Action · Drama · History
Japanese (切腹)
1962 · Directed by Masaki Kobayashi · 135 min
Japan, 1630. A masterless samurai arrives at a powerful clan's gates and asks to use their courtyard to end his life with honour. The clan's counselors suspect a bluff, and the long, formal conversation that follows becomes a slow, tense test of what honour is worth.
Why it matters in cinema history
A defining film of the revisionist samurai cinema of the early 1960s, it used the genre's own conventions to question the code of honour that older swordplay films had celebrated.
Watch with intention
Watch it as a trial in which every speaker is both sincere and performing, and ask who controls the story being told.
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