1950s and early 1960s Japanese New Wave movement.David Desser situates the New Wave within the film of the 1960s student protest movement, emphasizing the revival of AMPO, the Japan-US Mutual Security Act, and the resurgence of traditional authority.It was deemed to exemplify Annette Michelson(David,1988, 5-24) (who has written extensively about Oshima) has examined the evolution of cinema as a medium or instrument of political struggle during this period.Dessert asserts that this cultural commitment is filtered into a criticism of realist shingeki theatre techniques, the program strongly influenced by European realists named Ibsen. (David,1988, 5-24)

Styles used in double Suicide that demonstrate traditional Japanese theater

Double Suicide (1969) identifies the style throughout the film. Double Suicide is also about understanding Japanese puppet theater. Played through characters being manipulated by stagehands dressed in black, or Kuroko, while visibly developing the characters' ordeals and predicaments, such as the male lead's performance for his character undergoing unfortunate occurrences, leading to Suicide. The film followed its bunraku play origins and developed it further by creating it into a Japanese drama, or kabuki, making a story intertwined with the old and the new stylistic choices.

Use of stage

Double Suicide brings this activity to the forefront, with the kurogo often influencing, directing, and assisting live performers in their plays.Actors often come to a halt in the middle of a scene, allowing the kurogo to control the villain through it, or they kneel and watch closelyover their dark veils as a sensual scene unfolds as the next step toward the eventual shinju. According to some reviewers, the kurogo's ghostly presence resembles the hand of destiny leading the characters' lives. Although this interpretation increases a level of figurative meaning to the dramaturgy, the influence of these figures' mute physical appearance, as well as the mystique surrounding their work, creates an attraction that goes past any inquiry of symbolic meaning. On the one side, the film's breathtaking black-and-white shooting, the kurogo becomes yet another icon—the graphic properties of scenes. Brothels, streetlamps, windows, gravestones are built around them. The design of the walls and floors and the relationships created. The amid figure and ground reflect this acute understanding of the set's visual qualities.

The emphasis on  "staginess" in the film starts with the opening scene, which takes place in a bunraku puppet theater. The architecture and conventions of these nearly life-size wooden puppets are integrated into the structure of Double Suicide, complete with visible, black-clad, hooded puppeteers. Bunraku theater is known for its kurogo, which is the uncanny doubling of the puppeteers' figures.

Actors move through walls adorned with white and black figures suggestive of the ukiyo-e woodblock custom in early scenes in the pleasure quarters.Lovers, outfitted in kimonos that are black and white and sprinkled through the stage, blend in with the color black and white figures drawn on the floor, are filmed from above. The pleasure house's backdrop transforms into massive ink blotches as the film progresses, acting as a visual cipher for the unfolding confusion and collapse of social order. In Jihei's store, these graphic patterns evolved from scrawled calligraphic texts on the walls to single and shapeless brushstrokes with liquid inkdrops cascading through the walls in the film. The divisions devolve into artistic elements as the kurogo...