AKIRA KUROSAWA @ 100—SFFS

My thanks to Executive Director Graham Leggat and Creative Director Miguel Pendás of the San Francisco Film Society (SFFS) for reminding me just how valuable a resource the SFFS History Project can be. Keyed into the centennial celebration of Akira Kurosawa's birthday, SFFS forwarded an article by Miguel Pendás recounting Kurosawa's October 1980 appearance at the San Francisco International Film Festival for the screening of his Palme d'Or winning film Kagemusha. "Eight taiko drummers pounded out a welcome," Pendás recalled, "and Akira Kurosawa stepped up on the stage, tall, slim, elegant and, as always, hidden behind dark glasses. Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, who had helped him finance his latest film, Kagemusha, joined him on stage. A full house at the Palace of Fine Arts theater rose to its feet and gave the threesome a lengthy standing ovation."

That same edition of the festival boasted an on-stage conversation between Albert Johnson and Kurosawa, assisted by Audie Bock. Bock's Japanese Film Directors was long held as the definitive book on the subject and she leant her translation skills towards Kurosawa's partial autobiography Something Like An Autobiography. That on-stage conversation is available as a 25-minute audio podcast at the History Project's Close-ups sidebar.

In 1986, SFFS inaugurated the Akira Kurosawa Award for excellence in directing. The SFFS History Project offers not only Kurosawa's on-stage appearance receiving the award by way of a 27-minute audio podcast, but also a three-minute video clip of Kurosawa's 1986 press conference where the deputy mayor presented him with a key to San Francisco; specifically, a key to the original Mission Dolores.

Be sure to check out the many riches to be mined at the SFFS History Project, whose database stores information on most of the films shown at the festival: credits, print sources, film stills, notes from the Festival program guide, awards, tributes, out-of-town guests and even some posters and trailers. The festival's oral history is likewise laid out in multiple interviews with key festival personnel.

Cross-published on Twitch.

AKIRA KUROSAWA @ 100—TCM / CRITERION / RIZZOLI

There's nothing like a birthday party to bring out the festive and when that party is to celebrate and honor noted Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa on the 100th anniversary of his March 23 birthday, then it's very good reason indeed to shout out, "O-tanjôbi omedetô!"

For starters, Rizzoli has just published Akira Kurosawa: Master of Cinema authored by film historian Peter Cowie, with a preface by Kurosawa's daughter Kazuko Kurosawa, a foreword by Martin Scorsese, and an introduction by Donald Richie. The most lavishly produced and profusely illustrated volume on Akira Kurosawa ever published, Akira Kurosawa: Master of Cinema is the first illustrated book to pay tribute to Kurosawa's unmistakable style—with more than two hundred images, many never before published. The filmmaker is also famous for his attention to detail, and fans will delight in seeing annotated script pages, sketches, and storyboards that reveal the meticulous craft behind Kurosawa's genius.

The Criterion Collection's AK 100: 25 Films by Akira Kurosawa likewise groups together 25 of Kurosawa's most beloved films in a linen-bound deluxe box set celebrating his astonishing career. AK 100 is the most complete set of Kurosawa's works ever released in this country, and includes four rare films that have never been available on DVD. As if that isn't enough, AK 100 comes with its own illustrated book featuring an introduction and notes on each of the films by Stephen Prince (The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa) and a remembrance by Donald Richie (The Films of Akira Kurosawa).

Naturally, The Auteurs Notebook has been all over this one. They've established a film-by-film discussion board and Glenn Kenney has done a particularly fine job of promoting the enhanced context the package supports. Kenney writes: "There's that old story about the anti-loyalty-oath Director's Guild meeting where an American master introduced himself by saying 'My name's John Ford. I make Westerns.' Some eager novices in Japanese film appreciation could well imagine Kurosawa introducing himself by saying 'I make chambara [sword-fighting] pictures.' But of course, just as Ford proved a master of several genres, Kurosawa too could not be pinned down. And, as with Ford, …all of Kurosawa's pictures say things about each other, whether watched in genre-specific groups, by period, or just chronologically across the course of his career as a whole, which mode this set definitely encouraged. To call the journey rewarding is rather an understatement. The individual pleasures never let up, and are invariably enhanced by context."

