Tales of the Underworld: The Big Boss (Japan, 1959)

Kihachi Okamoto (1924-2005) was a Japanese filmmaker who spent an entire career demolishing the widely accepted viewpoint that there was any honor in violence. Although recognized as a preeminent director of action films for Toho studios his work was constantly being eclipsed by more critically acclaimed directors like Masaki Kobayashi and Akira Kurosawa. Yet, what makes Okamoto’s films prescient is how the theme of history being an invention by those in power runs throughout his oeuvre. The typical Okamoto protagonist is an outcast and victim of the times that they live in, but within this hopelessness came a freedom, be it through death or a rejection of established social codes. So please come join me as we explore the inelegant, the sardonic, the brutal, and the comic films of Kihachi Okamoto.

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Desperado Outpost (Japan, 1959)

Kihachi Okamoto (1924-2005) was a Japanese filmmaker who spent an entire career demolishing the widely accepted viewpoint that there was any honor in violence. Although recognized as a preeminent director of action films for Toho studios his work was constantly being eclipsed by more critically acclaimed directors like Masaki Kobayashi and Akira Kurosawa. Yet, what makes Okamoto’s films prescient is how the theme of history being an invention by those in power runs throughout his oeuvre. The typical Okamoto protagonist is an outcast and victim of the times that they live in, but within this hopelessness came a freedom, be it through death or a rejection of established social codes. So please come join me as we explore the inelegant, the sardonic, the brutal, and the comic films of Kihachi Okamoto.

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Sengoku Yaro (Japan, 1963)

Kihachi Okamoto (1924-2005) was a Japanese filmmaker who spent an entire career demolishing the widely accepted viewpoint that there was any honor in violence. Although recognized as a preeminent director of action films for Toho studios his work was constantly being eclipsed by more critically acclaimed directors like Masaki Kobayashi and Akira Kurosawa. Yet, what makes Okamoto’s films prescient is how the theme of history being an invention by those in power runs throughout his oeuvre. The typical Okamoto protagonist is an outcast and victim of the times that they live in, but within this hopelessness came a freedom, be it through death or a rejection of established social codes. So please come join me as we explore the inelegant, the sardonic, the brutal, and the comic films of Kihachi Okamoto.

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Oppai Volleyball (Japan, 2009)

The lustful desires of adolescent boys are a comic trope that is susceptible to the law of diminishing returns. What may start out as clever and funny can easily devolve into a routine set of predictable jokes or worse, escalate into a gross-out contest leaving neither the audience nor its creators satisfied. When confronted with the opportunity to watch the film Oppai Bare (Oppai Volleyball), the average viewer might skip over to a film with a more respectable title, but doing so denies him/herself of a rather funny and poignant story. Of course that’s not to say that the film rises above its popcorn flick roots. Oppai Bare is unabashedly lite entertainment fare, but what many viewers fail to realize is that it is just as difficult to make a popcorn flick as it is to make an auteur film. With all this said though, the producers of the film didn’t make appreciating the movie any easier with its choice of title, oppai being Japanese for breasts. Having a title that literally translates into Breast Volleyball makes defending the film a bit like defending the artistic merits of the American Pie franchise.

Gate Of Flesh (Japan, 1964)

Seijun Suzuki’s military career in the Imperial Japanese Army was nothing less than comically horrific.  Conscripted in 1943 and sent to East Abiko, Chiba for basic training, he formally entered the army with a rank of Private Second Class.  Yet, after his induction into the ranks, he was ordered to ship out to the Philippines and while only a week into his tour of duty, the cargo ship he was on was torpedoed by an American submarine.  Luckily for Suzuki, he washed up on shore, but ironically, by the time he arrived, American forces were already poised to take the islands back from Japanese control.  Then, while escaping on a freighter headed to Taiwan, Suzuki narrowly escaped death again when a squadron of American fighter planes sunk his ship, leaving the future director stranded out at sea for about eight hours before finally being rescued.  In between these harrowing adventures, Suzuki spent a majority of his time and money getting drunk or enjoying the company of comfort women.  It is no exaggeration to state that his experiences during the war left him with very few illusions about battle and a lot of resentment towards institutions that posed as authority figures.

The Story Of Qiu Ju (China, 1992)

Before the epics, before the over-blown spectacles, and long before the ostentatious pageantry, Zhang Yimou was one of China’s great neorealist directors.  His films gave voice to the poor rural class without ever pandering to audience sentiment.  Maybe it was his circumspect background: his father was an officer in the Nationalist Kuomintang army and one of his brothers fled to Nationalist-safe haven Taiwan, which led to Zhang never fully embracing the Communist doctrine. The path that Zhang took to eventually become the most well known Chinese director in the Western world was fraught with many setbacks, though.  During the Cultural Revolution, Zhang, after finishing high school, was forced to work in the fields, farming with the peasant class and then he was later sent to work at a textile factory in the city of Xianyang.  During all of this though, Zhang’s fascination with visual imagery and, more specifically, the cinema would ultimately lead him to sell his own blood just to purchase a camera and then, after Mao’s death in 1976, to apply to the Beijing Film Academy.

