Night and Fog in Japan

Night and Fog in Japan
Night and Fog in Japan
Directed by	Nagisa Ōshima
Written by	Nagisa Ōshima; Toshirō Ishido
Produced by	Tomio Ikeda
Starring	Fumio Watanabe; Miyuki Kuwano; Takao Yoshizawa
Cinematography	Takashi Kawamata
Edited by	Keiichi Uraoka
Music by	Riichiro Manabe
Production; company	Shochiku
Distributed by	Shochiku
Release date	9 October 1960 (Japan);
Running time	107 minutes
Country	Japan
Language	Japanese

Night and Fog in Japan (日本の夜と霧, Nihon no Yoru to Kiri) is a 1960 Japanese drama film directed by Nagisa Ōshima. It deals with the contemporary Zengakuren opposition but also evokes the 1950 protests against the Anpo treaty; this political content is related to the particular approach of memory and interpersonal dynamics of social movements in the film.^[1]

Plot

In 1960, in the aftermath of the Anpo Protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty, uninvited guests interrupt the wedding ceremony between Nozawa, a journalist and former student radical of the 1950s, and Reiko, a current activist. They accuse the couple and assembled guests of forgetting their political commitments, invoking a tortured exploration of unresolved conflicts of a decade ago, when they were swept up in the student demonstrations. In flashbacks, personal and political wounds are reopened, focused on Nozawa's subjective experiences in both 1950 and 1960. Two characters, one dead by suicide, the other now a Stalinist politician, are the subject of greatest scrutiny. The memory of Takao, a young student who committed suicide after letting a "spy" free, is reconstructed as a criticism of the authoritarian leadership of the Zengakuren of 1950. Nakayawa, former student leader now Communist functionary, is castigated for his role in the tragedy and his possession of Misako, a much desired female student. Other forgotten comrades from 1950 and fresh from the bloody demonstrations of 1960 are invoked as political and personal challenges. In the end, night and fog envelops the guests as they stand immobile to the stilted speech of the unchanged Nakayawa: memory has been invoked, but it is unclear whether or not anything has changed.

Cast

Fumio Watanabe as Nozawa
Masahiko Tsugawa as Ōta
Miyuki Kuwano as Harada
Hiroshi Akutagawa as Utagawa
Noriko Ujiie as Utagawa's wife
Kei Satō
Rokkō Toura

Production

For Night and Fog in Japan Ōshima received the funding and creative latitude as part of Shochiku's strategy of promoting films by several young directors which the studio marketed as the "Shochiku New Wave" (Shochiku Nuberu bagu).^[2]^[3]

Release

Three days after it was released, the film was abruptly pulled by the studio in the wake of Japanese Socialist Party politician Inejiro Asanuma's assassination by far right student Otoya Yamaguchi.^[4] Ōshima protested what he saw as the politically motivated censorship of his bold film. In this response, he expressed faith in the potential of the audience to receive controversial political films, taking issue with the political repression of the film industry and critics. Ōshima's claimed that "my film is the weapon of the people's struggle," and, of the resistance to censorship: "that is the voice of the people demanding that the future of the Japanese film be directly tied to their own future."^[5]

Background

In 1948 the Zengakuren was formed, mobilizing Japanese students against the first Anpo treaty with the United States. This is the time period detailed in flashbacks,^[6] during which Nozawa, Nakayama, Misako, Takao, and Takumi were active. At the time, the Zengakuren was dominated by the Japanese Communist Party, represented in the film by the dogmatic leadership of Nakayama. Although resistance to the treaty failed in 1950, a new generation of student activists in 1960 challenged its renewal with massive street demonstrations, which once again ended in failure. This is Reiko's generation, and the demonstrations covered by Nozawa. The Zengakuren of this period tried to assert its independence from the Japanese Communist Party, and subsequently fractured into several organizations that continued to retain the name. Night and Fog in Japan, with extensive political dialogue peppered with Marxist rhetoric, tries to make sense of political defeat and the reconciliation of these two generations. Although the marriage of Nozawa and Reiko seems to suggest the possibility of reconciliation,^[7] Nakayama looms large as the imposition of forced forgetting and the denial of reflection in favor of Party orthodoxy. Director Nagisa Ōshima clearly was critical of Stalinism and the failure of political reflection.^[8] This pessimistic assessment pervades the film (Ōshima had been involved in, and sympathized with, student movements himself), especially in the portrayal of personal motivations in political movements.^[4]

Analysis

Commentators on Night and Fog in Japan have noted its formal innovation, especially its theatricality. Maureen Turim describes, in addition to innovative long take and shot sequences reminiscent of Kenji Mizoguchi, a new filmic theatricality. Spatial restriction, lighting, color, and gesture figure in it, but most importantly it is the way spoken lines and confrontations are ordered by camera movement and shot, so that "the cinema becomes a device for redefining theatrical language."^[4] Dana Polan sees the film as part of a broader element of Ōshima's cinema in which political meaning emerges "as process between screen and spectator." For example, in the ten-minute opening shot, camera movement and the symmetry of the wedding ceremony suggests a political stability threatened by the fog outside and the tracking shot that introduces the uninvited guests- destabilizing both composition and ideological certainty. More than just narratively showing political process, Ōshima's filmic technique demands the spectator reflect on the political and personal implications of form and character.^[9]

Film historian Geoffrey Nowell-Smith described Night and Fog in Japan as the most aesthetically original film in any of the world's cinematic New Waves up to the year 1960, with the possible exceptions of Hiroshima mon amour, Breathless, or Shadows.^[10]

References

^ "日本の夜と霧とは". kotobank. Retrieved 11 January 2021.
^ "Night and Fog in Japan". Harvard Film Archive. 12 December 2008. Retrieved 7 July 2023.
^ Sharp, Jasper. "Where to begin with the Japanese New Wave". British Film Institute. Retrieved 7 July 2023.
^ ^a ^b ^c Turim, Maureen The Films of Oshima Nagisa: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast, pp. 51-60. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
^ Oshima, Nagisa. "In Protest against the Massacre of Night and Fog in Japan." Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima, 1956-1978, pp 54-58. The MIT Press, 1992. Cambridge.
^ "Nuit et Brouillard au Japon, de Nagisa Oshima". Il était une fois le cinéma (in French). 3 June 2018. Retrieved 7 July 2023.
^ Guignandon, Florian (28 August 2007). "Critique : Nuit et brouillard au Japon". Critikat (in French). Retrieved 7 July 2023.
^ "Quand Nagisa Oshima n'en faisait qu'à sa tête". Libération (in French). Retrieved 7 July 2023.
^ Polan, Dana. 1983. "Politics as Process in Three Films by Nagisa Oshima." Film Criticism 8, no. 1 (Fall): 35-41.
^ Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey (2013). "Nagisa Oshima and the Japanese New Wave". Making Waves, New Cinemas of the 1960s (Revised and Expanded ed.). Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781623565626.