Nihon shunka-ko

Sing a Song of Sex. JP 1967. PC: Sozosha. P: Takuji Yamaguchi. D: Nagisa Oshima. SC: Tsutomu Tamura, Mamoru Sasaki, Toshio Tajima, Nagisa Oshima. DP: Akira Takada - Shochiku Grandscope 2,35:1 - colour. AD: Jusho Toda. M: Hikaru Hayashi. ED: Keiichi Uraoka. GRADUATE BOYS: Ichiro Araki (Toyoaki Nakamura), Koji Iwabuchi (Hideo Ueda), Kazumi Kushida (Katsumi Hiro), Hiroshi Sato (Koji Maruyama). GRADUATE GIRLS: Nobuko Miyamoto (Sanae Satomi), Hiroko Masuda (Tomoko Ikeda), Hideko Yoshida (Sachido Kaneda, Korean). - Ichimo Itami (Professor Otake), Akiko Koyama (Takako Tanigawa), Kazuko Tajima (Mayuko Fujiwara, 69). 103 min. Print: Japan Foundation, with English subtitles. Viewed at Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 29 Aug 2009. - The colour print looks great to begin with, but the definition of light is uneven. - One of Oshima's most disturbing films. - It is winter in Tokyo. Graduates from the countryside want to enter Tokyo University. Their mentor, Professor Otake, invites them to a pub and they sing together old Japanese bawdy songs. The professor is killed at night in an inn in a gas oven accident. - Akiko Koyama plays the late professor's long-term lady friend. - The story takes place on the resurrection of the Emperor's Day, the celebration of which had been banned during the U.S. occupation. There is a demonstration against it, where workers' songs, the Warsawjanka, "This Land Is Our Land", "We Shall Overcome", etc. are sung along. - The film is almost a musical. - The protagonists interrupt the rebellious singing with bawdy songs, male and female. But the bawdy songs have also a strong dimension of social protest. - Also here there is a Korean theme: the origin of the Japanese is in Korea. - The film is deeply nihilistic and pessimistic. The boy students' sexual fantasies are violent, about raping and humiliation. The young generation does not seem better than the old one. - The girls' fantasies seem to be about being dominated, humiliated and raped, willingly. - Despite the title, there is hardly any sex and only fleeting nudity in this film. - It's more about extreme awkwardness and shyness in sexual matters.

Koshikei

Death by Hanging / [Hirttotuomio] / [Dömd att hängas]. JP 1968. PC: Sozosha, Art Theatre Guild. P: Nagisa Oshima, Masayuki Nakajima, Takuji Yamaguchi. D: Nagisa Oshima. SC: Tsutomu Tamura, Mamoru Sasaiki, Michinori Fukao, Nagisa Oshima. DP: Yasuhiro Yoshioka - b&w - VistaVision. AD: Jusho Toda. M: Hikaru Hayashi. ED: Sueko Shiraishi. CAST: Do-yun Yu / Yun Do Yun (R, the convict on death row, to be hanged), Hosei Komatsu (district attorney), Kei Sato (prison warden), Fumio Watanabe (education officer), Toshiro Ishido (catholic priest), Masao Adachi (chief of guards), Mutsuhiro Toura (doctor), Masao Matsuda (secretary of the D.A.), Akiko Koyama (Korean woman), Shizui Sato (prison guard), Takashi Ueni (prison guard). Commentary read by: Nagisa Oshima. 118 min. Print: New Yorker Films, with English subtitles. Viewed at Cinema Orion, 29 Aug 2009. - A duped print with an uneven quality of definition, from soft to better, but never worthy of the film's VistaVision origins. The subtitles are sharp. - One of three of Oshima's greatest masterpieces, together with Gishiki and Etsuraku. - The brilliant black comedy starts as a thesis film in the tradition of André Cayatte and Fritz Lang, with text and commentary only, but then there is a sharp turn to an original and macabre development. - The execution fails, the convict called R survives, but his personality has changed, and he has lost his memory. He does not even recognize concepts like "family" and "desire". - The desperate officials start to perform an elaborate series of reconstructions to teach R from scratch who he is... what his crime is... and what life is... The boundary between reality and hallucination is blurred, as a simulated woman materializes at least to many of those present. The woman is the most eloquent of them all. - The woman is Korean, and the theme of racism surfaces. In the drunken revel of the officials, their own sexual and violent obsessions surface. - The film is a witty philosophical reflection. What I did? What I am? - R accepts being R for the sake of all the R's. - In the final double execution there is a void at the end of the rope.