For those who can't quite afford the Criterion price tag, however, fear not. Turner Classic Movies launches their month-long celebration of Kurosawa's ouvre this coming week, crowned by a 24-hour marathon on Tuesday, March 23, the anniversary of Kurosawa's birth. "There are many reasons the name Akira Kurosawa means so much in the world of moviemaking, and we're going to be showing 26 of those reasons this month on Turner Classic Movies," says TCM host Robert Osborne. "It's the largest gathering of Kurosawa films we've ever shown in a retrospective of his work, and we couldn't be more excited."

TCM's March celebration of Kurosawa will include such popular samurai films as Seven Samurai (1954), The Hidden Fortress (1958), Yojimbo (1961) and its sequel, Sanjuro (1962); the groundbreaking classic Rashomon (1950); literary adaptations such as Throne of Blood (1957) and The Lower Depths (1957); compelling domestic dramas like No Regrets for Our Youth (1946), Ikiru (1952), I Live in Fear (1955) and Red Beard (1965); crime dramas such as Stray Dog (1949), The Bad Sleep Well (1960) and High and Low (1963); and the vibrantly photographed Dodes 'Ka-Den (1970) and Kagemusha (1980).

Among the films making their debut on TCM are two of Kurosawa's later films, Dersu Uzala (1975), which earned Kurosawa a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar®, and Ran (1985), which is based loosely on Shakespeare's King Lear. Also making their TCM premieres are The Idiot (1951), based on the book by Dostoyevksy, and The Most Beautiful (1944), a World War II drama that wasn't released in the United States until the late 1980s.

In addition to its slate of Kurosawa films, TCM will present two Westerns inspired by Kurosawa's work. On Sunday, March 21, a double-feature will include The Outrage (1964), an adaptation of Rashomon, and The Magnificent Seven (1960), adapted from Seven Samurai.

Below is a complete schedule of TCM's centennial celebration of Akira Kurosawa (all times shown are Pacific):

Tuesday, March 9

5:00PM Ikiru (1952)—Frequent Kurosawa actor Takashi Shimura turns in a heartbreaking performance as a man who finds out he only has a short time to live. Kurosawa explores the meaning of a man's life with this poignant drama.

7:30PM Throne of Blood (1957)—Kurosawa's stunning adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth stars frequent Kurosawa leading man Toshirō Mifune as the feudal lord who kills his rival at his wife's bidding. Kurosawa skillfully blends elements of Noh drama to craft this fascinating and visually arresting film.

9:30PM The Hidden Fortress (1958)—One of Kurosawa's more whimsical samurai dramas, this film follows a pair of inept misfits as they try to help a princess pass through a rival territory. Mifune is the general who assists. George Lucas has acknowledged this rousing tale was the primary inspiration for his first Star Wars film.

12:00AM The Idiot (Hakuchi, 1951)—Dostoyevsky's tale of a love triangle served as the basis for this Kurosawa drama starring Mifune and Shimura. Kurosawa's original cut was edited down by the studio before release, but much of Kurosawa's brilliance remains.

3:00AM The Lower Depths (1957)—Kurosawa's adaptation of the Maxim Gorky play is a character study of a group of people living in poverty. Mifune leads a fine cast. Jean Renoir tackled the Gorky play in 1936, but Kurosawa remained more faithful to the original than the French master.

Tuesday, March 16

5:00PM The Bad Sleep Well (1960)—In this variation of Shakespeare's Hamlet, Kurosawa captures the feel of the great Warner Bros. crime dramas. Mifune stars as a man determined to exact revenge against the high-profile businessman he blames for his father's suicide.

7:45PM High and Low (1963)—Mifune plays a shoe company executive whose son is targeted for kidnapping. But the kidnappers end up taking his chauffeur's son instead. This cat-and-mouse thriller, based on an Ed McBain novel, provides a unique view of Japan in the 1960s.

10:15PM Red Beard (1965)—Kurosawa and Mifune worked together for the last time with this gentle drama about a doctor and his intern, played by Yūzō Kayama.

1:30AM I Live in Fear (1955)—Mifune, nearly unrecognizable thanks to old-age makeup and a superb characterization, plays a successful businessman whose fear of nuclear war leads him to want to move his entire family from Japan to South America.

3:15AM Scandal (1950)—This Kurosawa drama stars Mifune as a painter who sues a magazine over a scandalous story. His lawsuit is threatened when his lawyer, whose daughter is deathly ill, takes a bribe to lose the case.

Sunday, March 21—Adapted from Akira Kurosawa

5:00PM The Outrage (1964)—In this remake of Kurosawa's Rashomon, Paul Newman plays the bandit who attacks a couple, played by Laurence Harvey and Clair Bloom. Each of the three has a different perspective on what exactly happened. Edward G. Robinson and William Shatner co-star.

