The Lumière Pageant Presents a Trio of Gorgeous Meiko Kaji Motion pictures

30 years after Japanese moviegoers first heard “The Flower of Carnage,” the theme tune of Toshio Fujita’s “Girl Snowblood” sung by star Meiko Kaji, it got here to mainstream Western audiences through Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Invoice.” Kaji’s candy, clear voice sings a couple of “lady who walks on the brink of life and demise,” and Uma Thurman slices the highest off Lucy Liu’s head, the place three many years earlier than, her tune had soundtracked one other grievously wounded, kimono-ed magnificence whose final breath is captured in full-face close-up earlier than she staggers to her knees within the snow. The trio of Kaji’s movies, together with “Girl Snowblood,” taking part in the Lumière Pageant this week, invite us to (re)go to this fascinating icon’s work contemporary from the supply, and discover in it a bristling, revolutionary vitality typically absent from the numerous motion pictures that cite it as an affect.  

1973’s “Girl Snowblood” might be essentially the most “respectable” of the three movies featured, with Kaji taking part in a younger lady whose very conception was a calculated act, orchestrated by her mom to deliver into the world a toddler whose sole goal in life can be implacable revenge on the miscreants who raped her and murdered her husband and son. Director Fujita was already established within the youth-oriented melodrama style, so the extremely stylized violence of “Snowblood” during which geysers of bright-red blood gush from essentially the most superficial wounds, was a departure, that nonetheless turned the work for which he’s best-known internationally.

“Feminine Prisoner 701: Scorpion,” in contrast, was the primary movie from Shunya Ito, and stars Kaji as a girl betrayed by her faithless police detective boyfriend and despatched to a girls’s jail. There she is reborn as “Scorpion,” a taciturn insurgent with snarling eyes glimpsed between the parted curtains of her whipping, whirling, black hair, who has a genius for absorbing the sadistic punishments of sneering male guards and poisonous feminine fellow prisoners alike, solely to repay them tenfold on the earliest alternative. Ito’s filmmaking bravado elevates the grubby materials (even a gang rape scene, shot by a glass flooring turns into a curiously dreamlike expertise), however arguably this was solely the dry run for the heights of expressivity he would obtain within the first of the movie’s three sequels.

“Feminine Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41” is, basically, an exploitation masterpiece, during which an incoherent story that includes Scorpion staging a mass jail breakout, is merely an excuse for giddy grindhouse experimentation. Surrealist interludes; our bodies that flip into autumn leaves that blow into winter; grisly garottings carried out on rotating rigs; “Jailhouse 41” is actually dazzling in its formal inventiveness. But a lot of the visible exuberance is constructed round a easy but immensely potent picture: Whether or not in partial dissolve, or spliced onto one half of the display screen, or framed from forehead to chin to fill all the subject of the digital camera’s imaginative and prescient, Kaji’s is the form of face that reminds you why the close-up was invented.   

All three motion pictures got here out inside a 16 month interval, but characterize solely the tiniest sliver of Kaji’s filmography. Within the 4 years 1969-1973 she appeared in no fewer than 40 options, a borderline inhuman charge of labor that contributed to a disillusion with the business that pushed her extra towards tv within the Nineteen Eighties. As this pulpy, exploitative, grotesque and implausible triptych proves, the small display screen’s achieve was the massive display screen’s colossal loss; seldom has the archetype of the vengeful virago been given extra exquisitely cinematic type than in Meiko Kaji, a human flower of carnage certainly.