NEW 35MM PRINT!

“Was and remains a landmark of Japanese cinema . . . the key work of that time” (Max Tessier). Tied with Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (!) as one of the dozen best Japanese films ever made in a poll in the prestigious journal Kinema Jumpo, Night and Fog in Japan packs more visual audacity into its ten-minute opening shot than many directors can muster in an entire film. Deemed dangerous and inflammatory by its studio and withdrawn only days after its release, Night and Fog takes its title from Alain Resnais’ short film about the Holocaust (shown this past summer at the Cinematheque) and certainly lives up to its inspiration. Shot and acted with ferocious intensity, the film takes place at the wedding of two leftist “comrades,” a celebration that quickly turns into a bitter round of denunciations, accusations, and self-recrimination. “False despair is the same as false hope,” declares one of the radicals, while another demands, “What’s dancing to do with the revolution?” The ashen guests, who look like ghosts, confirm another’s comment: “Call this a wedding? It’s a funeral!” The intellectual savagery is framed by perhaps the most inventive mise en scène of the director’s career: hand-held long takes; swish pans; theatrical friezes (anticipating Fassbinder); flashbacks-within-flashbacks; fog-enshrouded or tautly diagonal compositions; freeze frames; blackouts with spot lighting; rack focusing; elaborate pans. Called “one of the most beautiful films about youth in the history of Japanese movies” (Tadao Sato), Night and Fog in Japan ranks with such films as Godard’s La Chinoise as a key document of its age. “One of the year’s best. . . . Without question one of the most piercing political films I have ever seen, as great in its way as Jancsó’s The Confrontation” (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice). “An audacious and original work,