Nagisa Oshima begins Manual of Ninja Martial Arts, a 1967 political anime based on the manga by Sanpei Shirato, with an intertitle: "In sixteenth century Japan, parallel to rapid advances being made in swordsmanship, another martial art called ninjutsu was secretly developed to cope with the necessities of the turbulent times. Those skilled in ninjutsu were called ninja, and they mastered various combat techniques, which enabled them to act almost like magicians. They were engaged mainly in secret services and played an important role in Japan's history, though not in an expected way."



The 1960s were a turbulent decade for the Japanese film art and industry, framed by two massive, unsuccessful protests by multitude of student, worker, intellectual and artist communities against the signing of the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty Anpo in 1960 and 1970. Political issues resonated in the changing modes of film production, stylistic orientations and reception: from the studio-induced and restrained New Wave, television's remediation of film, the increasing commercialization of the film industry, but also in the explosion of the genre forms, to the manifest avant-garde films and movements. Oshima's allegorical provocation can be understood as double strategy of guerrilla activity, an activist call to "Tokyo Wars" and reaction to "ninja" film artists of the 1960s who returned a sense of crisis and pessimistic worldview of the particular political and moral situation back to the authentic fatalistic space of historical film.



A comprehensive category of historical dramas jidai-geki, which includes narratives from the centuries of Japanese culture and history, is considered the first Japanese film genre, which functioned as oral and folk literature, transmitting the common heritage of Japanese narrative memory from film to film. Often mentioned as one of the first films is Great Bodhisattva Pass (Daibosatsu toge), a 1913 adaptation of the epic novel in installments by Kaizano Nakazata, who reworked the story from the oral literary and storytelling heritage kodan about nihilistic swordsman and initiated the transmedia trend of modernization of stories and heroes from the Edo period or the last Tokugawa shogunate (1600 - 1868) for film and theater. Perhaps the most famous stylistic exercise is a story about forty-seven loyal ronins, which had been remade more than 220 times even before 1960. Movies about samurais and other skilled swordsmen, from the gamblers yakuza to other action movies with swords chambara, included, together with vagabonds, dupers and delinquents, characters of mysterious spies, mercenaries, masked assassins of "cloak and sword", related to stories of shinobi, or ninja. However, the secrecy of ninjutsu was preserved to the early 1960s when they were appropriated by popular culture, from manga and newspaper series to the film studios' triple program installments. After World War II, among the many prohibitions of cultural contents from the feudal past, the Occupation Forces had prohibited and banned the production of the historical film genre, so soon after their departure from Japan there was a revival and a dramatic increase in jidai-geki production, culminating in 1954, the peak year for Japanese film industry. Number of produced samurai films (the name is often used for the whole historical genre) in 1960 amounted to 165 films, and along with 391 contemporary dramas the Japanese film industry produced 556 films at the beginning of its crisis. Actual ninjutsu practitioners blamed the film industry for the negative image of ninja skills. Among the common misconceptions, they cite examples of ninjas walking on water, instead of walking with floating sandals, and of disappearance, instead of their disappearing techniques, for example, by setting off small explosives that create clouds of smoke. It's not true, they say, that they were hired assassins; they were secret agents for gathering hidden tactics and strategies of the opponents. It is believed that they were spies, but they were actually warriors whose skills included surveillance techniques and devices well ahead of their time.



The first film that we will see in this program is also the first authentic film about the mysteries of shinobi (shinobi is an alternative reading of the word ninja) Shinobi no mono aka Band of Assassins by Satsuo Yamamoto, a filmmaker of the poetic-realistic style. The uniqueness of this film is in collaboration with Masaaki Hatsumi, a founder and teacher of the school of martial arts Bujinkan Dojo and his teacher Toshitsugu Takamatsu. In fact, filmmaker Yamamoto invited Hatsumi to be an expert advisor on Band of Assassins and while creating the character of Momochi Sandayu, actor Yunosuke Ito went to the house of the master Takamatsu and watched his daily life and behavior in ninpo. Shinobi no mono is also a title of the novel by Tomoyoshi Murayama, which was published in installments from 1960 to 1962 in the Sunday edition of the newspaper Akahata, and this movie is the first of seven adaptations of the stories with Goemon Ishikawa (portrayed by Raizo Ichikawa), a folk hero in oral literature and kabuki plays, and who, a legend claims, was cruelly punished for his outlaw skills by being boiled alive in an iron cauldron. Yamamoto combines lyrical and naturalistic episodes from the youth of his warrior who tries to define his losing identity in the context of the feudal principle of the late Tokugawa era, "He was born in the dark to die in the dark, that's his destiny."



