Night and Fog in Japan

NEW 35mm PRINT!  │  A landmark of Japanese New Wave cinema, Oshima’s first truly radical work prefigures the later methods of Godard, and has a title that references an earlier short by Resnais (1955’s Night and Fog, about the Holocaust). Night and Fog in Japan uses the wedding reception of two activists, who meet while protesting Japan’s 1960 security pact with the U.S., as the occasion for a highly stylized, highly critical meditation on the failures of two generations of Japan’s postwar Left. As wedding guests launch into political speeches and hurl accusations, flashbacks recount the recent demonstrations and those of a decade earlier. Oshima makes striking use of mobile cameras, elaborate pans, theatrical tableaux, and extended sequence shots; there are but 43 shots in the entire film (in Violence at Noon, six years later, he would use more than 2000). Shochiku, the studio, withdrew the film within days of its release, probably as a result of political pressure in the wake of a Socialist politician’s assassination. Oshima, outraged, would begin working as an independent filmmaker. The reception at his own wedding, to actress Akiko Koyama in 1961, is said to have been full of vindictive speeches denouncing Shochiku. Colour, 35mm, in Japanese with English subtitles. 107 mins.