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**** “Double Suicide.”

Sony. $59.95. 1969.

Beginning with an 18th-Century Bunraku puppet play by Chikamatsu, about a shop owner ruined by his love for a geisha, director Masahiro Shinoda fashions a bizarre, stimulating mix of classic and modern Japanese aesthetics. Actors play the puppet roles (with the same actress, Shima Iwashita, as both victimized wife and doomed courtesan), while stoical, silent, black-hooded figures, symbolizing the absent puppeteers, glide around setting scenes like the hands of fate. The sets are covered with elaborate calligraphy and collapse at a touch, the monochrome photography has gorgeous high contrasts, and the haunting score, by Toru Takemitsu (“Ran”), resonates like the clang and plank of doom. Winner of the Kinema Junpo prize as Japan’s best 1969 film, “Double Suicide” was a key work of the Japanese “New Wave.” It remains Shinoda’s most unique and provocative work.