Night and Fog in Japan

A Japanese film set in a wedding hall. Two people are marrying. Nozawa is a journalist, Reiko a young woman; both come out of the student movement. The guests are old comrades. The speeches begin. The first ones are polite. Then someone interrupts. A man who was not invited asks a question and the hall changes. From there the film is a story of reckoning. Everyone accuses everyone. The subject is the student movement of the 1950s. A group carried out an action, one person disappeared, and nobody ever discussed it. There is 1960 as well. The demonstrations against the security treaty and something else that happened there. Two generations are in the same hall. The people of the old movement and the young of the new; each accuses the other of betrayal. The narrative moves back and forward in time. The flashbacks are made not by cutting but by a change of light; the camera stays in the same room and the scene moves to another time. That method is the film's signature. There are around forty shots in the whole film; the scenes are very long. What the narrative is interested in is not a wedding but memory: its idea is that a political movement buried its own silencings without ever facing them, and that those dead come back at a wedding. Nobody is proved right. The narrative gives no side a clean position. The title is taken from a French documentary and the reference is deliberate. The film was pulled from cinemas four days after it opened. A political assassination had occurred in the same days and the studio withdrew it; Nagisa Ōshima left the company over this and founded his own. Miyuki Kuwano, Fumio Watanabe, Masahiko Tsugawa and Hiroshi Akutagawa are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes the Japanese new wave and political cinema. Who it is not for: anyone without the context; the narrative rests on the internal history of the Japanese left and there are a great many characters.