boy

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Movie
German title boy
Original title 少年 Shons
Country of production Japan
original language Japanese
Publishing year 1969
length 97 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Nagisa Ōshima
script Takeshi Tamura ,
Nagisa Ōshima
production Masayuki Nakajima
music Hikaru Hayashi
camera Yasuhiro Yoshioka ,
Seizō Sengen
cut Keiichi Uraoka ,
Sueko Shiraishi
occupation

The boy ( Japanese 少年 Shōnen ) from 1969 is one of the more accessible films by Japanese director Nagisa Ōshima . The plot revolves around a boy of about ten and his family, based on a fraud case that occurred in Japan in 1966. The neorealist style is occasionally broken by the boy's fantasies. At first sight, the film seems to be close to humanist concerns, although the director did not take this position. The audience liked the film because of the childish protagonist and the linear narrative form, while some critics saw it as a regression of the artist.

action

The focus is on a boy whose parents do not have a regular job and who has a little brother. The father, a World War II veteran, is considered an invalid due to a war injury. It is suggested that he exaggerates the extent of the injury so as not to have to support the family. The parents occasionally earn an income in that the mother lets herself fall next to passing cars and the father comes in as an "uninvolved witness". With accusations, they put pressure on drivers who, in order to avoid reporting to the police, agree to pay. In order to remain undetected, the family constantly changes location. One day the boy takes on the role of the one who lets himself go. He does it so skillfully that he increasingly takes over from his mother, who now appears as a “witness”, while the father stays away from “work”.

When the mother becomes pregnant again, the parents change their decision several times whether to have an abortion or to carry the child to term. Then the father sends them to a clinic that they seem to have known from before and tells the boy to see if the mother really goes there. The boy watches as she leaves the clinic immediately. The woman - as it now turns out she is his stepmother - gives him a watch. They agree to keep silent about the father. As a result, their complicity deepens, the father is increasingly left out of their relationship. The moment comes when the continued pregnancy can no longer be concealed. The angry father scolds the boy, who then builds an "alien" out of snow outside to save the world. In one of the "accidents" the driver does not take the lie from them and insists on an investigation by the police. The investigation is unsuccessful, but since the authorities have recorded her personal details, the family is at increased risk if the fraud continues. Finally they are blown up, the police arrest the parents, and the boy remains silent during the questioning. A voice reads the police protocol with the biographies of father and mother, both of whom led an unsteady lifestyle.

Emergence

Ōshima derived the plot from a case that actually occurred in Japan and was discovered in September 1966. It received heavy coverage in the press and made front pages. After a few weeks he was gone from the news. Ōshima immediately discussed the idea with producer Masayuki Nakajima , who thought the fabric was easy to sell. Then the director brought in the writer Takeshi Tamura . They decided to use the facts, people and events largely unchanged in the script, but to add to the boy's mind. Since Ōshima was busy finishing another film, he let Tamura write the book. Fumio Watanabe , an old companion in Ōshima's oeuvre, who had starred in most of the works since his first film, actively participated in the preparation. Tamura submitted the finished script just five days later. A magazine printed it and it received a special award from the Screenwriters Association.

Nevertheless, the project met with little interest at Studio Shōchiku . But after Ōshima's films Ninjas Martial Arts and Death by Hanging at the box office were successful, Ōshima decided to produce The Boy independently of the studio and won the Art Theaters Guild (ATG), a distributor specializing in art and foreign films, as a cooperation partner. Exactly two years after the script was completed, in September 1968, production began. With 10 million yen , half raised by Ōshima's production company and the ATG, the project was budgeted very low. The actual financial costs ended up being twice as high as planned. According to Ōshima's estimate, the film would have cost 40 to 50 million yen at regular fees and without the free material provided by various supporters. The shooting meant that the staff and actors were constantly on the move. Hence Ōshima chose almost the same composition of the staff that had existed since death by hanging . In order to avoid the involvement of new employees, he assigned an actor and two assistant directors to the cameraman; the two assistants were also engaged as drivers. The entire entourage consisted of no more than 15 people. Before filming began, Ōshima spoke to his crew, they went on a criminal journey with a family of accident fraudsters. You should feel like criminals on the spot. "In fact, it was more like a journey by beggars," he later summed up this time. The working conditions were exhausting. Only 1,000 yen were available per person and day for accommodation and meals. According to Ōshima, they got very close and the stressful work went smoothly.