At the Beijing Academy, Zhang’s skill at photography would quickly land him a job as cinematographer for several small inland studios right after graduation, allowing him the opportunity to work with fellow Fifth Generation directors, Chen Kaige and Zhang Junzhao. This small group of filmmakers and craftsmen that would ultimately make up China’s Fifth Generation of artists all grew up under the harsh regime of the Cultural Revolution and thus had a very skeptical viewpoint on China’s totalitarian policies. Foregoing narratives that were overtly political or self-congratulatory, Zhang and his compatriots used the cinema to tear down the myths that the Communist party had been perpetuating  since the regime took power.

Princess Raccoon (Japan, 2005)

Popular thought dictates that the films of Seijun Suzuki are difficult, obtuse, and illogical works that exist in a very aestheticized universe.  Watch a few of his films, especially his late ’60s work for Nikkatsu studios or his critically celebrated Taisho Trilogy, and it becomes very easy to box him into that specific category and engage with his work on only a superficial level.  The images that Suzuki puts on the screen may often be treated as nothing more than just eye candy to be consumed and digested by many cinephiles, but the artifice in his films all serve a purpose.  Nothing in a Suzuki film is just there to pretty up the frame.  His jarring visual style is Suzuki’s primary mode of expressing the themes that he’s been obsessed with ever since he sat in the director’s chair.

After almost 50 years of working in the Japanese film industry Seijun Suzuki premieredOperetta Tanuki Goten (Princess Raccoon) at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. Although admired by the film community it nonetheless was forgotten and buried under the few accolades that the film and its director received. Princess Raccoon being neither a gonzo crime picture nor an austere art film seemed to cater to only the most devoted Suzuki follower. Blending traditional and contemporary art forms the film is a confusing mash-up of styles that may take some time for the viewer to get used to but repeated viewings of this film will reveal a magnum opus, a picture that encapsulates what Suzuki the artist was obsessed with throughout his entire career.

If You Were Young: Rage (Japan, 1970)

It’s a sad fact, but economic prosperity is built on the backs of people who will never get the chance to taste the fruits of their labor.  In America, diverse ethnic populations that range from Africans who were brought into the country as slaves, the Chinese who toiled as miners and railroad workers during the California Gold Rush, and the various Europeans who labored in the booming industrial factories that were popping up everywhere in the country all had a hand in making America the First World country that it is now considered.  During the immediate postwar period, Japan conscripted its young men into leaving their small towns and villages to work in the bustling cities that were just rising up from the rubble of the War years.  These “golden eggs”, really just boys right out of middle school, were 

promised the world but once services were rendered, all the promises that were made were quietly brushed under the carpet.  Japan, like America, had no feasible plans on how to assimilate the innumerable mass of poorly educated and ill-prepared young men into mainstream society.

Kinji Fukasaku, cinema’s patron saint of angry youth, set out to capture on film through a mix of documentary realism and avant-garde visual flourishes a group of “golden eggs” as they struggle against the system.  Kimi Ga Wakamono Nara (If You Were Young: Rage) was one of a handful of films Fukasaku made away from his home studio, Toei, during the late 1960’s.  Produced through his own independent production company, Shinsei Eigasha, and released theatrically in 1970 by Shochiku studios, the film sticks out in Fukasaku’s vast oeuvre. In fact, the film itself was thought to be lost or, at best, obscured by the genre fare that Fukasaku was much more famous for until his Batoru Rowairu (Battle Royale), made in 2000 but not released theatrically in the states until 2001, awakened in Western cinephiles a hunger for all things Fukasaku.

Blackmail Is My Life (Japan, 1968)

Apathy in youth is a well-worn dramatic cliché not just in the realm of cinema, but also in literature, music, theatre, and the visual arts. Artists and hacks alike have mined ad nauseam youth culture’s seemingly languid attitude towards everything. The old castigate the young for not caring and the young look down on the old for not understanding them. In the 1960’s, Kinji Fukasaku, almost approaching middle age, left Toei Studios and for a brief time shed the moniker of action-director by directing a series of avant-garde genre films that approached youth not as a social problem nor as a subject to be exploited, but as a unique sub-culture unto itself. Influenced by what he’d seen in the slums and black market stalls of his neighborhood during the Occupation years, Fukasaku never condemned his protagonists for their actions, but at the same time, he wasn’t delusional enough to grant them anything more than brief spurts of happiness.

Kyokatsu koso Waga Jinsei (Blackmail Is My Life), made in 1968 for Shochiku studios, can’t easily be categorized as a yakuza film. It definitely has Fukasaku’s unique stamp on it, but nonetheless it is very much a film of its time. The picture still crackles with energy like the best of Fukasaku’s pictures but what we would later come to know as the Fukasaku style had not yet coalesced into a cohesive whole.Blackmail Is My Life is a film about a group of chinpira, young punks with no affiliation to a specific gang or clan. These social outcasts, who bear a resemblance to the Barrow gang in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, released the year before, have turned to blackmailing the rich and powerful to survive during Japan’s postwar economic boom period. Although they may exploit the corrupt, it would be highly inaccurate to label them as contemporary Robin Hoods. Fukasaku’s protagonists are ruled mainly by two things: Western youth culture and the very real economic divisions in Japanese culture as progress led to extremes in wealth for some and a hard scramble existence for many.