Night and fog over Japan

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Movie
German title Night and fog over Japan
Original title 日本 の 夜 と 霧
Nihon no Yoru to Kiri
Country of production Japan
original language Japanese
Publishing year 1960
length 107 minutes
Rod
Director Nagisa Ōshima
script Toshiro Ishido , Nagisa Ōshima
production Ikeda Tomio for Shochiku
music Riichirō Manabe
camera Takashi Kawamata
cut Keiichi Uraoka
occupation

The film Night and Fog over Japan ( Japanese 日本 の 夜 と 霧 , Nihon no Yoru to Kiri ) by Japanese director Nagisa Ōshima was made in the fall of 1960. Political allegory was quickly removed from circulation by the studio.

Movie content

Political background

The film takes place on three time levels, in the presence of the wedding, in the student days in 1952 and at the rallies in June 1960. In 1950, Japan and the USA signed a security pact , which was the radical left student organization dominated by the Communist Party of Japan (CPJ) Zengakuren brought an influx. When the ten-year pact was to be extended in 1960, there were demonstrations and clashes in which the police killed a student. At this point in time, a more radical current of the New Left had formed within the Zengakuren, which separated itself from the moderate CPY.

action

A wedding party meets to celebrate the marriage of journalist Nozawa, an avid CPY supporter since college, to Reiko, who belongs to the younger generation of the New Left. A professor praises marriage as a reconciliation between divided factions. The uninvited, wanted by the police Ota, a member of the younger generation, breaks into this harmony. He accuses the older generation of being fed up and complacent and confronts them with their past.

They held a fellow student prisoner in 1952 who the party claimed was a police informer they were never entirely sure of. When the prisoner escaped, the party blamed a guard, driving him to suicide. Nozawa and Kawayama suppressed doubts about the party line. Furthermore, Kawayama's wife Misako reported to those present that she was in a relationship with Nozawa in 1952, but that Kawayama seduced her by betraying his comrade Nozawa. The wedding guests are paralyzed by the revelations. Finally, Ota is arrested and Kawayama gives a speech in Stalinist style in which he disgusts Ota as a stray and tries to swear the guests to the party line.

To the work

At the beginning and at the end the scenery is shrouded in swirling fog. The intensive dialogues, in which mainly political points of view are discussed, and the restriction of the respective events to one location give the film something theatrical. Ōshima draws on his experiences with opposition theater groups and actors whom he met in the process. "It is not a rational discussion in which one argues patiently, but a passionate one in which everyone justifies their actions angrily and excessively." In terms of terminology and style of argumentation, the dialogues correspond to typical Marxist debates, but Ōshima comments on them through the visual ones Means of framing and composition. The flashbacks for the demonstration show a few illuminated people in front of the blackening night. The non-naturalistic stylistic devices also include the use of point lights that highlight individual figures. The wedding party consists of rigid and symmetrical people who cannot move in space. This order - weddings were decried as bourgeois among young leftists - is disrupted by the camera, as it changes from one group of figures in the room to the next in sometimes shaky, quick pans without cuts. The fact that the film consists of only 43 takes is due to the long planned sequences. These make the presence of the film counter and his questions and exploration noticeable. This formal aspect is the most likely to find similarities with Alain Resnais ' film essay Nacht und Nebel , from which Ōshima derived the title. Ōshima had not seen the French film, which only came to Japan in 1963, but had read a lot about it.

The film contrasts the present and the past in a dialectical process. Ōshima allows his own experiences to flow in, because he was represented on a committee of the student organization in the early 1950s. He takes the side of the new left of the younger generation, who feel betrayed by the old left in the Communist Party. The betrayal lies in the fact that the old left had learned nothing from the past, the failure of 1950. He gradually fades out the speech of the old Stalinist at the end of the film and drowns it out with string music. He preceded the script with an explanation for the studio: “All people are responsible. [...] You, who could be the active forces of this change, but still remain frozen and walled in in the given situation; you, who have risen once and are so depressed by one failure that you are now impatiently waiting for a change from outside [...] I want to expose you, along with your mistakes, your corruption and your weaknesses .. . "

After Ōshima was able to realize his debut in the summer of 1959 and soon had a visitor success with Nackte Jugend , he enjoyed some credit. Night and Fog over Japan , shot in autumn 1960, was his fourth directorial work. The Shochiku studio, with which he was under contract, lulled itself into the false belief that the film could be sold as a melodrama because of the wedding theme. Almost in secret, the participating artists turned him off in a few days. On October 9, 1960, the production in Tokyo first hit the cinema. Three days later, Shochiku removed the film from the program and archived it on the grounds that the number of visitors was below average. It is often believed that the studio used the previous day's murder of Japanese Socialist Chairman Inejiro Asanuma as an excuse to withdraw the film.

