Adapted from the renowned novel by Shusaku Endo Masahiro Shinoda's 1971 film Silence (Chinmoku co-written with Endo) explores the violent cultural conflict amid the arrival of Jesuit missionaries in seventeenth-century Japan. Shinoda's excellent direction - coupled with a pensive score by the legendary Toru Takemitsu - gives cinematic expression to inner spiritual paradox and imbues with religious mystery a landscape that seems already sentient with wind rain and light. Two Port
I was immediately drawn to this film by its subject matter: a story of Portugese Jesuit missionaries arriving in 17th century Japan, directed by one of key figures of the Japanese New Wave, Masahiro Shinoda, and scored by the legendary Toru Takemitsu. Add to this it was being released by the impeccable Masters of Cinema label, and I was sold.
Did it live up to my expectations? The answer is absolutely. I have long been fascinated by the relations between the East and West, and 'Silence' is a rare chance (for Western viewers) to see an Eastern perspective on the work of devout Christians spreading their religion to the four corners of the globe. Before I saw this film I was only dimly aware of Christianity in Japan, and thus the film becomes fascinating as a piece of history asides from the quality of the movie itself.
We discover the Jesuits first arrived in 1549 during the Sengoku/Civil War era, when a unified Japanese state no longer existed. Over the next forty years the number of converts reached a quarter of a million, but the changing fortunes of war and politics among the Japanese saw the formal decision by the reunified state of the Tokugawa shogunate to ban Christianity and to follow it up with a policy of persecution, torture, and execution. This is the compelling background to the film as two Jesuits arrive secretly on the shores of Japan. They are sheltered by poor Christian villagers who have secretly kept the faith going, constantly facing persecution. To their despair the villagers follow a religion that seems to have fused Japan's native myths and customs with their cherished Catholicism. Religion mutates, it would seem.
I won't spoil any further plot details, except to say that inevitably the priests fall into the hands of the authorities, and religious zeal in the face of state oppression is given very serious questioning. Who has the right to spread their beliefs if they know that the result be the persecution of those they convert? This is only one of the tough questions Shinoda gives us in 'Silence'. Visually the film is provocative and compelling, and Takemitsu's core is wonderful, mixing Western melodies and Japanese dissonance to great effect (capturing the tension between cultures). And the silence of the film's title? The silence of God, of course.
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Masahiro Shinoda directs this historical Japanese drama that explores the lives of religious missionaries in the 17th century. Japan was under a strict policy of self-imposed exclusion for 400 years and the reward for anyone fetching up on their shores during that was, officially, death. In this film, two Portuguese missionaries land on a remote Japanese shore under cover of darkness to infiltrate local Christians in order to find out what happened to an earlier priest sent there. Locally, Christianity has been driven underground after an earlier surge in popularity by an insecure and brutal government. Japanese fans of the bible must now read it in secret locations in the wilds. As they go about their mission, they come up against government informers and persecution almost immediately. One of them, Padre Rodrigues (David Lamson), is arrested and tortured in an attempt to make him deny his faith. He faces a spiritual crisis as he is gradually forced to see that his faith might not be the rock he imagined and that the people he thinks he's saving might not be doing so badly without Christianity.
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