Still Walking 2020

Queer-coding, as the name suggests, is the practice of coding characters as queer. The most widely known example of this in cinema is Disney villains, who have been queer-coded to various degrees of subtlety, from the drag-inspired Ursula to the slightly effeminate Scar. Some problematic aspects that instantly emerge from this are assuming certain stereotypes of queerness, using those stereotypes to code queerness, frequently attributing them to villains, and remaining at this superficial depiction of queerness. In The Family Game  (1983, dir. Yoshimitsu Morita), the queer subject is quite obviously Yoshimoto the tutor, and the characterization of him fits most of the patterns I set up above. The very first question to ask is: is Yoshimoto queer? There are many possible answers to this question. He is initially presented as 1. gay. Near the beginning of the film, his acts of intimacy with the same sex are presented with neither fanfare nor obscuration, which can be a good thin...

A few minutes into Proof of the Man (1977, dir. Junya Satō), a biracial man jumps joyously into the air and freezes. The camera punches in, and a title card in Japanese appears. At this point, we don’t know who this man is, and we don’t know why he is important, but the film has unmistakably marked him as “人間の証明”. Though I don’t speak Japanese, I can read kanji, and the title seems to translate not necessarily to “proof of the man,” but just “proof of human.” To place such momentous importance on anyone in a film is intriguing enough, but to place it on a half-black man in an African-American neighborhood screams thematically significant. Another few minutes later, he is unceremoniously killed. We still don’t know who he is, but his status hovers over our heads. He is the proof of human. “Look at me!”, he tells the audience. We later find out that this proof of human is Johnny Hayward, whose parents are a Japanese woman and an African-American man previously stationed in Japan ...

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 ...