7:00PM The Magnificent Seven (1960)—John Sturges' thrilling western is based on Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and stars Yul Brynner as the head of a gang of gunslingers who come to the aid of a village threatened by bandits. Steve McQueen, Eli Wallach, Horst Bucholz, James Coburn, Charles Bronson and Robert Vaughn co-star. Elmer Bernstein provided the memorable score.

Tuesday, March 23

3:00AM Sanshiro Sugata (1943)—Kurosawa's first feature film as director is the simple tale of a young judo fighter who must battle another fighter over a woman. The outstanding use of photographic composition and sound make this one of the more striking martial arts films of the era.

4:30AM The Most Beautiful (1944)—Kurosawa's story of young women working in a factory during World War II stars Shimura as their difficult foreman. This interesting early work from Kurosawa includes several elements of pro-Japanese propaganda.

6:00AM The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail (1945)—Based on a Kabuki play, this film tells the story of a lord who disguises himself and his generals as monks in order to avoid detection from the lord's murderous brother. This film was banned twice in Japan, first for not being faithful to is source material and then again by the occupation forces for its favorable depiction of feudal militarism.

7:00AM Sanshiro Sugata, Part 2 (1945)—Bordering on outright propaganda, this government-suggested film uses judo as the background for a story extolling the virtues of Japanese warriors.

8:30AM No Regrets for Our Youth (1946)—In this revealing domestic drama, a young woman learns about life after leaving the politically charged atmosphere of Tokyo and going to the country house of her executed boyfriend's parents.

10:30AM One Wonderful Sunday (1947)—Dreams and despair collide in this gentle drama about a couple who try to spend a Sunday afternoon on just 35 yen.

12:30PM Drunken Angel (1948)—An uneasy friendship between an alcoholic doctor and a gangster is at the center of this gripping drama featuring Shimura and Mifune in two early Kurosawa performances.

2:30PM Stray Dog (1949)—A grueling heat wave becomes its own character in this outstanding drama about a pair of police officers determined to track down a gun that was stolen from one of them. Shimura and Mifune play the cops. Kurosawa uses the story as an opportunity to shed light on the difficulties Japanese soldiers faced when they came home from the war.

5:00PM Rashomon (1950)—This groundbreaking film established a new story-telling style using the different points of view of several characters to explore the meaning of truth. Mifune is a bandit who attacks a couple and kills the husband. But as each person's story reveals, truth may be in the eye of the beholder. This film won Kurosawa an Oscar® for Best Foreign Film. The title has now become synonymous with the multiple-storytelling style the film established.

6:30PM Seven Samurai (1954)—Considered by many critics to be among the greatest films ever made, this extraordinary tale follows a group of ronin (masterless samurai) who agree to protect a village against bandits. Kurosawa explores everything from class distinctions to the nature of violence in this deeply humanistic film starring Shimura, Mifune and a host of stock Kurosawa performers. Tatsuya Nakadai, who would later play the lead roles in such Kurosawa epics as Kagemusha and Ran, can be seen briefly as one of the samurai walking through the town in the first half of the film. Kurosawa's use of slow-motion death scenes greatly influenced the work of Sam Peckinpah.

10:00PM Yojimbo (1961)—This Cold War allegory features Mifune as a samurai who plays two sides of a warring town against each other. Kurosawa uses satire and cynicism to tell a story that in many ways reveals the worst in human nature. This film was later remade by Sergio Leone as the 1964 spaghetti western Fistful of Dollars.

12:00AM Sanjuro (1962)—Mifune returns as the nameless samurai in this humor-laced action flick. This time around, he helps a group of young warriors expose corruption within the leadership of their clan.

1:45AM Dodes 'Ka-Den (1970)—Kurosawa's first color film is a character study of various people living in a Tokyo slum. The director uses his painter's eye to craft a unique color scheme. The title refers to the sound Tokyo streetcars make as they travel down a track. Noted symphonic composer Tōru Takemitsu created the enchanting score.

Tuesday, March 30

5:00PM Dersu Uzala (1975)—Kurosawa won his second Oscar with this story of a Goldi tribe hunter who teaches a Russian explorer how to survive in the harsh Siberian terrain. The pair gradually come to understand one another, despite the remarkably different worlds from which they come.

