Shinjuku Ecstasy
At Japan Society Feb. 18-March 1

“Shinjuku Ecstasy: Independent Films from the Art Theatre Guild of Japan” confirms my firm belief that the Japan Society is an indispensable cross-cultural bastion. The program, featuring films co-produced and/or co-distributed by the experimental and counter-cultural Art Theater Guild (ATG), is screening simultaneously with their monthly “Best of Tora-san” series, which provides highlights from the popular 48 film series. In hosting both at the same time, Japan Society has provided audiences with the polar opposites of domestic cinema of the late 1960s and early '70s, pitting alternately surreal and somber agitprop against traditional, almost sitcom-like comedies of manners. By juxtaposing the two, they’ve created an ideological war zone that the 12 ATG films not only anticipated but actively incited.

While it would have been interesting to see some of the films ATG released in the late 1970s or even in the '80s, just before the company of radical filmmakers/exhibitors closed down, “Shinjuku Ecstasy” provides a cogent collection of the producer/exhibitor’s body of work. Almost all of the films, regardless of what prevailing ideology they attempt to debunk, tease their audience with rhetorical questions of epistemology. In Nagisa Oshima’s hideously distended Death By Hanging (1968), an amnesiac rapist named R. maintains that he is innocent of his crimes and cannot be hanged until he admits that he is who his accusers claim he is and has done what they claim he’s done. Likewise, Shohei Imamura’s pat faux-doc A Man Vanishes (1967) questions the nature of empirical truth by filming the search for a fictional man in a verité style until its self-satisfied fait accompli conclusion: there is no such thing as objective truth.

By their nature, most of the featured films sacrifice consistency for provocation’s sake. Precious few of them have enough finesse, insight or wit to make their mostly unvarnished arguments more than just impassioned cries for attention. Even Koji Wakamatsu’s Ecstasy of the Angels (1972), one of the programs most self-indulgent but effectively jarring titles, is hard to take seriously. Like Wakamatsu’s United Red Army (2007), which screened at last year’s New York Asian Film Festival, Angels parlays the sins and the self-assigned mandate of a group of student radicals through the exploitative metaphors of fetishized sex and violence. While Wakamatsu’s revolutionaries get busy, they determine who will lead the revolutionary charge on behalf of the Chesterton-inspired “Seasons Movement.” Wakamatsu infuses the film with an uncannily overactive kind of deadpan humor, like when one fresh-faced anarchist suggests that their faction disband, casually remarking afterwards, “She says she thinks of you when she’s doing it with me.”

Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) is not much more cohesive than Angels, but it does feature the most refreshingly self-deprecating scenes of humor of the bunch. Nothing in Matsumoto’s representation of the contemporary gay and underground scene is straightforward or entirely sincere. Undoubtedly an acolyte of Godard, his playfully cynical sense of humor only takes the hedonism of the group at face value, though he ultimately rolls his eyes at that, too. A drug deal goes bad to the tune of a warped can-can and a film student gravely quotes “Menas Jokas” instead of Jonas Mekas. Accordingly, Matsumoto is at his most vicious when Roses is seemingly at its most naive:  the auspices of Beatles posters and the influence of an astoundingly potent joint, the young revolutionaries have an orgy that makes the one in Zach Braff’s Garden State look positively sinister. And yet even that, what might have been the most convincing scene abruptly ends with an intertitle that sighs: “Oh, the empire of roses.”

Nevertheless, Akio Jissoji’s This Transient Life (1970) is, next to Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide (1969), the most accessible of the “Shinjuku Ecstasy” series. Visually breathtaking for the most part of its 134-minute runtime, the film uses an incestuous coupling between brother and sister as the first step towards Masao (Ryo Tamura), its nihilistic protagonist’s, languorous amble to self-destruction. As blunt as any of Kim Ki-Duk’s Buddhist parables, Transient is one of the least turbulent of the bunch but in a program that champions inspired egomaniacal provocateurs, it won’t give you the same bang for your buck.