Tokyo senso sengo hiwa / The Man Who Left His Will On Film

Tokyo senso sengo hiwa: Eiga de ishi o nokoshite shineda – otoko no monogatari / He Died After the War / [Mies, joka teki testamenttinsa filmille] / [Mannen som upprättade sitt testamente på film]. JP 1970. PC: Sozosha-ATG. EX: Takuji Yamaguchi. D: Nagisa Oshima. SC: Masataka Hara ja Mamoru Sasaki – based on a story by Nagisa Oshima and Tsutomu Tamura. DP: Toichiro Narushima – shot on 16 mm and 35 mm – print 35 mm – b&w. AD: Jusho Toda. M: Toru Takemitsu. ED: Keiichi Uraoka. CAST: Kazuo Goto (Motoki Shoichi, student), Emiko Iwasaki (Yasuko, Shoichi's girlfriend). Members of the POSIPOSI, a film society of young radicals: Sugio Fukyama (Yazawa), Tomoyo Oshima (Akiko), Kenichi Fukuda (Matsumura), Hiroshi Isogai (Sakamoto), Kazuo Hashimoto (Takagi), Kazuya Horikoshi (Endo). 94 min. Print: New Yorker Films (New York), English subtitles. Viewed at Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 13 Sep 2009. - A good definition of light in a print that has signs of wear and tear, but not too much. - Anti-film, metafilm, a film that questions itself and student radicalism. The story of an impasse. - Ironic, witty, philosophical. - The cinematography is remarkable. The sense of landscape and urban living is on the level of Antonioni, but brilliantly original. Many shots can be appreciated as independent photographs. - The man who left his will on film mostly shot cityscapes. He maybe never existed, and at least there is a vicious circle of young men who leave their wills on film, as the story starts again in the end. - Disturbing: the theme of sexual violence. The young men seem to enjoy taking their girls violently, and the girls seem to enjoy it. - I have now seen all Nagisa Oshima's cinema films, and I can confirm that they are all different: each has a different way of storytelling, a different cinematography, and different music and sound solutions. - In Godard's work, the parallel to this would be Weekend.