Image from The Sword of Doom from blu-ray.com at https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/The-Sword-of-Doom-Blu-ray/115397/
Image from Kwaidan from moviesandmania.com at https://moviesandmania.com/2012/12/12/kwaidan-1964-japanese-anthology-horror-film-overview-cast-plot-reviews-trailer-blu-ray/
Image from The Naked Island from cinematrices.wordpress.com at https://cinematrices.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/the-naked-island-kaneto-shindo-1960/
Image from Onibaba from ffffilm.com at https://www.ffffilm.com/cinematographer/kiyomi-kuroda
Image from Pale Flower from giphy.com at http://gph.is/2cax73n
Pale Flower
In this cool, seductive jewel of the Japanese New Wave, a yakuza, fresh out of prison, becomes entangled with a beautiful yet enigmatic gambling addict. What at first seems a redemptive relationship ends up leading him further down the criminal path.
Samurai Spy
Years of warfare end in a Japan unified under the Tokugawa shogunate, and samurai spy Sasuke Sarutobi, tired of conflict, longs for peace. When a high-ranking spy named Tatewaki Koriyama defects from the shogun to a rival clan, however, the world of swordsmen is thrown into turmoil. After Sasuke is unwittingly drawn into the conflict, he tracks Tatewaki, while a mysterious, white-hooded figure seems to hunt them both. By tale’s end, no one is who they seemed to be, and the truth is far more personal than anyone suspected. Director Masahiro Shinoda’s Samurai Spy, filled with clan intrigue, ninja spies, and multiple double crosses, marks a bold stylistic departure from swordplay film convention.
Image from Tokyo Drifter from reddit.com at https://www.reddit.com/r/CineShots/comments/bs6h66/tokyo_drifter_1966/
Branded to Kill
A gangster story about a hitman who lost his last target, and now another hitman is after him.
Story of a Prostitute
Volunteering as a "comfort woman" on the Manchurian front, where she is expected to service hundreds of soldiers, Harumi is commandeered by the brutal Lieutenant Narita but falls for the sensitive Mikami, Narita's direct subordinate. Seijun Suzuki's Story of a Prostitute is a tragic love story as well as a rule-bending take on a popular Taijiro Tamura novel, challenging military and fraternal codes of honor, as seen through Harumi's eyes.
Tokyo Drifter
In this jazzy gangster film, reformed killer Tetsu’s attempt to go straight is thwarted when his former cohorts call him back to Tokyo to help battle a rival gang. Director Seijun Suzuki’s onslaught of stylized violence and trippy colors is equal parts Russ Meyer, Samuel Fuller, and Nagisa Oshima—an anything-goes, in-your-face rampage. Tokyo Drifter is a delirious highlight of the brilliantly excessive Japanese cinema of the sixties.
Youth of the Beast
When a mysterious stranger muscles into two rival yakuza gangs, Tokyo's underworld explodes with violence. Youth of the Beast (Yaju no Seishun) was a breakthrough for director Seijun Suzuki, introducing the flamboyant colors, hallucinatory images, and striking compositions that would become his trademark. The Criterion Collection proudly presents the film that revitalized the yakuza genre and helped define the inimitable style of a legendary cinematic renegade.
Image from The Pornographers from thecinemaarchives.com at http://thecinemaarchives.com/2019/04/05/the-pornographers-1966-imamura/
A Man Vanishes
An investigation into one of the thousands of missing person' cases that occur in Japan each year. Examining every aspect of the disappeared man's life including focusing on the mans finacee. As the filmmakers become more involved in her life, it begins to cast doubt over the couple's relationship, the man's work life, both of their families, and finally the fiancee herself.
The Pornographers
Subu makes pornographic films. He sees nothing wrong with it. They are an aid to a repressed society, and he uses the money to support his landlady, Haru, and her family. From time to time, Haru shares her bed with Subu, though she believes her dead husband, reincarnated as a carp, disapproves. Director Shohei Imamura has always delighted in the kinky exploits of lowlifes, and in this 1966 classic, he finds subversive humor in the bizarre dynamics of Haru, her Oedipal son, and her daughter, the true object of her pornographer-boyfriend's obsession. Imamura's comic treatment of such taboos as voyeurism and incest sparked controversy when the film was released, but The Pornographers has outlasted its critics, and now seems frankly ahead of its time.
