Filmed only a few months after Tatsumi Hijikata’s first explosive public butoh performance, “Gisei” features Hijikata and members of his Asbestos Hall Troupe in a brutal allegory of a closed society. Shot by noted Japanese film scholar Donald Richie, “Gisei” still conveys the shock that Japanese audiences in 1959 must have felt at the birth of Hijikata's ankoku butoh, or "dance of darkness". Richie met Hijikata through mutual friend Yukio Mishima. They decided to collaborate on a film about segregation. Richie memorialized the film in his diary: “It is more than ever about the death of an individual, a distinct kind of human sacrifice.”
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