Night And Fog In Japan

Nagisa Oshima - 1960
We have long takes in that 'scope ratio, with a camera panning, and sometimes tracking, in huge horizontals. These are huge long movements across the room, the faster the more urgent finding its target is. It is relatively smooth usually, but is happy while this to duck and dive in and out.
The lighting is also fasinating. Deeply 'theatrical', one could say, in that it can change in a scene so we only have spotlights on one or other individual people inside the room. The rest of the stage is blacked out. I got the same kind of idea from the use of contiguous spaces which are seperate in time and space; the themes of memory and so on are here, as is simply the exciting cinema.
This is really a fasincating discussion, and show, of tactics. Oshima isn't going to simplify down on one side, but there is generally a reaction against a kind of complacent, almost right wing Stalinism. He accusses, and here is the Resnais triangle, fogetfulness. Forgetfulness is inevitable, but it leads to complacency, the destruction of ideals. What has happened to these so called 'revolutionaries' now? What can they remember, do they try to remember? What does one choose to remember? I really found this film very, very fine ;an intelligent, in depth, exciting and at once engrossing.