Only She Knows

[Globus Film Series] April 20, 4:30 PM

This controversial film by director Koreyoshi Kurahara is based on a story by Nobel Prize-winning author Kenzaburo Oe, adapted by Yoshio Shirasaka, a prolific writer who scripted masterpieces under every major Japanese production company (including Yasuzo Masumura’s 1958 film Giants and Toys at Daiei studios). A college student seeks to study abroad in France to escape his daily troubles in Japan only to be met with endless frustration and ultimately forced to live an aimless life of disillusionment. Among Nikkatsu's most political films, The Age of Our Own reveals a complex, multi-faceted reaction to the anti-Anpo struggle and its contexts.

[Globus Film Series] April 20, 7 PM

The game-changing experimentation of Nikkatsu taiyozoku (“Sun Tribe”) films like Ko Nakahira’s Crazed Fruit (1956) and Toshio Masuda’s Perfect Game (1958) paved the way for this representative work of the studio’s New Wave by Koreyoshi Kurahara. A jazz-obsessed delinquent and a reckless sex worker are released from juvenile detention and wreak havoc on everyone in their paths, including the newspaper reporter who got them arrested and his bourgeois artist fiancée. Kurahara’s indelible portrait of amoral youth features striking high-contrast black and white compositions, bold camera movements and a propulsive jazz score, anchored by Tamio Kawachi’s mesmerizingly feral performance.

 

[Globus Film Series] April 23, 7 PM

Kiju Yoshida's second film for Shochiku is a fierce critique of mass media, advertising and capitalist consumerism. When his employers announce massive layoffs, a salaryman takes a gun to his head in a plea for mercy on behalf of his colleagues only to unwittingly become the center of an insurance company’s advertising campaign that exploits his desperate gesture for profit and markets him as a hero. Paired with Nagisa Oshima’s Night and Fog in Japan (1960) as a double bill, both films were pulled from theaters days after opening due to the politically motivated censorship of Oshima’s allegedly inflammatory film.

[Globus Film Series] April 26, 7 PM

Virtually unknown outside of (and even within) Japan, this Shochiku New Wave gem is set in a mining bunkhouse wherein a woman who survives a double suicide becomes entwined in a peculiar relationship with her dead lover's brother, a killer on the run. Another significant yet overlooked progenitor of the New Wave’s theoretical and formal ideals, Tsutomu Tamura only made this one film as a director before leaving Shochiku to create an independent production company with Nagisa Oshima and write scripts for many of the renown director’s films, including The Catch (1961), Violence at Noon (1966) and Boy (1969).

[Globus Film Series] April 27, 5 PM

Written and directed by newcomer Eitaro Morikawa for Shochiku’s Kyoto studio, The Tragedy of Bushido is the first jidaigeki period drama produced by the New Wave. After a clan lord dies, a young samurai in 17th century Japan is forced to follow him in death through ritual suicide in accordance with an archaic bushido custom. Drawing a connection between the oppressive values of absolute fealty within the samurai moral code and the bureaucratic political systems of postwar Japan that continued to place priority on obedience and obligation over individual freedoms, Morikawa gave birth to a new kind of post-Anpo jidaigeki.

[Film] May 10, 7 PM

Clad in a black leather jacket, renowned Japanese writer Yukio Mishima struts and preens as a small-time yakuza underboss in this oddity of postwar Japanese cinema directed by Yasuzo Masumura. Fresh out of jail and hiding out above a rundown Tokyo movie theater, the unsympathetic tough is hounded by a rival gang and an asthmatic killer-for-hire as he struggles to reconcile his criminal life with a newfound love interest (Ayako Wakao). Afraid to Die screens in celebration of a brand new English translation of Mishima's 1961 novella Star (New Directions Publishing, 2019), a fictionalized account of his experience working on Masumura's film.

[Film] June 14, 7 PM

Winner of the JAPAN CUTS 2018 Audience Award, this moving, comedic family drama returns to Japan Society for an encore screening in anticipation of the upcoming 13th edition of JAPAN CUTS: Festival of New Japanese Film (July 18—28). A visibly pregnant woman returns home to the remote Okinawan island of Aguni four years after her mother's death to find that her alcoholic father is still in mourning. As the gathered family works through lingering resentments and village gossip, they make preparations for the island's ancient senkotsu ritual in which the remains of the deceased are exhumed and the bones are washed clean.