The role of the father was taken over by the enthusiastic Fumio Watanabe , the maternal role was played by Ōshima with his wife, the actress Akiko Koyama . These two adults took on additional tasks: they taught the child actors how to act in front of the camera and helped feed the staff. The search for a suitable leading actor turned out to be difficult. The seekers swarmed into the children's homes and found nine-year-old Tetsuo Abe, an orphan who had gone through similar experiences as the film character, until late.

“No one could have been more suitable. When we went to a filming location by train, he held his luggage tightly with one hand and clung tightly to the tip of the coat of the person next to him with the other. Sometimes when we approached the destination he asked if everything was okay and why we weren't getting up yet. When asked about this, he said that when the teachers changed, he had been left behind on the train a few times. "

- Nagisa Ōshima

During the filming, he was tutored by members of the staff so as not to fall behind in school material. The two children grew visibly in body size and dear to the team. Towards the end of the shooting it became too much for the director and he forbade everyone to speak to the boy unless the work required it. Especially since the final scenes were imminent, in which the boy becomes separated from the family and becomes more independent.

The recordings began on October 15, 1968 and ended on February 4, 1969. The team covered a distance of 7,400 km. The subsequent editing took a month and the film was finished on March 18, 1969.

meaning

The father is a stereotypical Japanese patriarch , strict, demanding and self-centered. During the opening credits, the Japanese flag serves as a background and suggests analogies between the presented family and the state. Although the boy rejects the fraud, he loyally complies with the expectations of his parents, citizens who remain loyal patriots despite the rejection of some government measures. Family relationships are determined not by affection but by power. This can be recognized, for example, by the fact that the father keeps calling the boy bôya instead of his name , which means "boy". The viewer only finds out his actual name at the end. That makes him, according to Standish, a nameless representative of the disenfranchised. Ōshima saw contemporary Japan trapped in its militaristic past. The boy's childhood is drowned out under the continued patriarchy and the legacy of the experience of the World War. The father sustained physical and mental wounds during the war, and just as he exposed his body to danger as a soldier for the state, so does the boy in simulated accidents for the father. Occasionally the boy dreams of a normal family life. The imaginative world that he creates inwardly is increasingly restricted by the external circumstances. In doing so, Ōshima postulates an inverse relationship between material growth and spiritual development. Just as automobile traffic circulates, so does the family, who move restlessly from one city to the next and travel to Japan to its northernmost point. The fact that the family cannot return to the same place in order not to be blown up, increasingly narrows their room for maneuver, Japan is becoming too small for them, gradually becoming a prison. The boy experiences life as cheating and being cheated, both in the professional and in the family world. He goes through an emotional development from innocent child to undeniably criminal. According to Jacoby, the film shows the helplessness of those who have no alternative but to crime. However, Ōshima stated that he wanted to tell with an objective attitude and avoid any sentimentality. In style and content he opposed the victim view that was widespread in post-war Japanese cinema. He rejected the compassionate attitude of those humanists who psychologically justified moral failure of the socially disadvantaged with their past experiences, and the subjective flashbacks often used by these filmmakers . Apart from the boy's fantasies, he adheres to a neorealist style and, with the exception of the sober and imagelessly presented minutes of the parents' past, always tells in the present. In Buehrer's opinion, the director treats the material with “sharpness and poetry” and does not make any moral judgments about the boy and his family.

