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Provincetown Film Art Series: The Tale of Zatoichi
The Provincetown Film Art Series, now in its 18th year, is sponsored by the Provincetown Film Society (PFS) and Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) and curated and hosted by film scholar Howard Karren. Films in the series, both recent and vintage, are chosen around central themes, but the focus is on films about artists and creativity, and films that are themselves works of art.
The Tale of Zatoichi (1962)
Directed by Kenji Misumi. Screenplay by Minoru Inuzuka, based on the short story by Kan Shimozawa. With Shintaro Katsu. In Japanese, subtitled. B&W. 1 hour, 35 minutes.
In Japan’s pre-Western Edo period in the mid-1800s, Zatoichi is a blind itinerant samurai with an unflinching sense of honor and an otherworldly mastery of swordsmanship. His blindness is anything but a disability: Zatoichi is almost always underestimated by those he’s up against. This 1962 classic is the first of a 26-film series, in which Zatoichi is mostly played by the great Shintaro Katsu.
