Northwest Film Forum

Samuel Fuller is highly regarded as a forerunner to and influence on the French New Wave as well Tarantino, Scorsese and Jarmusch. His narrative-tabloid-noir filmmaking has always been controversial. In House of Bamboo, the director who famously said “film is a battleground” goes to US-occupied post-war Japan. Keith Uhlich of Slant writes that “House of Bamboo has some of the most stunning examples of widescreen photography in the history of cinema…Fuller captured a country divided, trapped between past traditions and progressive attitudes while lingering in the devastating aftereffects of an all-too-recent World War.” Conversely, a Japanese reviewer scorned the film as "strictly a commercial item trying to sell exoticism to an American audience using Japan as a stage and a Japanese actress." Orientalist or auteur, Fuller’s legacy endures as a director who persisted in taking up the cause of the disenfranchised.