- Fritz Lang’s Harakiri / Madame Butterfly
11/24/24 (Sun)
I was surprised to find a foreign film called Harakiri at all given Kobayashi Masaki’s masterwork by the same English title, but this was in fact a silent German film made in 1918, when Europe was still in the midst of its Japonisme boom. On top of that, it’s based explicitly on Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, which debuted just a few years earlier (the US release used the opera title rather than the more sensational German title). It follows a US silent Butterfly film with Mary Pickford by just three years and is one of the earliest surviving works by the great Fritz Lang. I initially watched a poorly preserved hour-long version online but found a better 90-minute version the next day and re-watched it.
sekenbanashi 