Japanese Sword Fencing (1897)
The earliest surviving Japanese film showing the martial art of kendo.
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I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.
This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.
While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.
The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.
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.