Shura (Demons, Pandemonium) by Toshio Matsumoto

Toshio Matsumoto is a well-known, award winning pioneer of avant-garde documentary, experimental film, multimedia, and video art in Japan. His books on film theory have significantly influenced the younger generation of Japanese filmmakers. Less known than his famous colleague representatives of the new Japanese wave (Nagisa Oshima, Kiju Yoshida, Masahiro Shinoda) Toshio Matsumoto, coming from experimental cinema and documentary film, has made only five feature films. With his radical approach and audacious style he challenged the traditional codes of cinematographic representation. After the scandal of Funeral Procession of Roses (Bara no s�retsu, 1969) - a parody of the myth of Oedipus situated in the gay bars of Shinjuku - his second feature film Shura (1971) again perfectly illustrates Matsumoto's modern approach to cinema. An adaptation of a traditional Kabuki play, this Dantesque drama explores human cruelty with a cynicism and an irony rarely seen. But under the direction of Matsumoto, the traditional framework is used as ground for visual and narrative experiments scrambling the perception of the spectator while staying true to the complexity of the original.