Made three years after the colour epic "Kaidan" (1964), two years after the break-up of Kurosawa and Mifune in "Akahige" (1965) and five years after Kobayashi's hit for the rival Shochiku "Harakiri" (1962), "Jôi-uchi: Hairyô tsuma shimatsu" (1967), known in English as "Samurai Rebellion" is just as good as I've come to expect from Kobayashi. While there are similarities to past films (Mifune takes justice in his own hands, Kobayashi paints a rotten society and his heroes and heroines, if you want to call them such for all their suffering, are faced with an impossible task and fall between), "Samurai Rebellion" is to "Harakiri" what "Tsubaki Sanjûrô" (1962) is to "Yôjinbô" (1961): a thematic and stylistically sibling that annotates, expands and elaborates the thesis Kobayashi explored in 1962 of both the social injustice masquerading as clan tradition and law and the radically dimensional visual vocabulary built around rigid shapes and symmetries.
If there's a single motif that runs through Kobayashi's work it's the inevitability of risk. Risk both in the story but also in the filmmaking. He's stylistically brilliant, a true master of moving the camera geometrically and harmoniously, that one might expect an equally harmonious narrative. But that's not Kobayashi: his stories take him to witness such cruelty, both without and within that the contextual discrepancy between the formal beauty of the film and its shocking narrative underline the cruel irony that befits the film, in fact lives and breathes it.
At this writing the Criterion Collection DVD of the film is already nine years old, not that the DVD wouldn't be excellent for being nine years and in standard definition. But one does wonder when it'll be released on Blu-ray.
If there's a single motif that runs through Kobayashi's work it's the inevitability of risk. Risk both in the story but also in the filmmaking. He's stylistically brilliant, a true master of moving the camera geometrically and harmoniously, that one might expect an equally harmonious narrative. But that's not Kobayashi: his stories take him to witness such cruelty, both without and within that the contextual discrepancy between the formal beauty of the film and its shocking narrative underline the cruel irony that befits the film, in fact lives and breathes it.
At this writing the Criterion Collection DVD of the film is already nine years old, not that the DVD wouldn't be excellent for being nine years and in standard definition. But one does wonder when it'll be released on Blu-ray.