Kuroneko

Shindo’s films are so sleek and sexy, even when they’re rape-revenge ghost stories. A lot of the compositions remind me of Alain Resnais. Crisp and full of geometric lines, though Shindo differs from Resnais in mostly making use of the natural world as opposed to solely architecture to bring about these compositions. The feminist arc of this film is genius — the animalism of man and the powers of the female spirit. I wonder what sort of statement was trying to be made by having the emperor in hikimayu. To my knowledge, that’s generally (and traditionally) a feminine form of make-up — but that would lie on whether or not this film was intended to be set in the latter part of the Heian period where men did in fact had a stint of wearing hikimayu, ohaguro, and painting their faces with oshiroi.