Nippon Sengoshi - Madamu onboro no Seikatsu (1970) Reviews

• Prostitution as a metaphor for post-war history of Japan

  anttilmar2008-03-24

  This is a documentary film about history of Japan in 1945-1970. The main narrative takes shape through describing events in one woman's unstable personal life. It consists of archive footage of political turmoil, demonstrations and other news flashes on one hand, and material from interviews with her on the other. In the interview the woman describes her relationships with various men, starting from the age of 15 in 1945. After failed and violent relationships with Japanese men, she starts to seek comfort by prostituting herself to various American soldiers and sailors. This reflects the development of the post-war relations between United States and Japan, which is shown in the background. Yet she seems mostly uninterested in the political patterns evolving around her, and she even actively seeks denial when she is shown photographs of Vietnamese civilian casualties. It's a very interesting perspective into Japanese history - and I have to admit that this contained much about the political history of Japan during 50's and 60's I wasn't previously aware of.

• History Of Postwar Japan As Told By A Bar Hostess (Shohei Imamura, 1970) **

  Bunuel19762006-04-01

  I was looking forward to following up my small Imamura retrospective with the 3-hour long THE PROFOUND DESIRE OF THE GODS (1968), but I had to abort my VHS viewing after the first 10 minutes because the tape was mangled (which, had I been aware of it, I would certainly have rerecorded the film when it turned up again recently during the "After Hours" programme on Italian TV)! In this respect, I have to agree with Michael Elliott's preference of DVD to VHS as one need only turn over the disc to know if it's scratched or not, but with VHS you cannot know beforehand in what state the tape is going to be!! So, I had to make do with the next entry in the Imamura canon that I had scheduled to watch. Well, it turned out to be as dreary and unappetizing as the film's very title would suggest, treating as it does events which would mostly only be familiar to Japanese people anyway. As a matter of fact, only the various scenes of military conflict and political turmoil held some measure of interest for me; indeed, the picture comes off as a very tedious whole, demonstrating that few film-makers can successfully make the leap into the field of documentary (and, frankly, only Werner Herzog comes to mind at the moment).