Time to reveal another trio of online store additions. Today’s slate consists of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Rumble Fish,” Werner Herzog’s “My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?” and Nagisa Oshima’s “Cruel Story of Youth.”
Although best known in America today as the director of “In the Realm of the Senses,” Oshima first established himself as an in-house critic of sorts during his time as an assistant director at Shochiku, advocating for a cinema that reflected Japan’s emerging youth culture in a way that was along the lines of how late 50’s pictures like Nicholas Ray’s “Rebel Without A Cause” and the Nouvelle Vague films of Godard & Co. reflected young people in America and France, respectively. While Shochiku was more than willing to seize on the sex and violence of so-called “Japanese New Wave” films as a gimmick to be exploited for profit, the criminality depicted in Oshima’s pictures continued to escalate, reaching the breaking point when the director’s “Night and Fog in Japan” was pulled by the studio in the wake of a politician’s assassination.