Tatsuya Nakadai in Person, Introduced by Audie Bock Special Admission: $10, advance tickets recommended. Over the last four decades Tatsuya Nakadai has proved to be the most versatile actor of the Japanese stage and screen. His first love and primary loyalty is the stage, where he spends half the year in Tokyo and touring in plays as disparate as Shakespeare's tragedies and Kabuki melodramas. Nakadai was discovered for the screen by Masaki Kobayashi, whose Harakiri provides one of his most moving roles. He developed a nihilistic samurai image in such cruel masterpieces as Kihachi Okamoto's Sword of Doom and Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo. He took on a hard yet human character opposite Toshiro Mifune in Kurosawa's Sanjuro, and as the inspector no one would want to tangle with in High and Low. But Nakadai also shows a twinkle in his soulful eyes in such contemporary black comedies as Kon Ichikawa's The Key (Odd Obsession) and I Am a Cat. He can also be a tragicomic gangster, as cast by Hideo Gosho in Wolves and Onimasa. His many talents all come together in his last two films for Kurosawa, as the lowlife turned warlord in Kagemusha, and the proud and tragic King Lear figure in Ran.-Audie Bock Harakiri (Seppuku) 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. Tatsuya Nakadai stars as a samurai out to destroy the honor of the clan that, as an example, forced his son-in-law to commit an agonizing ritual suicide. The vengeful man's chilling narrative is made all the more heart-stopping by the film's plastic beauty: Kobayashi harnesses black-and-white widescreen cinematography to create one of the cinema's purest uses of architectural space. 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. Toru Takemitsu's music haunts like rhythmic words: harakiri (seppuku), harakiri (seppuku)...