Essays

Film

Essays on films I have seen, mostly old ones on the big screen, and what they have to say about culture and philosophy.

Film · Japan · Philosophy · Masculinity The Hermeneutics of Samurai Culture in Film and TelevisionBefore my first boxing match I read Hagakure. Reading it again through Kurosawa, Kobayashi, Mishima, Jarmusch and Samurai Champloo, I find in the samurai ideal a modern invention and a masculine death drive, and in the best films its undoing. October 19, 2026 · 51 min read

2026

· 37 min read Kwaidan: Strange Tales of Nature and WarMasaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan is usually filed under horror. Seen on a big screen, its four ghost stories read better as mysteries: about a nature full of spirits, and about the dead of a lost war.