Kobayashi harnesses the breathtaking beauty of black-and-white, widescreen cinematography to create one of the cinema's purest uses of architectural space in Hara Kiri, an abstract epic with as great an affinity to the films of French director Alain Resnais (see Last Year at Marienbad, August 16) and the Canadian Michael Snow (Wavelength) as to the Japanese period spectacle. The story (starring Tatsuya Nakadai) depicts one man's desperate attempt to crack the maze-like hold of blind, absolute authority that characterizes the feudal age and, Kobayashi suggests, our own. Within an Edo-period mansion, the camera inches down hallways, fixes on rooms, finds rooms within rooms to explicate a complex, flashback narration; when the film bursts suddenly into action, all of these walls, entrances and no-exits come brilliantly into play once again. The fight scenes are choreographed to the sounds of bare feet on wooden floors, walls falling, men screaming. And in the bloody climax, all the black-robed figures who were caught and dissected by a stationary, waist-high camera throughout the film come into their own as an inexorable prophecy, like Toru Takemitsu's haunting music track and the words that emerge almost rhythmically from the dialogue: hara kiri (seppuku), hara kiri (seppuku)....