Who’s Cruel and Who’s Young in Cruel Story of Youth?
I’m usually quite vehemently opposed to “horrible people doing horrible things” cinema, as I find that to basically be torture porn, but Nagisa Ōshima makes atrocities on display compelling because of the meaning he injects and the sheer force of nature that is his directing. Witnessing an Ōshima film is always quite an experience – his films are mysterious in morals and meaning, yet also clear in construction and conviction. That tension between ambiguity and clarity permeates his second feature, Cruel Story of Youth (1960).
The lingering question I had while watching it was “who’s the titular ‘cruel’?”, and the answer kept changing shape and position. We start the movie thinking the rapist must be the cruel one, but the answer slowly expands to men as a whole then to American-influenced capitalist society. Ōshima has smartly centered his focus on a woman instead of the awful men surrounding her; men are just evil of the worst kind in this film. For a long stretch, this feels like a surprisingly feminist film about a woman’s struggle to survive against men (her continued efforts and moral complexity are what elevate this from female suffering porn), yet it takes an unexpected turn at the end, when even our rapist has to ditch his tantalizing towel polo and don a white-collar button-down. Even the most delinquent of teenagers are subsumed into orderly capitalism. All of these ideas are rather fragmented, which makes the viewing experience difficult, but the fragmentation of society feels precisely the point; if anything, Ōshima’s distinctive voice ties them together.
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| Corners of anamorphic. |
Ōshima’s voice is both passionately young and astonishingly assured. Sure, his anger is palpable and his indictment searing, but he is already showing stylistic considerations of a master. In our last film last quarter (When A Woman Ascends the Stairs), Mikio Naruse showed great use of anamorphic; little did I know that, in the same year, neophyte Ōshima was already doing great anamorphic on top of great color. Like Naruse, Ōshima makes sure to fill up the widescreen – for example, he accentuates the separation between characters by placing them on the distant corners of the 2.35:1 frame (Mitsuhiro 172). His colors are highly saturated, but it’s lighting that’s the secret to longevity. In a memorable shot involving an apple, light eschews classicism and slices our actor’s face; thanks to that and the digital restoration, the film hasn’t aged a day. Finally, within any scene, Ōshima can be violently cutting between dissimilar shapes or balletically splicing “Spielberg oners”. The .gif below is an example of both modes, one immediately after another, mirroring our characters’ fragmentation and exuding both stylistic dissonance and confidence. (Not to mention all the handheld.) Though the film is so polemical in message, it’s its energetic style that’s kept up its youth, not just in appearance but also in spirit.
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| “Spielberg oner” followed by harsh, disorienting cuts. |
Works Cited
Cruel Story of Youth. Directed by Nagisa Ōshima, Shochiku, 1960.Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto. “Questions of the New: Ōshima Nagisa’s Cruel Story of Youth (1960).” Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts, edited by Alastair Phillips and Julian Stringer, Routledge, 2007, pp. 168-179.
Hi Justin! Although I admittedly didn't like "Cruel Story of Youth" myself, I find your assertion that the film skirts the "torture porn" genre through its style and construction very interesting. I totally agree that the composition and lighting of Oshima's shots adds layers of meaning and cohesion to a narrative and characters that often feel distant and fragmented. I'd love to hear more about your classification of "Cruel Story of Youth" as feminist---although I understand that the depiction of Makoto's suffering at the hands of men is meant to be received with sympathy for Makoto, I personally found the film too distant and fragmented to construct any real argument about rape, assault, or domestic violence. Instead, I felt as though I was helplessly watching a young girl get repeatedly violated, both by strangers and by people that she trusted. In that way, I found "Cruel Story of Youth" to veer dangerously close to the torture porn category.
ReplyDeleteI agree that Ōshima's use of widescreen, color, and lighting seems crucial to this film. However, I'd just like to add that though you said he always makes sure to fill up the widescreen, I believe there are a couple of key moments that achieve their power through a *lack* of content filling up the screen.
ReplyDeleteTake this shot for example:
https://images2.imgbox.com/74/1b/fGTouQF3_o.jpg
The frame is almost entirely negative space, and this negative space is out of focus—drawing our eye immediately to the far right of the frame where Makoto is pushed so far to the side that she's nearly half out of frame.
I'd also just like to note briefly the effect of the widescreen on many of the handheld shots—that the huge image only serves to amplify the jerky motions of the cameraman, throwing the image even more out of balance.
Thanks for the screenshot; your frame is another example of how intelligently Oshima uses anamorphic. I guess I consider that negative space to be another way of how Oshima "fills up" the frame.
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