This weekend sees the start of a new season at the BFI, Seasons In The Sun: The Heyday Of Nikkatsu Studios. Nikkatsu, founded in 1912 after the absorption of four miniature studios, is the oldest active film studio in Japan, and by far the most recognised in the West. It shut its doors for production during wartime, surviving only as an exhibitor, but in 1954 the studio roared back to life with some of the most provocative and exciting films of its time. The season covers youth films, yakuza noir and several works from the Japanese New Wave, which is a movement difficult to define, but occurring somewhere between 1956 – 1971. Here I recommend ten of my favourite New Wave discoveries so far…
#1 Crazed Fruit (Kô Nakahira, 1956)
Adapted from the controversial novel by Shintarô Ishihara, Crazed Fruit (aka Juvenile Jungle) is the most beloved of the taiyôzoku (Sun Tribe) films which briefly dominated Japan in the late 1950s, igniting the New Wave with its hedonistic portrayal of the wealthy, aimless post-war generation, and causing a storm at the box office with star turns from Yûjirô Ishihara, Mie Kitahara and Masahiko Tsugawa. Even now the film feels possessed of an inimitable freshness, evoking reckless youth, the tangible swelter of summer (it remains the ultimate summer hangout movie) and romantic folly – though the central love triangle walks a razor’s edge between boyish boorishness and something darker, its spirited ménage-à-trois simmering with a tension which, in the final reels, broils over into violent amour fou. Beautifully shot and acted, it’s a genuine coming-of-age masterpiece.
#2 Black Sun (Koreyoshi Kurahara, 1964)
This scorching, jazz-infused anti-buddy movie (though inarguably the template for Lethal Weapon and every film of its ilk since) is one of the oddest, most provocative entries into the Japanese New Wave, and my favourite film from the unclassifiable auteur Koreyoshi Kurahara. It tells the story of a drifting youth named Mei (Tamio Kawachi) and the relationship he forms with a wounded black GI (Chico Roland), on the lam after killing a fellow soldier. Its racial politics (Mei is obsessed with black musicians; at one point in the film he adopts blackface and paints Chico up like a white clown) are boisterously woven into a loose-limbed narrative which frequently contorts to the tempo of its jazz soundtrack (by American musician Max Roach), reaching a final crescendo as poignant as it is insane – one of the great final shots in cinema.
#3 The Embryo Hunts In Secret (Kôji Wakamatsu, 1966)
Wakamatsu’s first independent production after a messy divorce from Nikkatsu, The Embryo Hunts In Secret (what a title!) tells the story of a disturbed store manager (Hatsuo Yamaya) who inflicts torture – both psychological and sexual – upon one of his young employees (Miharu Shima), a woman who resembles his mother and ex-wife. It’s a classical cross-Oedipal tragedy churned through the pinku eiga grinder, mixing the psychological rigour of an Ôshima or Teshigahara with the fetishistic sex of the then-popular porno films. Our protagonist’s slave is subject to various forms of bondage; whipped, raped, chained like a dog and tortured with a razor blade, making for a film difficult to stomach – but its dense character interplay, gorgeous photography and political allegory make it one of the most visceral and intellectually challenging films of its time. A deranged, unforgettable masterpiece.
#4 I Will Buy You (Masaki Kobayashi, 1956)
Paired with Seijun Suzuki’s Gate Of Flesh (1964), this ruthless baseball drama would make an intriguing double-bill on the themes of economics, slavery and the body in post-war Japan, imagining the prostitution racket as a human meat market second only to the professional sports industry. Kobayashi’s dark, cynical character study is one of the finest films of the ’50s, a condemnation of a nation’s favourite sport (all the more important when you consider that this nation’s heritage lies in systems of honour and family loyalty), and a careful examination of youth’s corruptibility. An eager sports agent (Keiji Sada) attempts to lure a prize college player (Minoru Ooki) onto his team by manipulating his terminally ill coach (Yunosuke Ito), but the question of who holds power is an ever-shifting one in this sad, complex tale; the performances are outstanding, and the ending a devastating resignation from hope.
#5 The Blind Beast (Yasuzô Masamura, 1969)
Yet another Oedipal, sadomasochistic tale of sexual obsession and domination, The Blind Beast is about a blind sculptor (Eiji Funakoshi) whose mother (Noriko Sengoku) helps him to kidnap the innocent masseur (Mako Midori) whose sensual form he then dedicates his life to capturing in art. It’s a twisted, deliciously perverse picture which invokes Franju, Wakamatsu and Hitchcock, but also acting out an intriguing subversion of Masamura’s own The Red Angel (1966), wherein an innocent nurse sacrifices her body to the impotent and amputated men around her, ultimately achieving a kind of religious martyrdom for her suffering; in this harsher, darker film, the woman is again an unwilling servant to an afflicted man, but her sacrifice is different – she too goes blind, and dies at his hand after falling in love with him (she soon becomes willing to endure his pain, becoming the sculpture when he begins to sexually chisel her leg).