7:30PM Kagemusha (1980)—George Lucas and Francis Coppola served as producers on this extraordinary epic about a thief who is used as a double for a noble lord. But when the lord dies, the thief has to become him. Tatsuya Nakadai plays the thief, a role that was eventually supposed to go to box-office star Shintaro Katsu, but Kurosawa objected to Katsu's demand that he have his own personal video crew on the set and fired him. At the time this film was made, Kurosawa was having difficult securing financial backing. So he appeared in a series of Suntory Whiskey commercials shot on the set. Kagemusha marked Kurosawa's final film with actor Takashi Shimura.

10:45PM Ran (1985)—Kurosawa adapted Shakespeare's King Lear with this lavishly produced film about a lord who divides his kingdom among three sons, inviting disaster in the process. Nakadai once again takes the lead as the lord, who eventually goes insane as he sees his entire land descend into chaos. Mieko Harada, as the lord's daughter-in-law, creates one of cinema's most memorable and conniving villains. Gender-bending star Peter plays the lord's jester. Costume designer Emi Wada took home an Oscar® for her work.

Cross-published on Twitch.

NINJA ASSASSIN—Peter Galvin's Review

James McTeigue's Ninja Assassin opens with its most successful sequence. In a non-descript hideout in Japan, a group of Yakuza gangsters laugh aloud in the manner of mad scientists as an old-timer warns them to be careful of—he cannot bring himself to utter the word out loud—ninjas! Suddenly, the men are attacked from the shadows by an invisible accurate force, swords and sharp-edged metal stars sever body parts left and right. The action is rapid-fire and plenty-cartoonish—it favors gouts of CGI blood over the more traditional exploding squibs—but it's successful because at its essence it is suitable to its genre.

Unfortunately, the opening scene is the only comfort food served up in Ninja Assassin, a film that might well be as confused as it is confusing.

Thrust into a series of flashbacks, we gather that a boy named Raizo was taken at a young age and trained as an assassin in a secret training castle high in the mountains. Breaking up the flashbacks, in the present day we meet a pair of Europol agents who think they've discovered a pattern to every high-profile assassination in the past hundred years: the very same ancient clan of ninjas. IMDb trivia tells me that writer J. Michael Straczynski was hired to rework a less-than-satisfactory script, pulling off a rewrite in 53 hours, and without doubt it shows. The dueling timelines feel like a storytelling crutch. Perhaps if the story were told in a more straightforward manner, it would hold more impact.

Still, I can suffer any number of contrivances and silly character decision-making if an action film delivers the thrills. I'll be the first to trumpet a successful visceral experience. Too bad the action scenes onscreen are up-close and in the dark—that's right, ninjas hide in the shadows—and much of the time it's difficult to decipher who's fighting who. Where I could make out the stunts, the ninja acrobatics of Korean pop-star Rain were impressive enough, and didn't appear to rely too heavily on wire work.

On the subject of Rain, his transformation from singer to actor seems to be a subject of contention in some circles. Although Rain isn't an especially emotive actor, his performance in Speed Racer held a certain amount of charisma, though I confess I found none of that charm exhibited here. However, if perpetual shirtlessness can be a skill, he is skilled indeed.

Maybe I like my ninjas old-fashioned, but I didn't care much for the clash of genres that takes place in Ninja Assassin. Pairing a traditional tale of revenge and redemption with a contemporary government conspiracy thriller was a conflicting choice, and I hope we can all agree from now on that guns have no place in ninja movies. If McTeigue's film marks the beginning of a ninja comeback, then I'm all for Ninja Assassin as a means to an end, paving the way towards exposing the genre to a new generation of audiences, but let's hope better and brighter entries lie ahead.

Cross-published on Ornery-Cosby and Twitch.

JAPANESE CINEMA: Nagisa Oshima's Tomorrow's Sun (1959)

My thanks to Frako Loden for turning me onto Tomorrow's Sun (Asu no Taiyo), an early short film from the legendary Nagisa Oshima, in the style of a trailer for a feature that doesn't exist.

JAPANESE ANIMATION—Onstage Conversation With Hayao Miyazaki and Roland Kelts

As part of its 50-year anniversary, The Center for Japanese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley recently awarded internationally acclaimed filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki with the 2009 Berkeley Japan Prize, which honors individuals from all disciplines and professions who have, over a lifetime, influenced the world's understanding of Japan. Hayao Miyazaki is the second recipient of the recently inaugurated Berkeley Japan Prize; the 2008 winner was novelist Haruki Murakami. In conjunction with his in-person acceptance of the award, Hayao Miyazaki was also honored with a series of events held on the UC Berkeley campus celebrating his timeless body of film work.

