Green forbidden as insidious or anodyne, red would become the marker of Oshima’s dire vision of Japan, not only in the motif of the Japanese flag, the Hinomaru with its burning sun, repeatedly invoked and maligned in the director’s films, but also in the many objects keyed to carmine in his extravagant colour films. (Think of the first burst of colour in the hitherto black-and-white Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, the incarnadine bedroom of the young lovers and the glowing red tent theatre of the kabuki troupe, the “cherry blossom” stain left on the sheets by Umeko’s deflowering and the blood later poured down her leg and splashed on the fake decapitated head.) “The blood of this young boy dyes all of Japan red,” claimed the trailer for Boy. In the mother’s red sweater and dyed hair, the little girl’s red boot and forehead wound, the ubiquitous Japanese flags and various red objects given prominence in the Scope screen, Boy joins such scarlet-scored films as Nick Ray’s Party Girl, Godard’s Pierrot le fou, and Bresson’s Le Diable probablement (screening on December 3), each a portrait of moral drift, corruption, suicide. Of course, red most readily represents blood, the stuff of life, which is defiled, bought and sold in the black market in The Sun’s Burial or, conversely, the deathly apotheosis of sexual passion (the sluice of blood that ends the cloistered lovemaking in In the Realm of the Senses).                            

Extremity defined Oshima’s vision, and his stylistics: Night and Fog in Japan was shot in only forty-seven long takes, while the cutting in Violence at Noon came on like a Kurosawa hail of arrows: over