#6 Woman Of The Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)
The centrepiece of a stylistic trilogy which united Teshigahara with author Kobo Abe and experimental musician Tôru Takemitsu (the bookends being 1962’s Pitfall and 1966’s The Face Of Another), Woman Of The Dunes is a work of intense, palpably erotic (sadly I stole this wonderful description from Criterion) cinema, its visual palette alternating between contrasts of sensual soft-focus and startling are-bure-boke (rough, blurred and out of focus) photography to heighten the relationship between an entomologist and the young widow he becomes obsessed with. It feels like a distant cousin to Shôhei Imamura’s The Insect Woman (1963) in its anthropological detailing of human relationships (and female hardship), but the coarse, horror-inflected sound design, hypnotic montage effects, and acting by Eija Okada and Kiyoko Kishida ensure that it remains very much its own film, and a singular masterpiece in the New Wave.
#7 Double Suicide (Masahiro Shinoda, 1969)
The tragic story of a wife paying for her husband’s infidelity with a local courtesan, Double Suicide – adapted from an 18th Century doll-drama – is one of the boldest films of the New Wave, prefiguring Lars von Trier’s theatre-on-film experiments Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2005) by over three decades. But where von Trier subverted Brecht, Shinoda deconstructs bunraku, marrying traditions of pre-war cinema (Mizoguchi tackled much the same material in his Chikamatsu Monogatari) with the meta-textual experiments of his New Wave peers; Ôshima’s Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief (1969), and the little-seen Patriotism (1966; highlighted below). His open-plan staging is fascinating – black-cloaked kurago (puppet masters) hurry the drama along, and meanwhile Shinoda’s voiceover (to his producer about the film’s pre-production) sets the scene for a drama which, despite its static camerawork, can’t help but call attention to itself, distancing the audience with its artificiality… so, not so far from Brecht after all.
#8 Patriotism (Yukio Mishima, Domoto Masaki, 1966)
Adapted by Mishima from his own 1961 short story, this silent, thirty-minute film is one of the most shocking and upsetting of the New Wave, staged in the manner of Noh theatre and telling the story of a soldier who commits seppuku (ritual suicide; a disembowelment of the stomach followed by decapitation) after being ordered to execute several of his comrades in the Ni Ni Roku Incident of February 1936. On the stage he makes love to his wife (the sex here is sensual and erotic, a sharp contrast to its depiction in most New Wave films, where it is largely nonconsensual and aggressive) before committing seppuku in horrifying detail. Both acts – inextricably linked in Mishima’s mind – are poetically realised here, all the more affecting for relying on close-ups and gestures in the absence of dialogue, and use of music – a theme from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde – couldn’t be more fitting.
#9 Profound Desires Of The Gods (Shôhei Imamura, 1968)
Imamura’s masterwork, co-written with the surrealist Keiji Hasebe, is one of New Wave’s most extravagant pictures; it swelled from a six-month shoot into an eighteen-month super-production, ending the director’s relationship with Nikkatsu. Set in 1968 during the U.S. occupation of Okinawa (American occupation and its corruptive influence is a recurring theme for Imamura), the film examines in intimate detail the dysfunctions of the ostracized, interbred Futori family, whose incestual lineage draws a parallel with the gods in an ancient creation verse. It’s one of the most beautiful films ever made, with the incredible ‘Scope photography capturing gleaming sky-blue oceans, bloodied tangerine sunsets, and the obsidian darkness of Nekichi’s (the chained son) pit. Imamura’s sensitivity shines through here, maintaining a level of empathy for his troubled characters across the epic three-hour running time, which builds to an unusual and visually distinctive climax. Another unforgettable work.
#10 Funeral Parade Of Roses (Toshio Matsumoto, 1969)
The first film to depict Japan’s underground gay subculture, and a major influence on Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), Funeral Parade Of Roses is one of the most confrontational and experimental films of the New Wave, using the Oedipal myth as a structure to chart the days and nights of a cross-dressing clubber named Eddie (played by a real-life transvestite named Peter) in a head-on, unapologetically explicit fusion of documentary and experimental styles (Matsumoto had experience in both of these areas when production began). But what lingers in the mind longest isn’t the film’s daring, hyper-sexual (boy and girl) imagery or grotesque ending, but its abstract beauty; the grace, elegance and adopted femininity of Peter, whose screen presence holds its own against the collision of aggressive politics and ahead-of-their-time aesthetic experimentation. Not the easiest watch, but a highly rewarding one.