Kaette kita yopporai

Three Resurrected Drunkards / Sinner in Paradise [title on screen] / [Kolmen juopon ylösnousemus] / [Tre uppståndna supare]. JP 1968. PC: Sozosha. P: Takuji Yamaguchi. D: Nagisa Oshima. SC: Tsutomu Tamura, Mamoru Sasaki, Masao Adachi, Nagisa Oshima. DP: Yasuhiro Yoshioka – Eastmancolor – Shochiku Grandscope 2,35:1. AD: Jusho Toda. M: Hikaru Hayashi. ED: Keiichi Uraoka. CAST: Kazuhiko Kato ("O-noppo" The Big One), Osamu Kitayama ("Chunoppo" The Smallest One), Norihiko Hashida ("Chibi" The Smallest One) - Kei Sato (I Chong-Iru, Korean soldier), Cha Dei-Dang (Kim Fhua, Korean college student) - Fumio Watanabe (Dokumushi), Mako Midori (The Beautiful One, Dokumushi's adopted daughter and lover) - Taiji Tonoyama (the old lady of the tobacco shop), Hosei Komatsu (fisherman), Masao Adachi (policeman), Takashi Ueno (policeman), Mutsuhiro Toura. 80 min. A Japan Foundation (Tokyo) print with English subtitles. Viewed at Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 28 Aug 2009. - A brilliant print in perfect 1960s pop colour. - A complete change for Oshima: a pop film with affinities with The Beatles, Frank Tashlin and Jean-Luc Godard. - A parodic romp of three young pop boys on the beach. Their clothes are stolen by illegal Korean immigrants, and the boys themselves are taken for Koreans. - Oshima's only real comedy? - Yet with serious thems such as the situation of the Koreans, the Vietnam War, and the generation gap (the oppression of Mako Midori by Fumio Watanabe). - The music, always interesting in Oshima's 1960s films, is funny. - In the middle of the film there is a great narrative surprise for the audience.

Hakuchu no torima

Violence at Noon / [Keskipäivän demoni] / [Demonen mitt på dagen]. JP 1966. PC: Sozosha. P: Masayuki Nakajima. D: Nagisa Oshima. SC: Tsuton Tamura – based on a short story by Taijun Takeda. DP: Akira Takada - b&w - Shochiku Grandscope 2,35:1. AD: Jusho Toda. M: Hikaru Hayashi. ED: Keiichi Uraoka. CAST: Kei Sato (Eisuke), Saeda Kawaguchi (Shino), Akiko Koyama (Matsuko), Mutsuhiro Toura (Genji Hiuga), Hosei Komatsu (Shino's father), Hideko Kawaguchi (Matsuko's mother), Teruko Kishi (Shino's grandmother), Taiji Tonoyama (schoolmaster), Sen Yano (village counsel), Hideo Kanze (Inagaki), Fumio Watanabe (inspector Haraguchi), Ryoko Takahara (the woman in the hospital), Shigemi Kayashima (teacher). 99 min. A Janus Films print with English subtitles. Viewed at Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 28 Aug 2009. - A clean, intact print of a film with an extremely original definition of light. The definition of light in the print is not perfect but pays justice to the concept. - One of Oshima's seminal films. - Based on a true story of a serial killer, a rapist and a murderer in the 1950s, who became the "High Noon Killer" of the headlines. He is not insane, but devoid of conscience. - The film is a hard look at brutal crime, which has no rational explanation, not even insanity. - The reality of the crime is strange and complex in itself, but Oshima also builds his film as a jigsaw puzzle which starts to make sense first after the screening. - The setting is a mountain village in the Shinshu district in the north of Honshu. A group of young people establish a collective farm, but the experiment is a grave disappointment, which leads to the suicide of Genji, the son of the village chairman, and the suicide attempt of his girlfriend, Shino. Eisuke, who had followed them with the assignment to prevent the suicide attemps, is married to the teacher Matsuko. The double suicide scene triggers in him a strange reaction: he rapes what he thinks is the corpse of Shino. But Shino is revived. Eisuke starts his rapist-homicidal spree with 35 victims. In the end Matsuko and Shino try to repeat the double suicide, but again, Shino survives. - This film demands repeated viewings to be fully appreciated. - Uniquely original cinematography, montage, and a brilliant jazz-like score in counterpoint to the subject.

