Nagisa Oshima's zen koan take on the issues of the revolutionary student movement. Some excellent period footage embedded into a highly elliptic and delusive narrative that keeps negating itself. Gentle pop-flavored soundtrack ty Toru Takemitsu. The trailer is not to be missed: it's even wilder than the movie itself! :lol:CitarOshima Nagisa's The History of the Post Tokyo War / The Man Who Left His Will On Film is a Mobius loop of a film played over revolutionary youth, disillusioned with the fractured student movement of the late 60s in Japan. In what many consider Oshima's most challenging film, the director toys with ideas of authorship, memory, and identity, and uses these to examine the concept of a film within a film.The Man Who Left His Will On Film examines a small group of radical film makers, who collectively pursue political activism through cinema. A member of the group, with a penchant for shooting "landscapes", ends his own life, while Motoki (the film's protagonist) chases after him only to witness the nameless film maker's suicide. More sooner than later this event is thrown into question as Motoki's identity becomes a murky vague thing, which is manipulated, by chance or unseen forces, to seemingly combine with the dead man from the beginning.Filmed around the time of massive student demonstrations and radical left wing movements, The Man Who Left His Will On Film is a testament to Oshima's growing distaste for the petty and self-defeating activities of the next generation during the "Tokyo War". Of Oshima and the film, Maureen Turim says it "will construct images as sign systems of a dream logic, images deceiving in the concreteness of their representation, as the meanings invoked by them drift faraway from their everyday literal interpretations."
Oshima Nagisa's The History of the Post Tokyo War / The Man Who Left His Will On Film is a Mobius loop of a film played over revolutionary youth, disillusioned with the fractured student movement of the late 60s in Japan. In what many consider Oshima's most challenging film, the director toys with ideas of authorship, memory, and identity, and uses these to examine the concept of a film within a film.The Man Who Left His Will On Film examines a small group of radical film makers, who collectively pursue political activism through cinema. A member of the group, with a penchant for shooting "landscapes", ends his own life, while Motoki (the film's protagonist) chases after him only to witness the nameless film maker's suicide. More sooner than later this event is thrown into question as Motoki's identity becomes a murky vague thing, which is manipulated, by chance or unseen forces, to seemingly combine with the dead man from the beginning.Filmed around the time of massive student demonstrations and radical left wing movements, The Man Who Left His Will On Film is a testament to Oshima's growing distaste for the petty and self-defeating activities of the next generation during the "Tokyo War". Of Oshima and the film, Maureen Turim says it "will construct images as sign systems of a dream logic, images deceiving in the concreteness of their representation, as the meanings invoked by them drift faraway from their everyday literal interpretations."
Here, director Oshima tells the tragic story of a young man who becomes involved in a confusing political struggle involving film from his camera. Even though he was covering a demonstration, the film he shot of it is fairly ordinary, and he cannot understand why it is important to so many people. His camera is stolen during the demonstration, and the thief, whom he follows, commits suicide. The police are reluctant to return the camera and film to him, and when he does obtain them, his co-workers try to wrest them from him. He repeatedly regains and then loses both the camera and the film, and when he finally views the developed film, the images are uninformative.
