Violence at Noon

Nagisa Ōshima's 1966 Japanese film is about the two women around a serial rapist and murderer: his wife and a woman who survived his attack. Neither reports him, and the film tries to ask why. Ōshima built the film from close to two thousand cuts; the constantly broken image never lets the viewer settle into a scene. The story frames the crime not as an individual deviation but as the outcome of a collective experiment collapsing in the post-war countryside, and ties the women's silence to that collapse. The subject is heavy and the film offers no relief at any point. Who it's for: viewers interested in the Japanese new wave and formally radical films. Who it's not for: anyone avoiding content involving sexual violence, or who will find the density of fast cutting wearing.