Almost a decade before Imamura’s Vengeance Is Mine, Shindo crafted this fascinating documentary-inspired portrait of a serial killer that drew upon the actual events of a troubled nineteen-year old who went on a murderous rampage, killing four people with a pistol stolen from an US navel base. Shindo’s meticulous research into the background of the anti-social youth, including extensive interviews with his mother and acquaintances, brings a rare authenticity of unexpected detail to a film that also reads as an astute critique of American imperialism and reckless tabloid journalism.
Tag: JAPAN
Three high-school students tangle with indulgent yakuza and lackadaisical police as they set out in search of the class bully, who has been kidnapped.
9th-graders Kazuo (boy) and Kazumi (girl) take a tumble at a temple in a small seacoast town in Japan. Through supernatural intervention, their minds and bodies are switched, and the result is a touching and hilarious coming-of-age comedy as they attempt to survive the pressures of junior high school life.
Shindo’s “Hymn” is one of many adaptions of Tanizaki’s classical novella ‘Shunkinsho’ (‘A Portrait of Shunkin’, 1933). The story tells of the adoration of Sasuke for his mistress, the blind samisen-teacher Shunkin, who treats him imperiously and subjects him to cruel beatings. After an unknown intruder probably one of her pupils, who seeks revenge for her cruel behaviour, pours boiling water on the sleeping Shunkin’s face, Sasuke blinds himself in order not to behold her disfigurement. Sasuke’s sacrifice, made in response to Shunkin’s tacit wish, seals their life-long relationship.
In a mountain village, Heita, a translator’s son, is a gifted boy but is shunned by the villagers. He can imitate birds’ cry and befriends another boy who works in a brewery. Heita also finds solace in the village pastor Yasugi and his teacher Michiko, but they too have problems of their own.
One morning Jun gets into an angry argument with his father over his girlfriend whom his father disapproves of. In a fit of bloody rage, Jun kills his father. He decides to turn himself into the police, but his mother stops him. Eerily calm after the shock, she suggests that they dispose of the body, and then move to another place where no one will know them. When Jun moves the body out of the house, his mother suddenly changes moods again and points a knife at him, as tragedy begets tragedy.
After being raped in an unknown rooftop, nineteen year-old girl Poppo meets a mysterious boy, and both share their sexual traumas and fears, with fatal consequences.
Filmed in a middle school gymnasium in suburban Japan, Goshogaoka takes as its ostensible subject the exercise routines and drills of a girls basketball team. The film consists of six ten-minute takes, shot with a fixed camera at court level, in which the various cadences of chanting voices and bodily movements digress into distinct studies. Taken together they construct a subtle and multi-layered social portrait, a portrait framed within a study of choreographed movements (the routines, etc.) and therefore one in which documentary values soon become inseparable from aesthetic ones.