February 21: The Sword of Doom
Join us for Movie Night at the OACC!
This month we will be screening The Sword of Doom (大菩薩峠 Dai-bosatsu tōge) by Japanese filmmaker Kihachi Okamoto. The film stars Tatsuya Nakadai and Toshiro Mifune in a story of a wandering samurai, surrounded by - and the cause of - a maelstrom of violence. “The sword is the soul. An evil sword is an evil sword.” In his 1967 review of the film, New York Times critic Howard Thompson called The Sword of Doom “a stark, meshed and well-made film, not for the squeamish.” Film critic and cultural historian Geoffrey O’Brien wrote, in his notes for the Criterion Collection release of the film:
Kihachi Okamoto’s The Sword of Doom is likely to strike the innocent viewer as an exercise in absurdist violence, tracking the career of a nihilistic swordsman from his gratuitous murder of a defenseless old man to his final descent into what looks like a rehearsal for global annihilation, as, in a kind of ecstasy, he slaughters a seemingly endless army of attackers both real and phantasmal. The extreme but stylized violence of Okamoto’s film epitomizes a style of Japanese filmmaking that profoundly influenced such directors as Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, and it would be easy - and not entirely inaccurate - to read the film in the light of the cynical antiheroic trends that surfaced in genre films all over the world in the 1960s and surmise that it represented the same kind of break with heroic tradition as, say, spaghetti Westerns.
The film will be introduced by curator and cultural producer Aaron Harbour. Based in Oakland, CA, Harbour received some modicum of education at the San Francisco Art Institute. He curates shows at MacArthur B Arthur in Oakland. He runs an art critique blog on Facebook as Curiously Direct and write occasional long-form reviews for Artcards. He has performed his music and/or DJed at various venues throughout the Bay Area such as the Berkeley Art Museum, Mighty, Club 6, LiPo Lounge, and Southern Exposure.
Sword of doom - Kihachi Okamoto - Trailer by k-chan
The Sword of Doom
1966
119 minutes
7pm Tuesday
February 21, 2012
Visit the event page on Facebook!
$5 suggested donation, no one is turned away due to lack of funds.
Oakland Asian Cultural Center
388 Ninth Street, Suite 290 (btwn. Franklin and Webster Street)
Oakland, CA 94607
Movie Night at the OACC is sponsored by the Oakland Asian Cultural Center. For more information about the OACC, please visit www.oacc.cc.
Movie Night at the OACC is a monthly screening night organized by Jackie Im.
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popcacophony reblogged this from oaccmovienight and added:
happening tomorrow night (well…in five minutes, tonight). If you’re
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