Ōshima protested in the film magazine Eiga-hyoron against the “massacre” of his film, which was “an act of political repression”. He saw the low frequency of the film only as a pretext, especially since his requests to be allowed to show at least one copy in a film club had been rejected. He accused the film journalists of polluting the concept of the New Wave by equating it with sex and violence. Now they wanted to talk the New Wave to death, even though they had forcibly put the label on this film: “Where are the sex and violence in the night and fog over Japan ? What relationship does the film have with your »New Wave«? ”He was aware that the film was only able to mobilize a small audience, but he believed in the ability of the audience to develop:“ For far too long, the masses have been shown bad, stupid films . "From his request to allow the performances again, speak" the voice of the masses ". A little later, Ōshima married the actress Akiko Koyama and played a few scenes from Night and Fog over Japan at his wedding . He attacked the studio, some of which were present at the party, in a resentful speech. After this falling out, he founded his own production company.

Three years later, the film was released outside of theaters in Japan. It was first seen in Europe at the 1973 Berlinale, where it found a place in the International Forum of Young Cinema. Arnd F. Schirmer from Tagesspiegel said: “The Japanese director's work captivates with the uncompromising radicalism of his cinematic handwriting.” Although Ōshima seems to be leaving the Japanese film tradition in terms of form and theme, he remains committed to it. Instead of the generational conflict within the family in the Ozus films , one occurs between people with a similar political point of view. Desser (1988) rated the work as one of the paradigmatic films of Nuberu Bagu , the renewal movement in Japanese cinema of the 1960s, because the failure of the protests against the extension of the security pact initiated and deeply shaped the whole movement.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Maureen Turim: The Films of Nagisa Oshima. University of California Press, Berkeley 1998, ISBN 0-520-20665-7 , pp. 51-60
  2. ^ Antoine Coppola: Le cinéma asiatique: Chine, Corée, Japon, Hong-Kong, Taïwan. L'Harmattan, Paris 2004, ISBN 2-7475-6054-6 , p. 403
  3. ↑ Turim 1998, pp. 51-52 and 54
  4. ↑ David Desser: Eros plus Massacre. An introduction to Japanese New Wave Cinema Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1988, ISBN 0-253-20469-0 , pp. 24-31
  5. ↑ Turim 1998, pp. 52 and 55
  6. ↑ Desser 1988, p. 30; Turim 1998, p. 53
  7. ↑ a b Desser 1988, p. 26
  8. ↑ Turim 1998, p. 56
  9. ↑ Nagisa Oshima in Seishun to dokusho from August 1969. Printed in: Nagisa Oshima: The Awareness of Freedom. Writings , Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-596-24483-8 , pp. 126–127 (German first edition 1982 by Klaus Wagenbach Verlag, Berlin)
  10. ↑ Desser 1988, p. 25
  11. ^ Hubert Niogret: Nagisa Oshima, cinéaste sous contrat puis indépendant . In: Positif , October 2007, p. 77
  12. ↑ Desser 1988, pp. 25-26; Turim 1998, p. 52
  13. ^ Donald Richie: A hundred years of Japanese film . Kodansha International, Tokyo 2001, ISBN 4-7700-2682-X , p. 198
  14. ↑ Nagisa Oshima in Eiga-hyoron from December 1960. Reprinted in: Nagisa Oshima: The idea of ​​freedom. Writings , Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-596-24483-8 , pp. 36-39 (German first edition 1982 by Klaus Wagenbach Verlag, Berlin)
  15. ↑ Desser 1988, p. 26; Turim 1998, p. 59
  16. ↑ Arnd F. Schirmer in Der Tagesspiegel , June 28, 1973, quoted. in: Friends of the Deutsche Kinemathek (ed.): Films from Japan , 1993, ISBN 3-927876-08-9 , S: 219-220
  17. ↑ Desser 1988, pp. 25 and 31