The Krannert Art Museum, the Unit for Cinema Studies, and the Center for East Asian & Pacific Studies present a series of Japanese films with theatrical sources and/or styling in conjunction with the Museum's exhibition of Japanese theatre posters. David Desser, Professor of Cinema Studies and East Asian Languages and Cultures, will provide introductory comments for each screening.

All films are in Japanese with English subtitles and will be shown in the Krannert Art Museum auditorium. Admission is free.

February 11 (Wednesday) 7:00 p.m.

Double Suicide (Shinju ten no Amijima, 1969).

One of the most famous plays of the traditional Bunraku (puppet) theatre, by the noted playwright Chikamatsu, has been transformed into one of the best-known and most admired of contemporary Japanese films. Director Masahiro Shinoda keeps many characteristics of the original puppet play intact, especially the black-clad kuroko (stagehands); not preserved, however, are the puppets themselves. By using live actors, Shinoda creates a brilliant tension between human choice and fate; between actor and puppet; between individuality and social role. Highly stylized sets and brilliant black and white cinematography cohere to create a dynamic confrontation between film and theater, between filmmaker and audience. 104 minutes.

February 18 (Wednesday) 7:00 p.m.

Death by Hanging (Koshikei, 1968)

Nagisa Oshima is the best-known of Japan's postwar filmmakers, a major figure in the Japanese New Wave and a major figure in the international cinema, as well. This film is among his most politically engaged and cinematically challenging. If comparisons to Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Luc Godard are apt, nevertheless Oshima details very specifically Japanese issues in a very particular Japanese manner. The film is all at once an examination of discrimination against Koreans in Japan, a condemnation of the death penalty, and a darkly comic expose of institutional hypocrisy. Based on an actual incident, the film turns the tables on both its subjects and its audience. 117 minutes.

February 22 (Sunday) 2:00 p.m.

Buraikan (1970)

Contemporary playwright Shuji Terayama scripted this adaptation of two classic kabuki plays by 19th century dramatist Mokuami. This Masahiro Shinoda film celebrates the "play" side of theater, the liberatory, populist, rebellious roots of kabuki and of cinema, too. Rebellion--from parents, from government, from duty, from repression--forms the theme of this sometimes riotously comic, freewheeling, colorful, widescreen tour-de-force. Role playing and playacting abound in a complex panorama of plots and counter-plots, of glamorous courtesans, heroic derring-do, and a tea-master who brings everything and everyone together. 103 minutes.

February 25 (Wednesday) 7:00 p.m.

Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (Shinjuku dorobo nikki, 1969)

Influential contemporary playwright and theatre director, Kara Juro, appears as himself on the streets of Shinjuku, center of the youthful counterculture in the 1960s. Nagisa Oshima has created what amounts to a documentary of Shinjuku during the era, alongside a comic look at a fictional lovable loser, the oddly named Birdey Hilltop. Shot in 16mm, black and white, the hand-held camera captures the sense of spontaneity, of alienation, of longing, of outrageousness that brought life, freedom, and openness to Japan during its turbulent 1960s. A quintessential New Wave film. 96 minutes.

All the films are in Japanese with English subtitles and will be shown in the Krannert Art Museum auditorium. Admission is free.

(Film notes by David Desser)