A Film Canon

The second installment in Inagaki's Samurai trilogy, Duel At Ichijoji Temple continues Musashi Miyamoto's location of bushido at the limits of nature, visibility and sense-perception, as Musashi strives for a 'mental relaxation' that will allow him to become a conduit for spiritual energy. As a result, a very different kind of dimness settles over the narrative - urban, rather than amniotic; meditative, rather than frenetic; and noumenal, rather than earthly - that imbues the three fight sequences with an increasingly cognitive, cerebral abstraction, aestheticising the repeated maxim that a samurai must fight with his mind, rather than his body. At its strongest, this seems to channel time and space itself through Musashi's sword, whose sublime disembodiment becomes a kind of inverted calligraphy, a counterpoint to the sumi-e paintings for which he was also renowned, and which are first referenced in this installment. In the process, the dialectic between verticality and horizontality is gradually replaced with a more abstracted continguity, in which different spaces and media seem to simply float alongside or around each other, perhaps explaining the centrality of the bridge that concluded the first film. Similarly, the focus on refinement draws out the oblique relation between relaxation and decadence, humility and emasculation and samurai and aristocratic codes, as the latter's various aesthetic pursuits - gardening, clothing, kabuki theatre - are presented alternately as lessons and snares, resulting in the stunted version of courtly seduction that induces Miyamoto to reject the love of women - and, more specifically, the romance that has, slightly implausibly, propelled the narrative - setting the stage for his third and final lesson.