After revealing our Sunday line-up in our last newsletter, we're now happy to share with you the exciting news that tickets are on sale for our Saturday 22 September screenings showing at Close-Up Film Centre!
JAEFF is delighted to present an exclusive screening of Ogawa Shinsuke's Forest of Oppression with an extended introduction by specialist Ricardo Matos Cabo who will be showing rare footage of the student movements in 1960s Japan.
The late evening slot will see Nagisa Oshima's wild Diary of a Shinjuku Thief paired with Desktop Treasure, an experimental short by emerging filmmaker UMMMI.
Saturday 22 September 2018 – 6pm
Shinsuke Ogawa's astonishing documentary takes the audience behind the barricades and into the heat of running battles with riot police in this chronicle of the student occupation movement in 1967 Japan at the Takasaki City University of Economics.
Perhaps the greatest chronicler of the student movement in Japan, Ogawa would live among his subjects, his camera moving among them. This raw and immediate filmmaking style presents a grounds-eye view of the struggle, often capturing clashes with riot police in the thick of the action.
The boundary between filmmaker and subject is increasingly eroded, mirroring Ogawa's unwavering faith of the power of collective action and living – the Ogawa Pro filming collective itself was run on socialist principles, with members voting of production decisions.
“Forest of Oppression” will be introduced by Ricardo Matos Cabo, an independent film programmer and researcher, who will give a short illustrated presentation about the first collective films made by Ogawa Shinsuke and talk about the student movement in Japan in the 1960s.
Saturday 22 September 2018 – 8.30pm
Dir. UMMMI., 9 min, Digital presentation
Dir. Nagisa Oshima, 96 min, 35mm presentation
Nagisa Oshima weaves a tale of ideological book thievery, situationist performance, fantasy Noh theatre productions, sexual revolution, and personal liberation in this Art Theatre Guild (ATG) classic.
“Diary of a Shinjuku Thief” was heavily influenced by the post-Shingeki theatre movement, whose main practitioners were Juro Kara and Shūji Terayama. Rejecting the long modern trajectory toward “realist” theatre, these playwrights turned toward premodern theatrical forms, including Noh, Kabuki, and Bunraku. Much like Masahiro Shinoda's “Double Suicide“, this film questions the relationship between reality and art, sending the protagonists into plays-within-a-film and featuring actual people as themselves in ad-libbed scenes. Shinjuku was a major center for the art-theatre scene in the late 1960s, and several settings remain largely unchanged today, including Kinokuniya and the plaza outside the east exit of the station.
“Diary of a Shinjuku Thief” is paired here with UMMMI.'s “Desktop Treasure”, a film which attempts to go beyond borders through mixing up personal areas of the Internet by bringing out online and analogue records, personal spaces lived in by the actor, old blogs and e-mail log in screens, and mixed video footages of various qualities.
