You won’t find Masahiro Shinoda’s name on a list of greatest directors, nor should you; but the near obscurity within which he has been incarcerated remains a crime nonetheless. Like Seijun Suzuki, Shinoda proved to be a master of genre subversion. Whereas Suzuki twisted his genre sketches into giddy, colorful experiments, Shinoda assembles moody, atmospheric poems with his. Take a film like Samurai Spy (1965) where a conventional theme of swordplay and betrayal morphs into a filmed poem of the duality of human nature that I daresay finds beauty in both sides. That film, so sublimely meditative despite its action and violence, was the apex of the genre.

By comparison Pale Flower (1964) feels like something of a letdown because the virtues that set it apart from its peers are not as apparent. However, viewing it again the other day, I witnessed in it the same flair and ingenuity that defined a generation of filmmakers in the Nouvelle Vague; the chaos of Godard, the mystery of Rivette, the nostalgia of Truffaut even the thrillers of Chabrol still found their roots firmly planted in realism. By contrast, Shinoda makes highly stylized films with occasionally abundant cutting, jarring angles and hard-boiled dialogue that nevertheless retain that same breathtaking realism. It’s no surprise that Shinoda, along with his contemporaries (sometimes considered to be a sort of Japanese “New Wave”) were rebelling against a studio system they viewed as outdated. To that extent, I suppose it was fate that the film would inevitably be banned; in this case for the gratuitous depiction of illegal gambling.

Pale Flower for the most part, it tells a rather conventional Yakuza story. A man named Muraki, recently released from prison, returns to the district he once knew to find that the streets on which he once lived have changed. He meets a girl while gambling, gets involved in a series of illegal activities and finds that as a member of the criminal underworld reform is impossible and he cannot escape his inevitable fate. I’ve seen this movie in all its variations many times on both sides of the Atlantic but Shinoda weaves it with such a bold originality that suggests something new entirely.

For a gangster film it contains a surprisingly scant amount of action, but that was perhaps Shinoda’s intent. He is less concerned with the act of violence than the time spent waiting for that violence to occur. By the time the viewer has reached that moment in which Muraki must ascend the stairs leading to his target (thusly sealing his fate) with the operatic score drowning out all other sound, one discovers that in the anticipation of the event Shinoda reveals more about human nature than in the depiction of the act itself. After all, the action occupies only an instant, and when it’s over Muraki has nothing left but a lifetime of waiting. For a film that remains relatively detached emotionally from its characters throughout its duration, the end strikes a surprisingly emotional chord. Are we doomed to face our tragic destinies head on, able to identify them but powerless to prevent them or can one alter the path one has chosen? For Shinoda the answer was always apparent and for the risks he took there would be no turning back. Freedom from convention may have been his goal, but obscurity shall remain his constant companion.