January 3: Kyōnetsu no kisetsu

Thursday, January 3 2019 @ 8PM Kyōnetsu no kisetsu aka The Warped Ones Japan 1960 d. Koreyoshi Kurahara with Tamio Kawachi, Eiji Go, Yuko Chishiro and Noriko Matsumoto. In Japanese with English subtitles. Black and white. 76 m

“Released not long after Godard’s Breathless, The Warped Ones offers similarly amoral characters, frenetic pace, and dynamic hand-held cinematography, though Kurahara’s vision is, if anything, more extreme. Actor Kawaji’s famously uninhibited performance, a fascinating experiment in style (not to mention the limits of human behaviour), catapults the film into the highest ranks of ‘bad youth’ cinema, and perfectly captures the essence of Beat. A stylistic and amoral high point of early ’60s cinema.” Vancouver Cinematheque

Links: Clip IMDB  Wikipedia

See Also:  Ore wa matteru ze aka I Am Waiting (Kurahara, 1957), Nihon no Yoru to Kiri aka Night and Fog in Japan (Oshima, 1960), Kurutta kajitsu aka Crazed Fruit (Nakahira, 1956)