Ninja bugei-cho

Band of Ninja / Ninja [the English title on screen] /[Ninjan sotakirja] / [Ninjas krigsbok]. JP 1967. PC: Sozosha. P: Masayuki Nakajima, Takuji Yamaguchi, Nagisa Oshima. D: Nagisa Oshima. SC: Nagisa Oshima and Mamoru Sasaki – based on the manga by Sanpei Shirato (1957). DP: Akira Takada – b&w - 1,37:1. M: Hikaru Hayashi. Theme song: "Ninga bugei-cho". Singer: Sumito Tachikawa. ED: Keiichi Uraoka. Voices in the Japanese version: Shoichi Ozawa (commentary), Kei Yamamoto (Jutaro Yuki), Akiko Koyama (Akemi), Kei Sato (Shuzen Sakagami), Noriko Matsumoto (Hotarubi), Yoshiyuki Fukuda (Mufu-dojin), Hideo Kanxe (Nobutsuna Kamiizumi), Shigeru Tsuyguchi (Mitsuhide Akechi), Fumio Yatanabe (Nobunaga Oda / Kynnyo), Hikaru Hayashi (Tokichiro Kinoshita), Mutsuhiro Toura (Kagemaru), Hosei Komatsu (Onikichi / Zoruko), Nobuo Tanaka (Munetoshi Yaguy), Juro Hayano (chief of Raiunto). [Japanese version 131 min.] On display was the short English-language version, 100 min. Print: Kawakita Memorial. Viewed at Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 27 Aug 2009. - A decent print of the short version. The film is probably more watchable in the short version. - This is a ninja action manga film. This is not animation (or anime) in the true sense, as the film is photographed from the frames of Sanpei Shirato's manga, and the cinematic impact is based on movement inside and into the manga frames, on montage, and on the soundtrack (music, song, commentary, voices, sound effects). - The birth of the ninjutsu and the ninja in the 16th century. A rebellious jidai-geki based on the manga favoured by the student radicals of the 1960s. - At first the film based on static drawings feels jarring and disappointing. Towards the end it gets more effective. - The story is very cruel and violent, and there are endless battle scenes. - Women have a prominent role as fearless fighters, including a pregnant lady and a nude ninja fighter. - The final message: "keep on fighting until all men can live equally". - The music by Hikaru Hayashi is original and effective. There is a theme song resembling of the western. The singer Sumito Tachikawa has an attractive voice. - Not a profound or sophisticated film, but an interesting experiment, one that one would not wish to be repeated in a feature film. - Antti Suonio remarked that a similar approach is now commonplace in dvd extras.

Muri-shinjo: Nihon no natsu

Japanese Summer: Double Suicide / [Japanilainen kesä: kaksoisitsemurha] / [Japansk sommar: dubbelsjälvmord]. JP 1967. PC: Sozosha. D: Nagisa Oshima. SC: Tsutomu Tamura, Mamoru Sasaki, Nagisa Oshima. DP: Yasuhiro Yoshioka - b&w - scope. AD: Toda Jusho. M: Hikaru Hayashi. ED: Keiichi Uraoka. CAST: Keiko Sakurai (Nejiko), Kei Sato (Otoko), Mutsushiro Toura (Television), Shunsuke Mizoguchi (Tsukibito, Television's assistant), Taji Tonoyama (Hanging Tree), Masakazu Tamura (Boy). 98 min. Print: Janus Films, with English subtitles. Viewed at Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 17 Aug 2009. - Brilliant definition of light. - Cinema of the absurd in an universe of sex and violence. The leading lady Nejiko wants to find a man to make love to her. The leading man Otoko wants to find someone to kill him. - The yakuza prison milieu does not make sense. - There is a sniper who is being hunted by the police. - In the final shoot-out the desperadoes escaping from the yakuza prison meet the sniper and the police. - This picture is a mad show of the death instinct.