Gisei (Sacrifice)

Filmed only a few months after Tatsumi HIJIKATA's first explosive public butoh performance, GISEI features HIJIKATA and members of his Asbestos Hall Troupe in a brutal allegory of a closed society. Shot by noted Japanese film scholar Donald Richie, GISEI still conveys the shock that Japanese audiences in 1959 must have felt at the birth of HIJIKATA's ankoku butoh, or "dance of darkness".