QUICK SELECT
J-NOIR: FILM NOIR FROM JAPAN
Film Noir is cinema’s great visual and thematic means for expressing social discord and disappointment through a popular filmmaking genre. As it had been in the USA, France and the UK, from the 1950s onwards noir became a key means for Japanese popular cinema to convey dark undercurrents beneath the nation’s modern milieu, precisely as it was suppressing its wartime past and extolling its ‘Economic Miracle’. And as with western noir, the key films of Japanese noir (both from directors acclaimed in west, like ‘Beat’ Takeshi and Masaki Kobayashi, or from little-known masters like Kinji Fukasaku and Masahiro Shinoda) are both startling exercises in film visual style and also deep critiques of their national social life, times and psychology. With support from The Japan Foundation and thanks to the Embassy of Japan and Shochiku Ltd.
Thu 16 Jul 7pm: VIOLENT COP (1989, MA15+)
Thu 23 Jul 7pm: I, THE EXECUTIONER (1968)
Sun 2 Aug 4.30pm: BLACK RIVER (1957)
Thu 6 Aug 7pm: PALE FLOWER (1963)
Thu 13 Aug 7pm: BATTLES WITHOUT HONOUR OR HUMANITY (1973)
All titles 18+, except as noted.
VIOLENT COP
(Sono otoko, kyôbô ni tsuki) Dir: Takeshi Kitano, Japan, 1989, 103 mins, (MA15+)
The directing career debut of the then cult Japanese TV comedian and occasional Japanese cinema ''heavy'' 'Beat' Takeshi astonished international film festival audiences for its unexpected mood and poetics. As the film’s anti-hero, Kitano’s Detective Azuma can easily be shoe-horned into the Dirty Harry stereotype. But as a director, Kitano’s interests are very different. Much like Kurosawa’s early Samurai epics he achieves an overall sublime melancholy by keeping the brutality to a few startling, kinetic moments. Courtesy of The Japan Foundation.
I, THE EXECUTIONER
(Minagoroshi no reika) Dir: Tai Kato, Japan, 1968, 90 mins, 35mm, (unclassified 18+)
A rare chance to see the sex, revenge, and Kabuki-soaked work of the Yakuza genre master director Tai Kato, described by Paul Schrader as like "… the very best of Sergio Leone.” Kato was famous for gender-inverting plots. So it’s no surprise that this legendary exploitation movie overturns the norms of the Revenge melodrama sub-genre, by having for its protagonist a young male teen gang member - and the target of his retribution five women who sexually abuse a mentally disturbed friend. Courtesy of The Japan Foundation.
BLACK RIVER
(Kuroi kawa) Dir: Masaki Kobayashi, Japan, 1957, 114 mins, 35mm, (unclassified 18+)
Whilst a young couple fall to the temptations offered by a local Yakuza enforcer, their whole community falls under the spell of the Yankee dollars and pop culture on offer around a nearby US Air Force base. The early masterpiece from the director of Kwaidan looks at the social corruption that existed in the shadow of post-War US military occupation. “… (M)oral without being moralistic… the villain is not America for having camps but the Japanese social system which permitted lawless behaviour.” - Donald Richie. Courtesy of The Japan Foundation.
PALE FLOWER
(Kawaita Hana) Dir: Masahiro Shinoda, Japan, 1963, 96 mins, 16mm, (unclassified 18+)
A veteran gangster emerges from three hard years in prison. The old scene seems feudalistic, inflexible and even boring, and he is attracted to an amoral and very different young society woman with an addiction to gambling, high-risk living and thrill killing. A gritty, neon-lit portrait of Tokyo street life at the beginning of the ‘Economic Miracle’ period, Shinoda’s film brought together the traditions of the Yakuza genre with the moral and stylistic freedoms of Japan’s cinema New Wave. From the collection of the NFSA.
BATTLES WITHOUT HONOUR OR HUMANITY
(Jingi Naki Tatakai) Dir: Kinji Fukasaku, Japan, 1973, 97 mins, 35mm, (unclassified 18+)
This is the Japanese The Godfather, the masterpiece from the veteran director of over 60 features who only came to notice in the west with his late 1990s cult Battle Royale. A raw history of the emergence of modern Yakuza in post-War Japan, it has moments of spellbinding ‘bullet ballet’, but also creates an unglamorous context for organised crime in poverty, humiliation and greed. “Fukasaku’s crime films were… ideal vehicles… to vent his anger and frustration about the hypocrisy of post-war Japan.” – Tom Mes, Midnight Eye. Courtesy of The Japan Foundation.