One of those events was an onstage conversation in Berkeley's Zellerbach Auditorium between Hayao Miyazaki and Roland Kelts (Tokyo University lecturer and author of Japanamerica). My thanks to Peter van der Lugt for alerting me to the event and inviting me to transcribe the conversation for GhibliWorld.com. Further thanks to Duncan Williams, Chair of the Center for Japanese Studies, for arranging a last-minute pass to what had long been a sold-out event.

GhibliWorld.com has faithfully kept track of Miyazaki's West Coast promotional tour for Ponyo, which has included the trip to the UC Berkeley campus, UCLA, and San Diego's Comic-Con. Variety devoted their July 22 issue to contextualizing Miyazaki's career, via the American promotion of Ponyo, specifically at Comic-Con. In her report, Ellen Wolff quoted producer Kathleen Kennedy that one of her shared frustrations with Studio Ghibli is the "conundrum of how to distribute [Miyazaki's] movies in North America in a way that people realize these pictures can appeal to a wide range of audiences and not just be relegated to arthouses." I find this "conundrum"—that despite global acclaim Miyazaki's U.S. record is hit-and-miss—somewhat difficult to imagine. His capacity audiences seem to refute that. Further, as much as I wish Miyazaki the increased marketability he wishes for his films, I've poised concerns about how this is to be effected in the U.S.

The Variety coverage also included Erin Maxwell's dispatch from Comic-Con's Pixar/Disney panel, where Pixar's John Lasseter and Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki were honored with Inkpot Awards for "great contributions to pop culture."

Variety likewise gathered tribute testimonials from several industry professionals—Nick Park, Pete Doctor, Jean Giraud, among others—on how Miyazaki has inspired them. And Andrew Stewart reports on husband-and-wife team Don and Cindy Hewitt and the strategic care they have taken with dubbing Ponyo's English translations.

On behalf of Twitch, Doug Jones has compiled a condensed reaction to Miyazaki's various Southern California appearances and—as mentioned earlier—my transcript of Miyazaki's onstage conversation with Roland Kelts can be found here.

Illustration of Hayao Miyazaki courtesy of Marla Campbell, Variety. Cross-published on Twitch.

PFA: IN THE REALM OF OSHIMA—James Quandt Introduction

Introducing the "In the Realm of Oshima" retrospective, currently running at the Pacific Film Archive through July 18, James Quandt, Senior Programmer of the Cinematheque Ontario, admitted to feeling daunted by the invitation to speak at the Pacific Film Archive—"which has been the gold standard for all of us for so many decades; the institution that we all look to set the standard for cinema curation and preservation"—and acknowledged colleagues Edith Kramer, Mona Nigai, Kathy Geritz, Judy Bloch and "especially my beloved colleague" Susan Oxtoby. "Our loss was your gain," he reminded his audience.

Quandt had just been telling Oxtoby that—when he introduced the series in Columbus, Ohio a few weeks back—the first tornadoes of the season touched down about 45 minutes before his talk, setting off sirens all over the city warning residents to seek shelter. When he got up on the stage he felt like the pastor in Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light, unsure that anyone would even be in the audience. Thus, he was gratified to see such a full house for his PFA introduction.

Apologizing for being a "nervous presenter", Quandt read an edited version of his introduction to the Oshima retrospective, published on the Cinematheque Ontario website. Notwithstanding, its erudition bears repeating.

* * *

The Pacific Film Archive is the final venue in North America to present a comprehensive retrospective, the first in 20 years on our continent, of the films of Nagisa Oshima or—to use proper Japanese name order—Oshima Nagisa. A towering figure in post-war cinema, Oshima has been called plainly "the greatest living Japanese filmmaker" by Jonathan Rosenbaum and "Japan's greatest living filmmaker" by J. Hoberman of the Village Voice. So why has it been so impossible to see this important body of work when so many lesser directors enjoy full-scale retrospectives and plentiful DVD releases? Famous—or rather I should say infamous—for the rights issues surrounding some of his most important work, Oshima has slid into semi-obscurity, which is why the next few weeks offer you the rarest of opportunity.

Oshima—given to polemical statements—loved to dismiss the entirety of Japanese cinema, including all the great masters of the Golden Age—"My hatred of Japanese cinema includes absolutely all of it."—and I ask you to keep that in mind when you watch his rather perverse tribute to the centenary of Japanese cinema showing later in this series, which gives cursory attention to Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, et al., while concentrating on Oshima's own achievements.

