The Buddhist Trilogy

Director: AKIO JISSÔJI

Screenplay: AKIO JISSÔJI

Minutes: 415

Year: 1970

Release: Arrow Academy

Do you know the feeling of being so excited for something that you are prepared to elevate the object’s importance without regard to a personal feeling?

A few years back Arrow released a mesmerizing box set called Kijū Yoshida: Love + Anarchism. It is filled with some difficult films, all produced by the Art Theater Guild out of Japan. There are images from Eros + Massacre that, years later, I still cannot get out of my head.

Last year when Arrow announced the release of a new set called Akio Jissoji: The Buddhist Trilogy I preordered it the second I was able to do so. Then time got in the way. The set was first supposed to ship in September or October of 2018, by the end of December Amazon canceled my preorder. Months later I was sitting in an Arrow Video panel, at Texas Frightmare, and asked whether a release was still on the horizon, the answer was to be a little more patient. I later that day chatted with Louise Buckler, from Arrow, and she briefed me that their primary challenges were rights, and the Japanese postal service. This, naturally, elevated my excitement even higher.

Then there is a new official announcement, and I, once again, fire off a pre-order, this time with DiabolikDVD.com (from whom I recommend you order everything, this is not an ad). I received it and tore into it and This Transient Life was like being launched into space, then Mandala hit me like a wall at hyper speed, and I was still jarred when I watched Poem.  

From Arrowvideo.com:

Akio Jissôji created a rich and diverse body of work during his five decades in Japan’s film and television industries. For some, he is best-known for his science-fiction: the 1960s TV series Ultraman and 1988’s box-office success Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis. For others, it is his 1990s adaptations of horror and mystery novelist Edogawa Rampo, such as Watcher in the Attic and Murder on D Street. And then there are his New Wave films for the Art Theatre Guild, three of which – This Transient Life, Mandara and Poem, forming The Buddhist Trilogy – are collected here.

Winner of the Golden Leopard award at the 1970 Locarno Film Festival, This Transient Life is among the Art Theatre Guild’s most successful – and most controversial – productions. The film concerns a brother and sister from a rich family who defy the expectations placed on them: he has little interest in further education or his father’s business, instead obsessing over Buddhist statues; she continually refuses a string of suitors and the prospect of marriage. Their closeness, and isolation, gives way to an incestuous relationship which, in turn, breeds disaster. Mandara, Jissôji’s first colour feature, maintained the controversial subject matter, focusing on a cult who recruit through rape and hope to achieve true ecstasy through sexual release. Shot, as with all of Jissôji’s Art Theatre Guild works, in a radically stylised manner, the film sits somewhere between the pinku genre and the fiercely experimental approach of his Japanese New Wave contemporaries.

The final entry in the trilogy, Poem, returns to black and white and is centred on the austere existence of a young houseboy who becomes helplessly embroiled in the schemes of two brothers. Written by Toshirô Ishidô (screenwriter of Nagisa Ôshima’s The Sun’s Burial and Shôhei Imamura’s Black Rain), who also penned This Transient Life and Mandara, Poem continues the trilogy’s exploration of faith in a post-industrial world.

This Transient Life

It seems paramount that I break This Transient Life into two separate themes. I have experience with the faith struggle of a Christian and can postulate at length on the topic, but I don’t have similar experience with the erotic aspects of the film. While the two are intertwined, the former can be discussed separately from the latter.

The protagonist in This Transient Life (also called This Passing Life, or Mujo) Masao is an educated young man whose Buddhist faith is damaged by a pseudo nihilistic break when he realizes that if nirvana is only attainable through the purest of lives but, to him, happiness is only achieved through physical entanglements, many of which are not pure, then heaven (in the new translation) or nirvana must be a place with zero happiness. And thus, he sees no value, in this life or the next, in living a pious life.

It is through this nihilistic philosophy that Masao chooses to seduce his sister and fathers a child with her. This action is the mcguffin that keeps the story on the rails throughout. This, faithful reader, is what I cannot speak to, graciously.

My faith journey was challenged after an auto accident when I couldn’t differentiate between a proverbial faith bubble that protected me from serious harm, and a God who could have steered the car on my behalf to stop the accident. This is before I had considered studying philosophy on any level, so my teenaged mind was crushed under the weight of God saving my life versus God putting my life in danger. I say this to suggest that I understand this part of Masao’s character.

As I mentioned that is where the similarities stop. I might argue that Masao’s sexual escapades may suggest that his spirituality didn’t require much force for it to snap, but, that is not mine to judge. It makes me wonder how autobiographical the film might be, not to suggest that Jissoji had any taboo relationships, rather if his faith was shattered in a similar way.

I suppose that this is a long way to say that there is a significant amount to unpack with this film. It is interesting that Jissoji chooses to challenge a viewer’s personal morality on two fronts simultaneously. This Transient Life is why I want you to purchase this set, know this.

Mandala

The second film, Mandala, alternates between a Bergman treatise on the philosophical meaning of existence, a Godardian experiment of sex and film theory, and a Shaw Brothers kung fu flick. I hope, based on that sentence that you might understand how little I understood the film. While engaging and entrancing Mandala is an example of an amateur avant garde picture in that there is little clear purpose aside from a director plumbing the depths of his understanding of life.

I think that the director is trying to understand physical love in his modern and repressive time. There are several scenes of rape with a justification of toxic masculinity, which detracts from my interest in promoting the set. This opens a philosophical pandora’s box of excuses for men not being equipped and able to investigate their sexuality outside of historical expectations and norms. In a perfect world films like these would have been made differently and there wouldn’t be a precedent of saving the princess.

Even with the brutality of the rape scenes the film has a few redeeming artistic factors. Not enough to redeem the content but many of the shot compositions are interesting. But that isn’t nearly enough to be me want to revisit it any time soon, nor does it make it possible for me to recommend it.

Poem

Poem is a peculiar film to follow the toxicity of Mandala since its theme are like a dirty Douglas Sirk melodrama that, at times, plays like a Carl Th Dreyer religious tale about a family trying to decide how to manage their inheritance. On one side there is interest in maintaining the property as a spiritual center and the other cashing in because the property has a great deal of value.

An argument can be made the Poem is a representation of the constant modernization of society. I have heard my Dad talk about how it used to be with a snide reaction and, sadly, I have noticed myself thinking it. The further and further technology progresses the further we get from the society of our grandparents. It is not my place to tell you how you should feel about this, but the film can bring an understanding to the forefront of you mind and could make it easier for a younger person to understand the feeling of their opposites a touch better.

Mandala is my primary issue with this set. I would recommend that you seek out the opinions of others on this because it is sort of a deal breaker for me. I knew that the eroticism was a key aspect of these films going in and this doesn’t bother me until it become out right sexual assault. The relationship in This Transient Life near crosses the line but then looks tame next to Mandala. If you chose to purchase this set, and I do gladly recommend This Transient Life and Poem, my recommendation, when it comes to Mandala, is to skip it.

Special Features:

• High Definition Blu-Ray (1080p) presentations of This Transient Life, Mandala and Poem
• Original uncompressed LPCM mono 1.0 audio on all three films
• Newly translated optional English subtitles
• Introductions to all three films in the Trilogy by David Desser, author of Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave
• Scene-select commentaries on all three films by Desser
• It Was a Faint Dream, Akio Jissôji’s 1974 film for the ATG, presented in High Definition
• Theatrical trailers for Mandala, Poem and It Was a Faint Dream
• Limited edition packaging, fully illustrated by maarko phntm
• Illustrated 60-page perfect-bound collector’s book featuring new writings on the films by Tom Mes, Anton Bitel and Espen Bale