Oshima: Taiyo no habaka (The Sun's Burial) (1960)

One of several films that Nagisa Oshima made about disaffected Japanese youth in the early 1960s, The Sun’s Burial traces out the rivalry between a pair of gangs against the otherworldy, ghettoised slums of Osaka. Fragmentary and elliptical, it’s set in a world of short-term solutions, amidst a generation waiting for the next catastrophe, certain that World War III would follow as quickly as World War II arrived. Like Pasolini’s films of the same period, there’s something redemptive about this criminal underclass – the only bearers of anything like a feudal honour code – but it’s far more fleeting and provisional. Perhaps that’s because teenagers were such a rare beast in Japanese cinema at this time – they jar too much with the mise-en-scene to feel like they could really redeem it, as if the most shameful legacy of Japanese defeat were in fact the rise of teen culture, regressing the nation to a new era of adolescence, driven by cult icon Kayoko Hanoo. To that end, Oshima uses the striking fashion and body language of his more or less nameless characters to evoke a new Japan emerging within the shell of the old Japan – lurid, garish and neon-lit, it often feels like a forerunner of the globalised, cyberpunk Japan that would become prominent in manga and 1980s science fiction, especially in a subplot that revolves around the blood trade. And yet it’s clear that Oshima’s fascinated by this aesthetic as much as he’s repelled by it – it’s a film made for teenagers by someone who’s deeply distrustful of them, with all the conflict that entails, a film that can’t but yearn to be cast aside with the “buried and useless trash” it eviscerates, too self-destructive to even believe in suicide anymore.