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.

The Man Who Left His Will on Film (Nagisa Oshima, 1970)

Cast: Kazuo Goto, Emiko Iwasaki, Sukio Fukuoka, Kenichi Fukuda, Hiroshi Isogai, Kazuo Hashimoto, Kazuya Horikoshi, Tomoyo Oshima. Screenplay: Nagisa Oshima, Tsutomu Tamura, Masato Hara, Mamoru Sasaki. Cinematography: Toichiro Narushima. Art direction: Shigemasa Toda. Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka. Music: Toru Takemitsu.

Nagisa Oshima's The Man Who Left His Will on Film owes something to Michelangelo Antonio's Blow-Up (1966) in that both involve photography that tantalizes and hints at an unsolved (unsolvable?) mystery. But Oshima's film has political overtones, a kind of goodbye-to-all-that movie about the waning of student protests in Japan. The story it tells is about the quest of Motoki (Kazuo Goto) to find out why a young activist, Endo (Kazuya Horikoshi), committed suicide when he was being chased by police across a rooftop. Motoki tries to puzzle out Endo's motives by retracing the footage he left in the camera he was holding when he leaped (fell? was pushed?). But the film resists interpretation almost as much as the one Oshima made about it. Oshima is always surprising and enigmatic, and this is one of his more challenging works.

Sing a Song of Sex (Nagisa Oshima, 1967)

Cast: Ichiro Araki, Kazuko Tajima, Juzo Itami, Akiko Koyama, Koji Iwabuchi, Kazuyoshi Kushida, Hiroshi Sato, Nobuko Miyamoto, Hiroko Masuda, Hideko Yoshida. Screenplay: Tsutomu Tamura, Mamoru Sasaki, Toshio Tajima, Nagisa Oshima. Cinematography: Akira Takada. Set decoration: Jusho Toda. Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka. Music: Hikaru Hayashi.

Politics and pornography intersect in Sing a Song of Sex, a film which, though it has four credited screenwriters, was largely improvised by its young cast. It's set at a time of political demonstrations, during which the teacher (Juzo Itami) of a group of young men preparing for their examinations tells them that bawdy songs -- the film's Japanese title has also been translated as A Treatise on Bawdy Songs -- are themselves a political statement, a way for the poorer classes to find release from oppression. And so the lines between fantasy and reality are blurred in the film as the young men act, if only in their imaginations, upon their desires, many of which focus on the pretty Mayuko (Kazuko Tajima), whom they depersonalize by referring to her by her seat number in class, 469. Often enigmatic, Sing a Song of Sex is the kind of film for which it's best that many of us just go along for the ride rather than to try to unravel its social and political implications, which are very much of a particular time and place.

Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (Nagisa Oshima, 1969)

Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (Nagisa Oshima, 1969)

Cast: Tadanori Yokoo, Rie Yokoyama, Moichi Tanabe, Tetsu Takahashi, Kei Sato, Rokko Toura, Fumio Watanabe, Juro Kara. Screenplay: Masao Adachi, Mamoru Sasaki, Tsutomu Tamura, Nagisa Oshima. Cinematography: Seizo Sengen, Yasuhiro Yoshioka. Art direction: Shigemasa Toda. Film editing: Nagisa Oshima.

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." 

Three Resurrected Drunkards (Nagisa Oshima, 1968)

Kazuhiko Kato, Osamu Kitayama, and Norihiko Hashida in Three Resurrected Drunkards

Beanpole: Kazuhiko Kato
The Small One: Osamu Kitayama
The Smallest One: Norihiko Hashida
I Chong-il: Kei Sato
Kim Fwa: Cha Dei-dang
The Middle-aged Man: Fumio Watanabe
The Young Woman: Mako Midori

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Masao Adachi, Mamoru Sasaki, Tsutomu Tamura, Nagisa Oshima
Cinematography: Yasuhiro Yoshioka
Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka
Music: Hikaru Hayashi