Oshima also said he was not interested in making films that could be understood in 15 minutes, emphasizing the complexity and difficulty of his own work. Indeed, I would grant that some of his films can't be understood even after 15 hours of contemplation, especially one of his greatest: Night and Fog in Japan, which I just saw again at the Wexner Center in Columbus. I was dumbfounded yet again. It's a film that you have to see at least maybe five times before you begin to even grasp on it. But even the most daunting of Oshima's works exhibit such wit, beauty, and furious invention, never mind profound feeling, that their conceptual gambits take on sensual and emotional force. Or even humorous effect as in the totally crazed and marvelous film Three Resurrected Drunkards, when Oshima gives projectionists heart attacks and sends audiences bolting to look for the house manager with a structuralist joke that I won't describe here for fear of being accused of being a spoiler. Oshima's films are less the product of a postmodernist sensibility—as some critics have characterized his strategies—than of a desperate intelligence. Oshima made films as if they were a matter of life and death.

"I do not like to be called a samurai," Oshima said, "but I admit that I have an image of myself as fighter. I would like to fight against all authorities and powers." Rejecting the aristocratic lineage and traditional Japanese culture that the samurai appellation implies, Oshima instead emphasizes its warrior aspect. Appropriately so: from his first film forward, Oshima was a fighter, less a maverick than an insurgent, rebelling against every myth, tradition, and piety of Japan Inc. Though born into privilege, the son of a government worker in Kyoto (reportedly of samurai ancestry), Oshima was a nascent socialist whose ideals were formed in his youth by the general strike of 1947; by the Pacific War, Emperor Hirohito's capitulation after the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the subsequent American occupation of Japan; and by the mass student struggle against the Korean War and, most markedly, against AMPO, Japan's security pact with cold war America in the early '60s. Steeped in Marxist and Freudian thought from his father's prodigious library, Oshima nevertheless opposed using ideological systems or dogma to probe his nation's psyche: "I am not a Marxist," he insisted. "In fact, I find Marxism and Christianity to be the same thing and both of them are bad."

Oshima was a leading figure of a movement dubbed the Japanese New Wave; a term he came to loathe, as he thought the analogy it forged with the French New Wave—the nouvelle vague, which emerged concurrently in the late '50s and early '60s—was a false one. Oshima felt the impetus behind a new style of filmmaking in Japan—of which he and Shohei Imamura, as well as such figures as Susumu Hani, Masahiro Shinoda and Hiroshi Teshigahara were avatars—was entirely different from that of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and their cofreres in France. Oshima—like the French directors, by the way—was first a film critic before becoming a director. Each movement was rebelling against the national tradition of cinema and shared a concern with sex and politics. But Oshima felt that Japanese films dealt with culturally and politically specific forms and stylistic forms. Oshima was determined to expunge from his own art the signifiers of Japan's cultural conformity and political obeisance that he felt had grown only stronger in the post-war "economic miracle", which culminated in the country's coming out party: the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo.

Oshima shunned traditional shots of the sky or of people sitting on tatami mats and then became more extreme, banishing the color green from his films as a "too comforting" hue—it "softens the heart," he said—because of its association with nature, with the traditional Japanese garden and its proximity to the consolations of home. He also has another essay about the color green where he associates it with the uniforms of the occupying U.S. army. That's another reason why he eschewed the color in his films.

Green forbidden as insidious or anodyne, red would become the marker of Oshima's dire vision of Japan, not only in the motif of the Japanese flag with its burning sun, repeatedly invoked and maligned in the director's films, but also in the many objects keyed to carmine in his extravagant color films. "The blood of this young boy dyes all of Japan red," claimed the trailer for his masterpiece Boy. In the mother's red sweater and dyed hair extension, the little girl's red boot and forehead wound, the ubiquitous Japanese flags and various red objects given prominence in Scope composition, Boy joins such scarlet-scored films as Nick Ray's Party Girl, Godard's Pierrot le fou, Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse, and Bresson's Le Diable probablement, each a portrait of moral drift, corruption, and suicide. Of course, red most readily represents blood, the stuff of life, which is defiled, bought and sold in the black market in Oshima's The Sun's Burial—one of cinema's great visions of Hell—or, conversely, the deathly apotheosis of sexual passion (the sluice of blood that ends the cloistered lovemaking in In the Realm of the Senses).

