Diary of a thief from Shinjuku

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Movie
German title Diary of a thief from Shinjuku
Original title 新宿 泥 棒 日記
Shinjuku Dorobō Nikki
Country of production Japan
original language Japanese
Publishing year 1969
length 95 minutes
Rod
Director Nagisa Ōshima
script Nagisa Ōshima, Takashi Tamura, Mamoru Sasaki, Masao Adachi
music Hideo Nishizaki
camera Yasuhiro Yoshioka , Seizo Sengen
cut Nagisa Ōshima
occupation

Diary of a Thief from Shinjuku ( Japanese 新宿 泥 棒 日記 , Shinjuku Dorobō Nikki ) is a Japanese feature film by Nagisa Ōshima .

The filmmaker strings together sequences that are very different in terms of content and style and which do not result in a logically developing plot. For the audience, Oshima's formal approach, an avant-garde fragmentation of the action, is a challenge.

The opening credits are semi-documentary. In the midst of the high-rise buildings in Tokyo's Shinjuku district , on a concrete square frequented by passers-by, the modern theater group “ Situation Theater Juro Karo ” gives a performance. Then Ōshima introduces the thief, a young student from a well-to-do family who tries to show works by mainly French authors in a large bookstore. Umeko, posing as a saleswoman, discovers him and leads him to the owner of the shop. He is pleased with his taste in books and lets him go. The thief and Umeko go to bed together, but it doesn't work. Sex therapist Tetsu Takahashi concludes that they suffer from androgyny and unclear gender assignments. When asked by him to undress for therapy, they are reluctant to do so. The thief causes Umeko to steal clothes in a fashion store. The two spend an evening watching a couple in traffic through the windows of a traditional hostel. Afterwards, film staff members discuss the meaning of sexuality in faint documentary images. At night the thief and Umeko run across an empty high street until two men appear who knock him down and rape Umeko. The thief later appears in a traditional theater as the son of a shogun . Umeko picks up books from the shelves in the bookstore at night and stacks them to form a work of art, whereupon the owner and the thief join them. Finally, original footage of riots between students and the police in Shinjuku can be seen.

Part of the action takes place in the Kinokuniya bookstore, which was opened a few years earlier and quickly established itself as a meeting place for intellectuals and students. Mostly shot in black and white, the film changes to color in some passages. Ōshima makes numerous allusions to works of literature and film. Even the title is derived from the Thief's Journal by Jean Genet from, along with the protagonists take books by Dostoevsky in his hand. The local times of some cities around the world shown at the beginning refer to a similar motif in October by Sergej Eisenstein . The stacked books are a motif from Jean-Luc Godard's Die Chinesin . Juro, the head of the theater group, sings the song of Ali Baba, the mysterious city , with his guitar several times during the film, facing the camera .

Frieda Grafe reviewed the film in 1972 and stated that the narrative seemed to “have nothing to do with defining its limits and its people. In this film, too, simulating, miming and depicting processes become the focal point of the plot. It is not just a refraction of the means of representation, it is subject, fiction, acting as a means of becoming conscious. The players fall out of their roles into what is supposed to be reality within the framework of fiction. ” Ulrich Grogor the thief was one of the“ most complicated ”films of Ōshima :“ The meandering film in which the documentary alternates with the symbolic (or merges), gives an overall picture of the confusion and frustration of the younger generation in Japan, the perplexity of the elderly, the latent unrest in the city district. "Turim (1998) saw a commonality between Ōshima and Godard before 1968 that they saw the connection between the revolt of a discontented youth and sexual energy and the theater measured. "The theater of sexuality here is perverse and unable to bring about coital satisfaction, except in violence and aggression."

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Maureen Turim: The Films of Nagisa Oshima. University of California Press, Berkeley 1998, ISBN 0-520-20665-7 , pp. 82 and 89
  2. ↑ Turim 1998, p. 81
  3. ↑ Frieda Grafe : From players who fall out of the role , in: Süddeutsche Zeitung of October 7, 1972
  4. ^ Ulrich Gregor: History of the film. Volume 4. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1978, ISBN 3-499-16294-6 , p. 500
  5. ↑ Turim 1998, pp. 85 and 88