Japanese Sword Fencing (1897)
The earliest surviving Japanese film showing the martial art of kendo.
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When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.
It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.
The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.
At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.
Here we have the earliest samurai flick on record -- although whether it was filmed by a cameraman in Japan or taken of a traveling troupe of Japanese performers in Paris I have no idea. Europe had been fascinated by Japan and Japanese culture for some time, ever since Perry had opened the country to westerners in 1854; and Gilbert & Sullivan had produced THE MIKADO a dozen years before this.Although this seems a rough and chaotic mêlée, it is the very chaotic nature of the action that maintains its interest; the viewer's eye is drawn from one flashing weapon to the other and never has the chance to grow bored. Compare this with the mannered, almost sedate way such combats are choreographed in the works of, say, Kurosawa.