Violence at Noon (Nagisa Oshima, 1966)

Cast: Kei Sato, Saeda Kawaguchi, Akiko Koyama, Rokko Toura, Fumio Watanabe. Screenplay: Tsutomu Tamura, based on a novel by Taijun Takeda. Cinematography: Akira Takada. Production design: Shigemasa Toda. Film editing: Keiichi Uraoda. Music: Hikaru Hayashi.

Violence at Noon is an edgy, jumpy film about a serial rapist and killer of women, played with his characteristic intensity by Kei Sato. It's a notable departure in technique by director Nagisa Oshima, usually given to long takes, in that it's constructed of thousands of individual shots. Akiko Koyama and Saeda Kawaguchi play the two women, both victims of the rapist, who try to piece together the truth about his life.

Pleasures of the Flesh (Nagisa Oshima, 1965)

Mariko Kaga in Pleasures of the Flesh

Atsushi Wakazaka: Katsuo Nakamura
Shoko: Mariko Kaga
Hitomi: Yumiko Nagawa
Shizuko: Masako Yagi
Mari: Toshiko Higuchi
Keiko: Hiroko Shimizu
Hayami: Shoichi Ozawa
Police Inspector: Kei Sato
Sakurai: Rokko Toura
Gang Member: Fumio Watanabe
Egi: Hosei Kamatsu
Mari's Pimp: Akiji Kobayashi

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Nagisa Oshima
Based on a novel by Futaro Yamada
Cinematography: Akira Takada
Art direction: Yasutaro Kon
Music: Joji Yuasa

With a burst of bluesy music, Pleasures of the Flesh starts out like a film noir, and the plot setup follows suit. The young tutor to a pretty teenager kills a man who has molested her, but the act has been witnessed by a man who has embezzled funds from his place of work. In an attempt to blackmail the tutor, the embezzler says he won't tell the police if the young man will hide 30 million yen of the loot. The embezzler expects to be arrested, he says, but he'll return for the money after serving his prison sentence. If the tutor has spent any of it, he'll tell the police about the murder. The tutor reluctantly agrees, but then the plot not unexpectedly begins to tangle. The tutor, Atsushi, is in love with the teenager, Shoko, but too poor to win her parents' approval. He's so devastated when she marries that he begins to lose his mind. The embezzler has in fact gone to prison, and Atsushi decides to live it up on the 30 million yen, then kill himself when the embezzler has served his term. And so begins a series of flings with four women, each of whom he pays to live with him. There's a showgirl with a gangster boyfriend, a married woman whose husband is desperately in debt, a doctor who insists on remaining a virgin, and a mute prostitute with a thuggish pimp. None of these attempts to wallow in the titular pleasures of the flesh ends well, and then, just as Atsushi spends the last of the money, he learns that the embezzler has died in prison. As if that outcome weren't ironic enough, the embezzler also told a fellow inmate about the 30 million yen he had stashed with Atsushi and when he's released he comes in search of the money. It's a moral tale straight out of Boccaccio or Chaucer, but writer-director Nagisa Oshima is faced with modernizing it and doesn't quite succeed. There's a bit too much fancy camerawork as Oshima interpolates Atsushi's obsessive visions of Shoko and paranoid ones of the embezzler into the narrative. The moral tale still feels heavyhanded. But Pleasures of the Flesh is the work of a major filmmaker at the outset of his career, and as such rewards watching.

Death by Hanging (Nagisa Oshima, 1968)

Do-yun Yu and Akiko Koyama in Death by Hanging

R.: Do-yun Yu
Warden: Kei Sato
Education Officer: Fumio Watanabe
District Attorney: Hosei Kamatsu
Doctor: Rokko Toura
Chaplain: Ishiro Ishida
Chief of Guards: Masao Adachi
Sister: Akiko Koyama
Narrator: Nagisa Oshima

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Michinori Fukao, Mamoru Sasaki, Tsutomu Tamura, Nagisa Oshima
Cinematography: Yasuhiro Yoshioka
Music: Hikaru Hayashi

It's becoming clearer to me that Nagisa Oshima is one of the great artists of the second half of the century whom nobody has heard of. That's an exaggeration, of course: Lots of cinéastes and students of Japanese film obviously know Oshima's work, but ordinary people who pride themselves on their knowledge of Kurosawa or Mizoguchi or Ozu often know little about him. Maybe it's because Oshima doesn't lend himself to easy description: You can't take any one of his films as representative of the style and content of any of the others. There's a vast difference between the harrowing upperclass family drama The Ceremony (1971) and the poignant account of an abused child's initiation into crime, Boy (1969), or between the scathing look at rootless Japanese young people in Cruel Story of Youth (1960) and what is probably Oshima's best-known film in the West, the sexually explicit In the Realm of the Senses (1976). His willingness to experiment has tagged Oshima as the Japanese Jean-Luc Godard, but he seems to me more the heir to the great modernists of the early-to-mid-20th century: Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Brecht, Genet. Certainly Death by Hanging has been singled out as "Brechtian" for its outrageous transformation of politically charged subject matter, capital punishment, into something like tragic farce. It's also "Kafkaesque" in its lampoon of bureaucrats. But mostly it's an audacious transformation of a polemic into an uproarious and finally sad satire. The protagonist is called "R.," which immediately brings to mind Kafka's "K."  He has raped and murdered two young women and is about to hang in the Japanese prison's scrupulously neat death house. But the hanging doesn't take: R. simply doesn't die, and in the ensuing confusion, none of the prison officials knows what to do. There's a flurry of arguments about whether, having survived the hanging, he's even still R., his soul presumably having left the body after the execution. Things grow still more problematic after R. emerges from a post-hanging coma and doesn't remember who he is. Can they hang him again? Much of this hysteria is over-the-top funny, especially the determination of the Education Officer, played with farcical broadness by Fumio Watanabe, to restore R.'s memory by re-creating his past and his crimes. He was the son of poor Korean immigrants, and the satire shifts away from capital punishment to the Japanese treatment of Koreans, as the prison staff voices some of the worst prejudices and stereotypes that the Japanese have of Koreans. Eventually, the Education Officer, trying to re-create one of R.'s crimes, murders a young woman himself. But by that time, the film has departed from any resemblance to actuality into symbolic fantasy. It's a very theatrical film in the sense that even when it departs from the confines of the death house, where most of it takes place, and explores the outside world, talk dominates action. But where that might have been a strike against the film, it adds to its claustrophobic quality, the feeling of being plunged deeply into an absurd but entirely recognizable situation. Maybe that should be called "Oshimaesque."