Extremity, then, defined Oshima's vision, and his stylistics: Night and Fog in Japan was shot in only forty-seven (some say fewer) long takes, while the cutting in Violence at Noon comes on like a Kurosawa hail of arrows: over two thousand edits, several used for one short sequence. Oshima's earliest films were mostly shot in the widescreen and color formats then favored by Japanese studios, but he would readily retreat to the old-fashioned mode of black and white and the 1.37 square aspect ratio for others, as you saw last week in Diary of a Shinjuku Thief and will see again in his very moving The Man Who Left His Will On Film. Oshima could be perverse in his stylistics, using extreme long shot or obscuring chiaroscuro to shoot key events, as in Shiro Amakusa, The Christian Rebel or to develop an unbearable intimacy using relentless close-ups, as in The Man Who Left His Will on Film, whose images of fleshy confinement offer another instance of the claustrophobia of Oshima's cinema, which often features shut-off or isolated settings, most markedly the love-making room in In the Realm of the Senses and the execution chamber in Death by Hanging.

"I always try to deny the style I used in a previous work ... I never make films in the same style," Oshima told Joan Mellen, which helps account for his swing from Nicholas Ray histrionics or the kino-fist aesthetic of Sam Fuller (in films like Cruel Story of Youth and The Sun's Burial) to the refined modernism of European masters Alain Resnais or Michelangelo Antonioni (in The Ceremony), from stern alienation effects (Night and Fog in Japan) to pop-modernist playfulness (Three Resurrected Drunkards), all the while maintaining his singular sensibility. Oshima told another interviewer: "I have to agree with someone like Ozu who said that he could only make 'tofu' movies. Bean curd was the only thing he knew how to cook and so he could not make a 'beefsteak' movie.... I feel that what I've been doing in my films, perhaps, is something much closer to making sake. Sometimes my films approach the full blends and rich flavor that the sake should have, and at other times they're very raw and they become the kind of sake that burns your throat as it goes down."

Throat-burning mostly, I would have to say. The director instantly became a pariah with his first film, the cheerily named Town of Love and Hope. Not only was the title forced on him by the Shochiku studio—Oshima preferred his blunt original, The Boy Who Sold His Pigeon—but the director was also expected to hew to the studio's popular Ofuna-style family melodrama in his tale of a poor boy befriended by a rich girl. Japanese film historian Tadao Sato is entirely correct when he says that in Town of Love and Hope the essence of Oshima can already be discerned. (The scam by which the boy supports his family—reselling a homing pigeon over and over—was the first statement of a key theme in Oshima: that of extortion, imposture, crime, delinquency; the director's clear-eyed sympathy with the cheating boy—which was the first of many self-portraits in his cinema, which include the pimply Motoki in The Man Who Left His Will on Film, and even, Oshima insisted, "that demonic rapist in broad daylight" of Violence at Noon. This established his identification with young outcasts and criminal aliens, which would define his subsequent cinema.)

Foreshadowing the masterpieces of Oshima's middle period—especially Boy—but more classically neorealist in style, this black and white Scope debut [Town of Love and Hope] employs a simple tale to complicated ends and succeeds with heartbreaking acuity. Oshima delivered neither the optimistic humanism demanded by the studio nor the prescribed social message. "This film is saying that the rich and the poor can never join hands," studio head Shiro Kido fumed, suspending the director for six months and declaring Town unhealthy and leftist. Whenever Oshima returned to the studio system, sometimes as a gun for hire, he would turn familiar Japanese genres—the samurai film in Shiro Amakusa, and again in Gohatto, the family chronicle in The Ceremony, anime in Band of Ninja, the so-called "sun tribe" films of disaffected youth—into reflections of his own concerns.

Those concerns centered on sex, crime, and death. Oshima insisted that the "unaware" and unconscious nature of both sex and crime made them the central obsessions of his cinema; "behavior with clear motivation is uninteresting," he insisted. However, the enticement of psychology, of biographical reduction, when interpreting his films is great. To abridge Oshima's early work to a vast psychodrama of parental abandonment would be unconscionable, but when Oshima says, "I always want to go back to my boyhood" because of the loss of his father at age six—a deprivation he wrote movingly about in an essay—one wonders if that familial yearning could help explain the many incomplete and broken households in his cinema, the preponderance of children, adolescents, teens, few of them innocent, all participants in or witnesses to the criminal world of adults. (Note, for instance, the marked presence of children at the communal evils committed in The Catch or the broken families in tonight's first film.) The stark title of Boy emphasizes this violation, the film's manipulation of scale and repeated disconnection of the supposedly unified family within the widescreen frame stressing the boy's isolation and vulnerability. Similarly, Oshima describes the harsh world of the amoral teens in Cruel Story of Youth in Scope images of the abject and precarious: for instance, the intensely compacted composition of Makoto's midriff in plaid skirt, a wad of bills and sheet of directions to an abortionist clutched in her hand, or the rape among the logs in Tokyo harbor, a travesty of the traditional understanding of "the floating world," rendered with virtuosic but unstable travelling camera. (Oshima's hand-held pans and tracking shots sometimes judder, not to signify authenticity as they do in contemporary cinema but to transcribe his characters' restless, tenuous existence.)

