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#Rokko Toura
shihlun · 2 years
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Naoto Yamakawa 
- So What 
1988  
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byneddiedingo · 1 year
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Do-yun Yu and Akiko Koyama in Death by Hanging (Nagisa Oshima, 1968) Cast.: Do-yun Yu, Kei Sato, Fumio Watanabe, Hosei Kamatsu, Rokko Toura, Ishiro Ishida, Masao Adachi, Akiko Koyama. Screenplay: Michinori Fukao, Mamoru Sasaki, Tsutomu Tamura, Nagisa Oshima. Cinematography: Yasuhiro Yoshioka. Music: Hikaru Hayashi. Nagisa Oshima is one of the great artists of the second half of the 20th century whom nobody has heard of. That's an exaggeration, of course: Lots of cinéastes and students of Japanese film obviously know Oshima's work, but ordinary people who pride themselves on their knowledge of Kurosawa or Ozu often know little about him, unless it's his English-language film starring David Bowie, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983). Maybe it's because Oshima doesn't lend himself to easy description: You can't take any one of his films as representative of the style and content of any of the others. There's a vast difference between the harrowing upperclass family drama The Ceremony (1971) and the poignant account of an abused child's initiation into crime, Boy (1969), or between the scathing look at rootless Japanese young people in Cruel Story of Youth (1960) and what is probably Oshima's best-known film in the West, the sexually explicit In the Realm of the Senses (1976). His willingness to experiment has tagged Oshima as the Japanese Jean-Luc Godard, but he seems to me more the heir to the great modernists of the early-to-mid-20th century: Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Brecht, Genet. Certainly Death by Hanging has been singled out as "Brechtian" for its outrageous transformation of politically charged subject matter, capital punishment, into something like tragic farce. It's also "Kafkaesque" in its lampoon of bureaucrats. But mostly it's an audacious transformation of a polemic into an uproarious and finally sad satire. The protagonist (Do-yun Yu) is called "R.," which immediately brings to mind Kafka's "K."  He has raped and murdered two young women and is about to hang in the Japanese prison's scrupulously neat death house. But the hanging doesn't take: R. simply doesn't die, and in the ensuing confusion, none of the prison officials knows what to do. There's a flurry of arguments about whether, having survived the hanging, he's even still R., his soul presumably having left the body after the execution. Things grow still more problematic after R. emerges from a post-hanging coma and doesn't remember who he is. Can they hang him again? Much of this hysteria is over-the-top funny, especially the determination of the Education Officer, played with farcical broadness by Fumio Watanabe, to restore R.'s memory by re-creating his past and his crimes. He was the son of poor Korean immigrants, and the satire shifts away from capital punishment to the Japanese treatment of Koreans, as the prison staff voices some of the worst prejudices and stereotypes that the Japanese have of Koreans. Eventually, the Education Officer, trying to re-create one of R.'s crimes, murders a young woman himself. But by that time, the film has departed from any resemblance to actuality into symbolic fantasy. It's a very theatrical film in the sense that even when it departs from the confines of the death house, where most of it takes place, and explores the outside world, talk dominates action. But where that might have been a strike against the film, it adds to its claustrophobic quality, the feeling of being plunged deeply into an absurd but entirely recognizable situation. Maybe that should be called "Oshimaesque." 
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dare-g · 3 years
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Silence Has No Wings (1966)
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moviemosaics · 3 years
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Kuroneko
directed by Kaneto Shindo, 1968
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tylermkw · 5 years
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Kuroneko (1968)
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ozu-teapot · 6 years
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Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in the Land of Demons | Kenji Misumi | 1973
Rokko Toura, Masaru Shiga, Teruo Ishiyama, Taketoshi Naitô, Bin Amatsu, Shingo Yamashiro
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facesofcinema · 5 years
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Yabu no naka no kuroneko (1968)
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badgaymovies · 4 years
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The Ceremony (Gishiki) (1971)
The Ceremony (Gishiki)
NAGISA OSHIMA
Bil’s rating (out of 5): BBBB.  Japan, 1971.  Art Theatre Guild, Daiei Studios, Sozosha.  Screenplay by Mamoru Sasaki, Tsutomu Tamura, Nagisa Oshima.  Cinematography by Toichiro Narushima.  Produced by Kinshirô Kuzui, Takuji Yamaguchi.  Music by Toru Takemitsu.  Production Design by Shigenori Shimoishizaka. Film Editing by Keiichi Uraoka.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6P…
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multiphaseflowers · 9 years
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shihlun · 2 years
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Naoto Yamakawa
- The New Morning of Billy the Kid
1986
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byneddiedingo · 1 year
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Mariko Kaga in Pleasures of the Flesh (Nagisa Oshima, 1965)
Cast: Katsuo Nakamura, Mariko Kaga, Yumiko Nagawa, Masako Yagi, Toshiko Higuchi, Hiroko Shimizu, Shoichi Ozawa, Kei Sato, Rokko Toura, Fumio Watanabe, Hosei Kamatsu, Akiji Kobayashi. Screenplay: Nagisa Oshima, based on a novel by Futaro Yamada. Cinematography: Akira Takada. Art direction: Yasutaro Kon. Music: Joji Yuasa.
With a burst of bluesy music, Pleasures of the Flesh starts out like a film noir, and the plot setup follows suit. The young tutor to a pretty teenager kills a man who has molested her, but the act has been witnessed by a man who has embezzled funds from his place of work. In an attempt to blackmail the tutor, the embezzler says he won't tell the police if the young man will hide 30 million yen of the loot. The embezzler expects to be arrested, he says, but he'll return for the money after serving his prison sentence. If the tutor has spent any of it, he'll tell the police about the murder. The tutor reluctantly agrees, but then the plot not unexpectedly begins to tangle. The tutor, Atsushi (Katsuo Nakamura), is in love with the teenager, Shoko (Mariko Kaga), but too poor to win her parents' approval. He's so devastated when she marries that he begins to lose his mind. The embezzler has in fact gone to prison, and Atsushi decides to live it up on the 30 million yen, then kill himself when the embezzler has served his term. And so begins a series of flings with four women, each of whom he pays to live with him. There's a showgirl with a gangster boyfriend, a married woman whose husband is desperately in debt, a doctor who insists on remaining a virgin, and a mute prostitute with a thuggish pimp. None of these attempts to wallow in the titular pleasures of the flesh ends well, and then, just as Atsushi spends the last of the money, he learns that the embezzler has died in prison. As if that outcome weren't ironic enough, the embezzler also told a fellow inmate about the 30 million yen he had stashed with Atsushi and when he's released he comes in search of the money. It's a moral tale straight out of Boccaccio or Chaucer, but writer-director Nagisa Oshima is faced with modernizing it and doesn't quite succeed. There's a bit too much fancy camerawork as Oshima interpolates Atsushi's obsessive visions of Shoko and paranoid ones of the embezzler into the narrative. The moral tale still feels heavyhanded. But Pleasures of the Flesh is the work of a major filmmaker at the outset of his career, and as such rewards watching.
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dare-g · 3 years
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Violence at Noon (1966)
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