Nagisa Oshima

Violence at Noon

Violence at Noon

Violence at Noon concerns the odd circumstances surrounding a horrific murder and rape spree. In a twist, the film is as much about the two women who protect the violent man—his wife and a former victim—as it is about him. Containing more than two thousand cuts and a wealth of inventive widescreen compositions, this coolly fragmented character study is a mesmerizing investigation of criminality and social decay.

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Film Info

  • Japan
  • 1966
  • 98 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 2.35:1
  • Japanese

Available In

Collector's Set

Eclipse Series 21: Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties

Eclipse 21: Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties

DVD Box Set

5 Discs

$55.96

Violence at Noon
Cast
Saeda Kawaguchi
Shino Shinozaki
Kei Sato
Eisuke Oyamada
Akiko Koyama
Matsuko Koura
Rokko Toura
Genji Hyuga
Taiji Tonoyama
School director
Fumio Watanabe
Inspector Haraguchi
Teruko Kishi
Shino’s grandmother
Credits
Director
Nagisa Oshima
Cinematography
Akira Takada
Editing
Keiichi Uraoka
Music
Hikaru Hayashi
Producer
Masayuki Nakajima
Screenplay
Tsutomo Tamura
From the story by
Taijun Takeda
Art direction
Jusho Toda

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Nagisa Oshima

Director

Nagisa Oshima
Nagisa Oshima

Japanese cinema’s preeminent taboo buster, Nagisa Oshima directed, between 1959 and 1999, more than twenty groundbreaking features. For Oshima, film was a form of activism, a way of shaking up the status quo. Uninterested in the traditional Japanese cinema of such popular filmmakers as Kurosawa, Ozu, and Naruse, Oshima focused not on classical themes of good and evil or domesticity but on outcasts, gangsters, murderers, rapists, sexual deviants, and the politically marginalized. He began as a studio filmmaker, and had a hit with the jazzy Cruel Story of Youth (1960), but left Shochiku when the powers that be there pulled his politically incendiary Night and Fog in Japan (1960) from circulation. Oshima then struck out on his own, becoming an independent director and even starting a production company, Sozo-sha, where he made such popular and aesthetically diverse films as the pinku eiga, or “pink film,” Pleasures of the Flesh (1965); Violence at Noon (1966), which contains more than two thousand cuts; Sing a Song of Sex (1967), a dreamlike investigation of libidinous, politically confused youth; and Death by Hanging (1969), a surreal, meditative film about social injustice. With his late-seventies international coproductions, the sexually graphic In the Realm of the Senses (1976) and the visually raw ghost story Empire of Passion (1978), Oshima became an art-house sensation in Europe and the U.S., riling moviegoers there much as he had at home. Made in 1999, Oshima’s final film, Taboo, a portrait of homosexual longing among samurai, is the perfect expression of his continued desire to provoke.

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