Violence at Noon

NEW 35mm PRINT!  │  “One of Oshima’s greatest films” (Noël Burch), the stunning Violence at Noon is based on the case of a notorious serial killer who terrorized Japan in the 1950s, and offers an exercise in elaborate film editing that would make Eisenstein proud. In the aftermath of the failure of a communal farm, a psychopath embarks on a series of rapes and murders — and the two women who know the killer’s identity choose not to turn him in. Ever keen to explore the links between individual pathology and socio-political dysfunction, Oshima turns the terrible story into an elegy for the failure of idealism in postwar Japan. Known in his earlier films for his mastery of long single-take sequences, he here employs in excess of 2,000 shots — to astonishing, mosaic-like effect. “Scenes seem to break apart and re-form before our eyes, as Oshima jump-cuts from angle to angle with unsettling speed, fracturing space like a cubist. The fragmented style brings us into the criminal’s consciousness, a jumble of fetishized memories and uncontrollable urges” (Nelson Kim, Senses of Cinema). “A masterpiece . . . portrayed with a poignancy that is both ominous and compelling” (Tadao Sato). B&W, 35mm, in Japanese with English subtitles. 99 mins.