Folk legends about ninjas associate their origin with the demon that was half-man half-crow, and Yamamoto frames the story on occult school with images of the crows as a key icon of the film. Occultist on duty must be insensitive to shame, just the opposite of the samurai, he has to be treacherous, dishonorable, shrewd, and use all sorts of dirty tricks: "One man rules the two towers as two different men to cause both sides to fight for the same goal. This is the secret principle of occultism." The film introduces motifs, types of actions, characters and iconography that were recognizable to Japanese moviegoers of the time, and that will become permanent, as we will see in other jidai-geki films. In addition to clothes, the icons of the genre are special weapons and devices, from the pyrotechnics, ropes and chains with dangerous extensions to swords, daggers or variants of sharp throwing stars that fit into a fist and strike an enemy from afar.



We will finally see two films by Tai Kato, Samurai Vagabond (Kaze no bushi, 1964) and Brave Records of the Sanada Clan (Sanada fuunroku, 1963), a stylists of the montage film who persists in a distinctive low camera angle with medium shots and long takes of the characters, in conjunction with blocks of attractions whose abrupt cuts destroy genre and artistic expectations, which could be one of the reasons for the late revalorization of his work. In his youth he lived with his uncle Sadao Yamanaka, a jidai-geki filmmaker of the Vigo's fate, he had elaborated Ozu's low camera position and especially, with the enthusiasm of the pioneers of film, the early tricks by Daisuke Ito and Abel Gance. His camera becomes an invisible warrior, poetic symbol of disorder and unrest. Screenplay of Samurai Vagabond is an adaptation of a novel about ninjas by Ryotaro Shiba that was published in newspapers from 1960 to 1961. Tai Kato, along with screenwriter Tatsuo Nogami, writer of many jidai-geki film at Toei company, developed a genre blend of melodrama with swords. Even stranger is a cross-genre of "singing ninjas" in Brave Records of the Sanada Clan (1962) about young delinquents, orphans after the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, who originate Sanada clan. Their ninja is a loner Sasuke, who as a child was exposed to meteoric radiation and can read minds and hearts with laser beams emanating from blueness of his eyes, and he can disappear, become invisible. Many films of the 1960s inscribe into their corpus trauma of atomic shadows. The screenplay of the film was originally written for a theater play about protests of Zengakuren movement against re-signing of the US-Japan Security Treaty two years earlier, so reaction to contemporary political violence is strategically moved to a period of feudal power struggles.



Allegorical reflections by Masahiro Shinoda, one of the filmmakers (along with Nagisa Oshima and Yoshishige Yoshida), with whom Shochiku Nuberu Bagu began, as well as a broader movement of a new film of the 1960s, displace the circumstances of the current political situation in a historical context. His film Samurai Spy (Ibun Sarutobi Sasuke, 1965), based on a novel by Koji Nakata with idealistic hero on the run ("I'm haunted, something is always haunting me."), is a reflection of the Cold War. In a long, descriptive prologue on the Battle of Sekigahara, a voice-over narrates the divisions that appeared when the Tokugawa clan took control of the country and the circumstances for the creation of networks of spies from both sides, as well as the conflict between Hideyori Toyotomi and Ieyasa Tokugawa, fourteen years later, in 1614. Shinoda introduces an icon of a dead crow and a boy who appear in the scenes with the two shinobi warriors. Archetypal division of good and evil is emphasized by aestheticism of black and white elements of image, creating a flat, frozen forms, such as the white ninja over a black or white background. Theatrical sign in film, which attracts many Japanese filmmakers, especially a critical modernist current, is a dominant mode of Shinoda's film. He studied theatre arts and he worked on screenplays for several films with avant-garde poet of theater and film Shuji Terayama. Shinoda's famous adaptation of a Chikamatsu's puppet drama - bunraku Double Suicide (Shinju: Ten no amijima, 1969) introduces a black figures of puppeteers - stage workers, whose costume and movement in their work merges with black, white or blue backgrounds. Ceremony of the mise-en-scène in formalized images, phantasmagoria of the camera and editing for a perspective and movement of shinobi, rapid direction changes, filages, jumps and falls in slow motion, with the sensuality of Toru Takemitsu's music, are creating imaginary, timeless landscape of Samurai Spy.



