The name of Masahiro Shinoda, Japanese filmmaker born in 1931, is not very well known in France, and even less his films. With the notable exception of Silence (1971) which owes all or part of its notoriety to its selection in competition at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival. The film is however not representative of a work begun in the early 1960s in the turbulent ranks of the “New Wave” launched by the Shochiku studio, with small urban and stylized films on rebellious youth or wars between yakusas.
Silence belongs to a more prestigious type of production, historical fiction in costume which exchanges the stylistic effusions of the beginnings for a disciplined form. Its standing nonetheless makes it a fascinating work, one of the few to tackle with such complexity the reason for the clash of civilizations, and that Carlotta has the good idea to make available in a single edition (DVD or Blu-ray). and restored copy.
Adapted from the eponymous novel by Christian writer Shusaku Endo, which has been screened several times, and of which Martin Scorsese will give a rather pompous version in 2016, the film looks at this moment of the 18th century.e century when Christianity was banned in Japan and the faithful (the kirishtan), persecuted, after a first wave of conversion instilled in the Archipelago by the arrival of the Portuguese Jesuits. It was then that two missionaries, Fathers Rodrigo (David Lampson) and Garrpe (Don Kenny), arrived from Macao on the southern coasts, in search of their spiritual father, Father Ferreira, who had been missing for years.
Picked up and hidden by a small fishing village, they are soon denounced and handed over to the local authorities. A standoff then begins between Governor Inoue (Eiji Okada), who demands apostasy from Christians, and even more so that highly symbolic of clerics, and Rodrigo, who stubbornly refuses to do so, while the villagers are tortured. one by one before his eyes. What will happen to this resolution in view of its exorbitant cost in human and innocent lives?
Dialogue of cultures
The beauty of Silence comes from the fact that it does not carry out the expected martyrology, nor does it stick to the plea pro domo for the Christian minority, but recaptures them both in a broader and deeper problematic, which concerns the harsh but necessary dialogue of cultures. At first, the film embraces the sacrificial destiny of Father Rodrigo as a repetition of the Christic passion: first in the service of an underground people, similar in this to the primitive Christians of ancient Rome, he is betrayed by the guide Kichijiro , a local Judas, and dragged along the country paths, shackles on his wrists and bloody feet.
You have 36.11% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.