Style and Themes
Shindo said that he saw film "as an art of 'montage' which consists of a dialectic or interaction between the movement and the nonmovement of the image." Although criticized for having little visual style early in his career, he was praised by film critic Joan Mellen who called Onibaba "visually exquisite." When interviewed by Mellen after the release of the film Kuroneko, Shindo stated that there was "a strong Freudian influence throughout all of work."
The strongest and most apparent themes in Shindo's work involve social criticism of poverty, women and sexuality. Shindo has described himself as a socialist. Tadao Sato has pointed out that Shindo's political films are both a reflection of his impoverished childhood and the condition of Japan after World War II, stating that, "Contemporary Japan has developed from an agricultural into an industrial country. Many agricultural people moved to cities and threw themselves into new precarious lives. Kaneto Shindo's style of camerawork comes from this intention to conquer such uneasiness by depicting the perseverance and persistence of farmers."
Women and human sexuality also play a major role in Shindo's films. Joan Mellen wrote that "at their best, Shindo's films involve a merging of the sexual with the social. His radical perception isolates man's sexual life in the context of his role as a member of a specific social class...For Shindo our passions as biological beings and our ambitions as members of social classes, which give specific and distorted form to those drives, induce an endless struggle within the unconscious. Those moments in his films when this warfare is visualized and brought to conscious life raise his work to the level of the highest art."
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