Nagisa Oshima's attempts to unsettle his audiences usually took the form of serious explorations of social dysfunction like Cruel Story of Youth (1960), Boy (1969), and The Ceremony (1971) or sexually provocative films like In the Realm of the Senses (1976), but Three Resurrected Drunkards plays more like A Hard Day's Night (Richard Lester, 1964) than any of those often grim and brutal excursions into the dark side of contemporary Japanese life. It begins with three young men larking about at the beach, accompanied by a giddy Japanese pop song. When their clothes are stolen and replaced with others, the film goes off into  a series of mostly comic mishaps. But there's a dark side to their larking about from the beginning: One of their gags is an attempt to restage the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by Eddie Adams of a South Vietnam general pointing a gun at the head of a grimacing Viet Cong prisoner. They take turns playing the general and the victim as the third critiques the grimace on the face of the one playing the victim. It turns out that the clothes thieves are South Koreans who are trying to sneak into Japan to avoid military service in Vietnam. The Koreans have a gun, with which they threaten the three young Japanese. Along the way, they also get involved with a young woman and an abusive older man who may or may not be her husband. At one point, the film simply stops and starts over at the beginning, but this time the characters know what happened in the first part and are able to change things around. It's all a fascinating blend of rock movie high jinks and serious social commentary: Oshima is satirizing the Japanese prejudice against Koreans, among other things. Some of the satire is lost on contemporary audiences, especially in the West, but Three Resurrected Drunkards is a fascinating glimpse into its director's imagination and political indignation.

The Ceremony (Nagisa Oshima, 1971)

Masuo Sakurada: Kenzo Kawaraski
Ritsuko Sakurada: Atsuko Kaku
Terumichi Tachibana: Atsuo Nakamura
Tadashi Sakurada: Kiyoshi Tsuchiya
Grandfather: Kei Sato
Setsuko Sakurada: Akiko Koyama
Shizu Sakurada: Nobuko Otowa

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Mamoru Sasaki, Tsutomu Tamura, Nagisa Oshima
Cinematography: Toichiro Narushima
Production design: Shigenori Shimoishizaka
Music: Toru Takemitsu

In his comments on The Ceremony in Have You Seen...? David Thomson makes an admission that perhaps I myself don't keep enough in mind: "I have seen enough Japanese films to know that, much as I admire that national cinema, it is based on precepts that are strange to me." But Thomson also makes an important point when he likens the family in The Ceremony to those in "Faulkner or Greek tragedy." We are distanced from the tortured family narrative in the film not only by cultural differences, but also by the larger-than-life mythic quality of the personalities and events. The transgressive sexuality -- the pervasive incest in the Sakurada family -- and the rigid adherence to tradition, which reaches its most absurd point when an elaborate wedding is conducted with the bride in absentia, are on one level satiric indictments of Japanese culture, but on another level are statements about human obsessions that transcend national boundaries. Sometimes Oshima's attempt at this kind of transcendent mythmaking bogs The Ceremony down a bit, and the performers don't always rise to the demands of the material, losing their grip on the humanity of their characters and bringing in a whiff of pretentiousness to the enterprise. But it's a fascinating film to watch -- and often to listen to, when Toru Takemitsu's spiky score appears.

Boy (Nagisa Oshima, 1969)

Tsuyoshi Kinoshita and Tetsuo Abe in Boy

Toshio Omura: Tetsuo Abe
Takeo Omura: Fumio Watanabe
Takeko Taniguchi: Akiko Koyama
Peewee: Tsuyoshi Kinoshita

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Tsutomu Tamura
Cinematography: Seizo Sengen, Yasuhiro Yoshioka
Music: Hikaru Hayashi

We meet the 10-year-old title character of Nagisa Oshima's Boy when he's playing hide-and-seek with imaginary friends -- the only kind he'll make in the course of the film -- around a war memorial. We don't even learn his name, Toshio, until the end of the film: His family simply refers to him as "the boy." They are on the down and out in increasingly prosperous Japan: The father, Takeo, is a disabled veteran who has married for a second time and fathered a child, known as "Peewee," with Toshio's stepmother, Takeko. They have cut off ties with their extended family, and when Toshio mentions his grandparents he's told they don't want to see them. They make a living by fraud: Takeko runs into the street to fake being hit by cars, and Takeo bullies the motorists into paying him off instead of calling the police. At a certain point, the parents realize that drivers would be even more willing to pay up if they think they've hit a child, and Toshio agrees to become the pretend victim. They travel around Japan to avoid detection -- too many incidents in one location would cause the police to get wise -- and Oshima's film takes us on this unsentimental journey, going as far as the northernmost point of the country in Hokkaido. The parents squabble constantly, especially when Takeko gets pregnant and decides not to have an abortion, all of which begins to take its toll on Toshio. He runs away several times, always to return: His stepmother gives him cash, to his father's annoyance, so once he tries to buy a ticket to where his grandparents live, but finding himself short of cash he goes only partway, then play-acts a meeting with them before returning to his family. Oshima directs this story, drawn from an actual case of an accident-faking family, with as much detachment as he can muster, but the pathos is inherent to the story, especially since the point of view is that of Toshio. A young non-professional, recruited for the film from an orphanage, Tetsuo Abe gives a remarkable performance, maintaining a precocious stoicism through the worst experiences, but also revealing that there is still a child behind that persona.

Turner Classic Movies