Melodrama without sentimentality, set in 1836, Actor's Revenge (Yukinojo henge, 1963) about Nakamura Yukinojo who became oyama , an actor for female roles in kabuki theater to prepare the perfect revenge against three government officials guilty for bankruptcy and the death of his parents, is a masterful film by classic of Japanese cinema Kona Ichikawa, his Emma Zunz. Ichikawa, a filmmaker of diverse oeuvre from wartime horrors, documentaries to comedies, for six decades has consistently developed his controlled visual style, with rigorous storyboard of manga, in whose diverse themes and genres we can see his fixation with discrete images and knowledge of animation. In this film, an adaptation of a newspaper serial by Mikami Otokichi and a remake of the eponymous film and screenplay of a historical avant-gardist Teinosuke Kinugasa in 1935, dominates a distanced flamboyance of style and aesthetics at the edge of camp. With Kinugasa (who also performed as oyama in theater and film), screenplay is signed also by Daisuke Ito, the inventor and innovator of jidai-geki attractions. Kazuo Hasegawa played his 300th role, namely - the two three-hundredth roles, the character of half-man half-woman, an actor of female roles that keeps the make-up and women's kimono for the whole film, and the character of a good bad guy, a carefree vagabond and thief who transfers stolen goods from the rich to poor. The roles of an actor for female characters Yukinojo and thief Yamitaro are Hasegawa's reenactment of the characters that he played 28 years earlier, and in addition in Kinugasa's film he played the third role, his mother. Kon Ichikawa made ​​a lucid gender trouble in scenes with Hasegawa who as female-male character, in women's clothing and theatrical make-up, seduces young girl who is blindly in love, while his voice-off, as conscience outside the image, coldly admits fraud for revenge; or in the scene of his narcissistic flirting between his female-male character with his man double. Both his characters are excellent swordsmen, and the scene with rope, the one of the icons of shinobi film, whose thread pulls the outside world through the black image, is an indication of the stylistic play of this film. The narrator of the film is the most famous benshi, a narrator for silent films, Musei Tokugawa.



This year's genre program of Japanese cinema prepared by Japan Foundation in Tokyo and the Japanese Embassy in Zagreb, will link the strategies and techniques of mimicry of ninjas, samurai and skillful actors of historical film with supernatural bodies of three futuristic, dystopian feature animas. First look at the eternity through stars is melancholic retro-futurism by Rintaro in Galaxy Express 999 (Ginga tetsudo three-nine, 1979.), trans-galactic coming-of-age of a boy Tetsuro and lesson on humanity, from the desire for the immortal machine body to the realization that consciousness can migrate only in the human bodies. The film is one of the many adaptations of manga by Leiji Matsumoto (co-writer is Kon Ichikawa), inspired by the novel Night Train to the Stars by poet Kenji Miyazawa, written around the 1927, and the question "What is true happiness?". Cyborg 009 (Cho ginga densetsu, 1980), directed by Masayuki Akebi, is one of the adaptation of manga by Shotaro Ishinomori about a rebellion of nine cyborgs, stereotypical representatives of different nations who have been kidnapped and subjected to experiment of acquiring supernatural powers. The mission against World War I and the end of the world is a technical reflection on Japanese post-homogeneous society. Anima by Mamoru Hosode The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (Toki o kakeru shojo, 2006) was inspired by the novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui, and after a successful film, as a permanent transmedia leap in Japanese culture, Ranmaru Kotone made an adaptation for a manga. What would you do if you got a limited number of jumps through time? – is a question posed to us by the last anima in this year's Japanese program, a gentle instruction from the present for adolescent leaps to the memory of the world. (Tanja Vrvilo)