reviews

In 1969 Frieda Grafe found the two films imshimas produced earlier, Death by Hanging and Diary of a Thief from Shinjuku , so unusual that the mediocrity of The Boy was confusing. In 1972, in the Süddeutsche Zeitung , Wolfgang Limmer stated that the film developed “a characteristic of modern Japan from the criminal case, a picture in which one recognizes the inhumanity of an unprecedented 'westernized' country. The little newspaper note takes on the dimension of an odyssey, told from the boy's perspective. From this point of view, authenticity and projection, dream and fact mix into a reality of suffering. ”The family has nothing wrong with itself. "Not outsiders, but thrust into the middle of society, where it is most ruthless, for fürshima they are the living symbol of the paradox that society only lets you live through injury." The film was initially not in Germany in the cinema, but seen on Südwest 3 in 1972 ; In 1987 he came to the screen after all.

In his book on Japanese cinema, Burch described The Boy as very dramatic. However, Ōshima stopped his efforts to create a unique montage and imagery within his work for a moment, possibly because they hindered a wider reception of his films by the Japanese audience. Buehrer saw no such interruption in Ōshima’s approach in this film: “Like his predecessors, The Boy can be difficult to watch, but he is innovative and challenging.” In her Ōshima book, Turim stated that the film was “far more complicated than it was at first appears. Its linearity and the possibility of interpreting it humanistically obscure the depth and the breaks in his way of depicting fantasy and psyche. Similar processes are illustrated with great and subtle variety; each time, not only did the frame and tone differ, the way of expression also changed. We move in carefully designed environments through representations that mix realism and stylized deviations from it. "

The Lexicon of International Films writes: "A crystal clear, personally stylized film of a strange, often sad beauty."

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Maureen Turim: The Films of Nagisa Oshima. University of California Press, Berkeley 1998, ISBN 0-520-20665-7 , pp. 89-96
  2. ↑ Beverley Bare Buehrer: Japanese films. A filmography and commentary, 1921-1989 . McFarland & Company, Jefferson NC 1990, ISBN 0-89950-458-2 , p. 206, describes the film as an "international success".
  3. ^ A b Nagisa Oshima: Notes on Boy , in: Cinema, Censorship and the State. The Writings of Nagisa Oshima , The MIT Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts) 1992, ISBN 0-262-15040-9 , pp. 170-174
  4. ↑ Oshima 1992, pp. 174-179
  5. ↑ Oshima 1992, pp. 176-180
  6. ↑ Oshima 1992, pp. 177-180
  7. ↑ a b Buehrer 1990, p. 205
  8. ↑ a b c d Isolde Standish: A new history of Japanese cinema . Continuum, New York 2005, ISBN 0-8264-1709-4 , pp. 250-251
  9. ↑ a b David Desser: Eros plus massacre. An introduction to Japanese New Wave Cinema Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1988, ISBN 0-253-20469-0 , pp. 66-67
  10. ^ Jacques Aumont: A propos de "Petit Garçon" . In: Cahiers du cinéma , March 1970, p. 36, right column
  11. ↑ a b Turim 1998, p. 91
  12. ↑ Aumont 1970, p. 37 left column
  13. ↑ Alexander Jacoby: A critical handbook of Japanese film directors. Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley 2008, ISBN 978-1-933330-53-2 , p. 239
  14. ↑ Standish 2005, pp. 151–152
  15. ^ Frieda Grafe: Games of love and death , in: Filmkritik No. 9/1969, p. 527
  16. ↑ Wolfgang Limmer in the Süddeutsche Zeitung , October 7, 1972, cited above. in: Friends of the Deutsche Kinemathek (ed.): Films from Japan , 1993, ISBN 3-927876-08-9 , p. 250
  17. ↑ First broadcast on March 25, 1972 and premiere in cinema on March 5, 1987 according to the entry in the Lexicon of International Films
  18. ^ Noël Burch: To the distant observer. Form and meaning in the Japanese cinema. University of California Press, Berkeley 1979, ISBN 0-520-03877-0 , p. 340
  19. ↑ Buehrer 1990, p. 206
  20. ↑ Turim 1998, pp. 95-96
  21. ↑ The boy. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed August 10, 2018 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on July 5, 2010 .