Image from The Sword of Doom from criterioncloseup.com at https://criterioncloseup.com/2015/02/04/the-sword-of-doom-kihachi-okamoto-1966/
The Sword of Doom
This is the thrilling tale of a man who chooses to devote his life to evil. A gifted swordsman plying his trade during the turbulent final days of Shogunate rule, Ryunosuke (Nakadai) kills without remorse, without mercy. It is a way of life that ultimately leads to madness.
Image from Death By Hanging from film-grab.com at https://film-grab.com/2018/08/16/death-by-hanging/#
Death by Hanging
A Korean man is sentenced to death in Japan but survives his execution, sending the authorities into a panic about what to do next. At once disturbing and oddly amusing, Oshima's constantly surprising film is a subversive and surreal indictment of both capital punishment and the treatment of Korean immigrants in his country.
Japanese Summer: Double Suicide
A group of oddball anarchists find themselves trapped in an underground hideaway together.
Sing a Song of Sex
When four sexually-hungry high school boys meet up with their drunk teacher, they are sent down a less-than-academic path.
Three Resurected Drunkards
A trio of young men are mistaken for undocumented Koreans in Japan and find themselves on the run.
Violence at Noon
The wife and a former victim of a murderer/rapist protect him in his horrific rape and murder spree.
The Face of Another
Okuyama, after being burned and disfigured in an industrial accident and estranged from his family and friends, agrees to his psychiatrist's radical experiment: a face transplant, created from the mold of a stranger. As Okuyama is thus further alienated from the world around him, he finds himself giving in to his darker temptations.
Kwaidan
Consists of four stories of the supernatural based on Japanese folk material. In The black hair, a poor young samurai leaves his first wife to marry a rich woman. When he is unhappy in his second marriage, he returns to his first wife, who at first appears unchanged from when he last saw her. In The woman of the snow, a woodcutter is spared by a mysterious ghost-like woman in the snow, but must promise never to tell anyone what he has seen. In Hoichi, the earless, a blind musician-monk named Hoichi is commanded by a gathering of ghosts to sing the saga of their ancient deeds. The head monk paints Hoichi's body with prayer verses to protect him, but unfortunately overlooks Hoichi's ears. In In a cup of tea, a writer wonders what would happen to a person who drinks another's soul and finds out.
The Naked Island
The international breakthrough for one of Japan's most innovative filmmakers, who went on to make such other marvelous movies as Onibaba and Kuroneko. It follows a family whose home is on a tiny, remote island off the coast of Japan. They must row a great distance to another shore, collect water from a well in buckets, and row back to their island, a nearly backbreaking task essential for the survival of these people and their land.
Onibaba
Deep within the wind-swept marshes of war-torn medieval Japan, an impoverished mother and her daughter-in-law eke out a lonely, desperate existence. Forced to murder lost samurai and sell their belongings for grain, they dump the corpses down a deep, dark hole and live off of their meager spoils. When a bedraggled neighbor returns from the skirmishes, lust, jealousy, and rage threaten to destroy the trio’s tenuous existence, before an ominous, ill-gotten demon mask seals the trio’s horrifying fate. Driven by primal emotions, dark eroticism, a frenzied score by Hikaru Hayashi, and stunning images both lyrical and macabre, Kaneto Shindo’s chilling folktale Onibaba is a singular cinematic experience.
Pitfall
When a miner leaves his employer and treks out with his young son to become a migrant worker, he finds himself moving from one eerie landscape to another, intermittently followed (and photographed) by an enigmatic man in a clean, white suit, and eventually coming face-to-face with his inescapable destiny.
Woman in the Dunes
An amateur entomologist leaves Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle that resides in a remote, vast desert. When he misses his bus back to civilization, he is persuaded to spend the night in the home of a young widow who lives in a hut at the bottom of a sand dune.