Just as he rejected the Japanese New Wave rubric, Oshima chafed at the inevitable comparisons critics made between his films and Jean-Luc Godard's. Though he would respond politely to questions about the latter's influence with evasive statements about shared enthusiasms and common concerns (predominantly politics and cinema), he took to calling Godard "the Oshima of France" after one too many comparisons or accusations of being an imitator. The similarities between the two run to a substantial list—none diminishing Oshima's originality, it must be emphasized—but in hindsight, Oshima seems to me to have as much affinity with the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder in his extraordinary prolificacy and swift, single-take shoots (look at Oshima's output in the years 1960 or 1968 alone!); his sometimes sentimental sympathy for outsiders—sexual, ethnic (particularly Koreans), and political; his development of a "house" technical and acting troupe, which he employed in film after film; his use of music as alienation device and such Brechtian strategies as the intertitles in Death by Hanging or the theatrical friezes in Night and Fog in Japan; and his acerbic view of human nature and how sex often subverts both emotions and politics.

In his late "international" period, several of his films were financed by French producers and Oshima seemed to mellow as a modernist, taking on the suave tone of late Buñuel (a director he once claimed as his favorite) in Max Mon Amour, a brittle comedy of manners about a British diplomat's wife who falls in love with a chimpanzee. Critics have argued over whether Oshima remained an iconoclast or succumbed to conservative nostalgia, particularly when they analyzed the last film of his career: Gohatto. I have a long analysis of Gohatto, which would take us to the end of the retrospective; but, I'm going to skip it because we're running out of time here. But I just wanted to say that Oshima provided the clue for this transition, to this more classical and serene tone of his later cinema; a transition from his youthful anger and political activism to this more conservative and accessible aesthetic. Love finally became the third element in his cinema, he commented, along with sex and crime.

As I've essentially dealt with the first feature in tonight's double-bill, I just wanted to make a few comments about the second one tonight—Three Resurrected Drunkards—whose reputation has grown over the years, though many audiences (I should warn you) still find it irritating or baffling. A programmer on this tour—I won't name him but he's from Washington—sent me an email. They've had great success with a number of our touring programs of Japanese cinema—Nabuse, Imamura, Mizoguchi, Ichikawa—but he said the Oshima retrospective was the first time he'd ever been cornered by a group of his audience afterwards who were very hostile and asked him why he showed the film? I shouldn't tell tales, but I was just saying at dinner that both my bosses walked out of it in the first half hour when I showed it in Toronto. So…. It's a film I really deeply love and I hope you do too. It's such a moving film for me because of the period that it comes from and the way it segues from a kind of pop Hard Day's Night into something really political and moving in its last sequences. Anyways, Drunkards is shot in eye-popping widescreen and pulsing color—from purple underwear to paisley trousers to hot pink outfits sported at an onsen (hot spring)—and scored with crazed insistence (the music veers from James Bond parody to a pop song by lead actor Kazuhiko Kato, celebrated singer of the Sadistic Mika Band and the tall one of the three lead actors). All the better to serve its Hard Day's Night tale of a trio of hapless young guys who have their clothes stolen while cavorting in the sea, are mistaken for Korean stowaways, and become involved with a young woman whose brutal older mate, sporting an eye patch and metal hook, represents Japan's repressive wartime generation. I think Oshima shares here with Susumu Hani a concern with the sins of the fathers, of patriarchs and overseers. This is 1968, after all, and amid the hi-jinx, chases, conceptual jokes and flash costume changes (including one into female drag), Oshima injects stinging commentary on the Vietnam War, Japan's war guilt, and prejudice against Koreans—an enduring concern of the director's, which is also a theme in tonight's short film Diary of a Yunbogi Boy and Saturday night's Death By Hanging. Reminiscent moment to moment of Frank Tashlin, Godard, Sam Fuller, and Buñuel, Three Resurrected Drunkards remains for me one of Oshima's most touching works.