Venue: Star And Shadow Cinema
Dates: Friday 26th March
Time: 7:30pm
Director Ôshima Nagisa / Japan 1960 / 107 mins
Certificate 15 / In Japanese with English Subtitles
Night & Fog in Japan openly displays the director’s disappointment with the left wing movement in the light of the US-Japan security Treaty talks. Using avant-garde techniques of clashing archival material with stylized drama, this is Oshima’s most explicitly political film in both form and content.
Tickets are £4/£3 and can be bought on Skiddle
Anonymous 
Night and Fog In Japan
Director Ôshima Nagisa / Japan 1960 /
The Night and Fog in Japan evolves around personality clashes and inefficiency of student leftist movement in Japan sometime after the Korean War. Power struggle, means before ends versus idealism and personal progress or digress, how ever you wish to see it. As usual those are the reasons for tensions, jealousy and eventually a murder.
Events of the film, or the air cleansing, happen at a wedding of two group members. All goes well until a displeased member joins the party and starts harassing people in order to find some answers to pending questions. The pieces of puzzle are eventually revealed in a series of flashbacks and revelations by the ones involved.
The film is very theatre-like. Instead of counting on editing it has really long and well choreographed scenes where camera pans, tilts and moves around to find the people speaking. And people do speak a lot. It is very dialogue heavy, so the camera also moves a lot. The lighting effects are also created to support the theatre-like look. Carefully designed lighting effects bring people out from the darkness while other lights inside the frame are dimmed completely until suddenly everything changes back to normal.
Even though Night and Fog in Japan had it’s moments, it was quite tiresome mainly because the endless flow of dialogue and bit repetitive visuals. So part of the film I spent somewhere in my own world of obscenities just to wake back up to the personal clashes of the student leftist in Japan. Also occasionally the drastic camera moves were bit disturbing and I didn’t really enjoy the theatre-like-look either. If I want to see theatre I go to theatre.
Night and Fog in Japan is an experimental piece that challenges some of the film making conventions. This time though the existing conventions of the medium beat the challenger.