Toshio Matsumoto: Demons (35mm)
’25
Lange Steenstraat 14
B-9000 Gent
Demons © Postwar Japan Moving Image Archive (PJMIA), Toshio Matsumoto
Lange Steenstraat 14
B-9000 Gent
Experimental filmmaker and critic Toshio Matsumoto followed up his queer opus, Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), with a “mere” samurai film, yet underneath its seemingly traditional surface lurks just as many subversions. A Borgesian satire in the guise of samurai horror, this nocturnal masterpiece is one of the darkest films of its era, both visually and politically.
! We had the 35mm print specially shipped from Japan, as the film is not available in an officially issued digital format.
This month, the Postwar Japan Moving Image Archive (PJMIA) just published the second volume of Matsumoto’s collected writings covering the period (1966−1971) leading up to the realization of Demons.
In collaboration with Kuru and Japan-Square festival (March 19 – 23)
Toshio Matsumoto
Demons (Shura)
Demons (aka Shura aka Pandemonium) plays as much with contemporary notions of the “real” in cinema as it does with classic tragedy in telling of the samurai Gengobe’s vendetta. As in Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge (1963), play-acting and voyeurism link fantasy to reality, but here it is Gengobe who is drawn into a netherworld of spiraling confusion, lashing out at his own demons
“One of the most important and beautiful films made in Japan since Kurosawa’s prime.”
— Noel Burch, To the Distant Observer
“When I look back, it seems that I have lived in an inferno for the last twenty years. I have been angry so many times, and involved in well-nigh bloody clashes with others. I still remember how misunderstanding bred misunderstanding, till I found the given situation irremediable… That kind of experience is what prompted me to make Pandemonium. This world is indeed pandemonium… Living with the burden of its plight has put me constantly in direct contact with this question: “Can a human being be saved?” By weaving many painful phases of my youth into this film, I tried to make of it a requiem.”
— Toshio Matsumoto
Demons © Postwar Japan Moving Image Archive (PJMIA), Toshio Matsumoto