Moving the Horizon: Violence and Cinematic Revolution in Ōshima Nagisa’s Ninja bugeichō

Ōshima Nagisa’s 1967 film Ninja bugeichō (Band of Ninja) and Walter Benjamin’s 1921 “Critique of Violence” participate in two very different historical horizons of the theorization of violence. Yet they have something structurally in common: both envision or imagine an “other form” of violence that would interrupt the naturalized continuities of time and would challenge the current orders of law and state power. Both interrupt a temporal horizon, layering and challenging the perspectives of linear historiography with an altered trajectory of time. But in the case of Ōshima, this vision of a violent disturbance to the current order of law is performed through a literal movement of lines, the curving and curling, crossing and swirling of Shirato Sanpei and his sister’s drawings, which Ōshima films directly into his rapid-fire and extended (131 minutes), nearly overwhelming montage, Ninja bugeichō.

Benjamin’s ideas of violence, though obscure, were already a presence in the philosophical apparatus of the late 1960s and early 1970s Japan. Iconically, in Higashi Yōichi’s slightly later film Yasashii Nipponjin (1971, Gentle Japanese), a politically engaged character working at a motorcycle repair shop reads out an excerpt from Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” while another character says bluntly that he has no idea what it means, no idea what such philosophical discourse has to do with the day-to-day reality of the political struggle at hand.¹ The position Ōshima takes in his writings on this film draws in both poles of their debate: he argues that the “spirit of revolution” (political struggle) and the “spirit of experimentation” (philosophically, in relation to the medium) are both crucial to the “leap” that is Ninja bugeichō, a leap he asserts is necessary to challenge commonsense frames of cinema and social forms more broadly.²

Benjamin defines a contrast between lawmaking and law-destroying violence. He writes:

If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them. If mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood.³

On the surface, what could appear to be more in line with animation’s plasticity than the image of a bloodless violence? Divine violence, which for Benjamin is a saving form of violence, “destroys boundaries” and as such moves edges, switches the lines around, changes fixed frames and perspectives. In his writings on this film, it is true that Ōshima is boundlessly interested in blood, “how people shed blood in order to change situations (jōkyō), and how history is moved by that blood.” ⁴ Yet the blood thematized here is a form of line, a structure of perception that generates a perpetual, nonfinal, endlessly successive subjectivity of revolution.⁵ In other words, what is important in Ninja bugeichō is not so much the individual death, the individual’s blood, as the continual revival of what the film and gekiga envision as the energy and power of revolution from one generation and historical moment to another.

Kagemaru, the hero of Ninja bugeichō, represents a force of violence outside the law, like that theorized by Benjamin as follows:

But if the existence of violence outside the law, as pure immediate violence, is assured, this furnishes proof that revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence by man, is possible, and shows by what means. Less possible and also less urgent for humankind, however, is to decide when unalloyed violence has been realized in particular cases.⁶

For Benjamin, though he is also interested in the possibilities of nonviolence, there is an interruption or breach, a caesura that comes to receive the name Gewalt (a term that also means “power”) that would be law destroying, breaking the naturalized continuity of time and “fate.” Rather than “mythic violence,” which for Benjamin constitutes a pernicious and rotten equivalent of law-making and the semi-invisible law-sustaining violence, this other kind of (somewhat messianic, call it “Kagemaru”) violence...