Review: Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (1969)
Cast: Tadanori Yokoo, Rie Yokoyama
Director: Nagisa Ôshima
Country: Japan
Genre: Experimental
Official Trailer: Here
The following review continues Matthew Blevins’s Nagisa Oshima Director Spotlight.
An unidentified man flees from his pursuers as the camera tries to keep pace. The camera moves and jostles with a frenetic nihilistic energy as it tries to keep up with the Kafkaesque action. Bystanders walking down the street become unwitting participants in this event and find themselves permanently etched on to the history of film. This is cinema as an event, as a confrontational force that asks no permission and begs no forgiveness. The moment the image has been captured, it is permanently etched in to the annals of cinematic history. Time marches forward for everywhere else in the world while Japan stands still. The destruction of a clock signals the onset of the narrative portion of film as Oshima captures a lost generation, seemingly frozen in time and trapped between disparate generational philosophies with no sense of purpose to set them apart. This is a generation defined by what cinema they chose to consume rather than the actions they carried out. It is a generation of lost souls and dropout Godard protagonists that know how to pontificate at length about the nuances of sexual behavior, but is not actually capable of participating in the activity with any degree of proficiency.
This is cinema as an event, as a confrontational force that asks no permission and begs no forgiveness.
Oshima was a filmmaker that exercised his craft to its fullest potential as a weapon of confrontation and method for catharsis. The idea wasn’t necessarily to capture truth on film, but to create truth by using film. It isn’t merely a means of escapism and can be at its most powerful when it doesn’t offer reprieve from the goings-on of the world. It can confront and harass the viewer with its ideologies, offering no explanation nor asking forgiveness for its erratic and confrontational content. The truth of the image is suspect, but the ideologies being explored present their own sets of truths and illustrate a sense of generational malaise. These people wouldn’t have a prominent place in the history books, so they chose to document their own story with fictional narratives that conveyed the attitude of their generation better than any conventional documentary filmmaking technique. The action of making the film becomes the event, and the anonymous faces of bystanders become the real story as their reactions and expressions speak more loudly about generational attitudes than the narrative of the film.
The narrative is ambiguous and ultimately unimportant to the power of this film. It follows a structure that Oshima has followed before, but with new faces and fresh attitudes. Oshima is fixated on certain ideas and imagery, and finds new ways to introduce those concepts in to his films to create a unique visual language and cinematic vocabulary. Beginning the film with the Kafkaesque pursuit of the camera is something explored in The Man Who Left His Will On Film, and creates a sense of artistic oppression as unknown forces try to silence his only means of expression and self-discovery. The concept of two young lovers against the rest of the world as they flee the trappings of previous generations and rebel with their sexuality, one of the few elements that are in their direct control, is a generic framework used throughout Oshima’s oeuvre. The Japanese flag is a another symbolic Oshima trademark that give a sense of begrudging nationalism; this time the flag is represented by the blood stains on the sheets of a young woman who has just lost her virginity. The raping of a sexually liberated woman has also been covered before in his work, and this time it acts as a means of silencing the contrarian opinions of the disenfranchised and a way of exercising power over those that cannot be dissuaded from their ideologies without extreme measures of demoralization and dehumanization.
The raping of a sexually liberated woman has also been covered before in his work, and this time it acts as a means of silencing the contrarian opinions of the disenfranchised and a way of exercising power over those that cannot be dissuaded from their ideologies without extreme measures of demoralization and dehumanization.
Oshima employs an amalgam of filmmaking techniques and creates a film that is a unique product of the attitudes of this lost generation in late 60’s Japan. He borrows heavily from Godard, with his playful self-reflexive intertitles colored with blue, white, and red and candid and uninterrupted interview segments about sexuality that pay homage to Godard’s Masculin Feminin while showcasing uniquely Japanese attitudes. He borrows from Godard, not because of a lack of artistic vision, but as a means of contextualizing the actions of the youth movements in a decreasingly isolationist Japan with the youth movements of the rest of the world. It also acts as a means of paying reverence to the church of cinema, which is a perfectly fine dogmatic theology for the tortured, insecure, unwashed, unacknowledged, uncertain, and unwanted. Cinema is both the message and the means for conveying the message. It is the catalyst for action and the means for capturing the results of the action. It is polemic while uncertain; objectively true in the images it captures, but wrought with falsehoods and contrivances the moment the images are captured. It is the art of uncertainty, and a cathartic refuge for the denizens of misfits, dubious of the status-quo and uncertain of their place in the world.
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