Philadelphia Weekly

As the French New Wave exploded, Japan went through its arguably more thrilling New Wave, of which Shohei Imamura and 
Nagisa Oshima were its masters. The late Imamura cut his teeth working for the great Yasujiro Ozu, only to rebel against him, shirking Ozu’s serene formalism for dirty, Tohoscope mayhem. Criterion’s box “Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes” packages three from Imamura’s early period, starting with 1962’s literal-titled Pigs and Battleships, in which not-so-
tender youths either exploit or are exploited by the U.S. presence in seaside Yokosuka. 


Resilient women headline both Insect Woman (1963) and The Intentions of Murder (1964), but Imamura’s take on them mixes respect with contempt; the latter features a pudgy woman putting up with the infatuation of a man who’s raped her.


Nagisa Oshima is best known/feared for 1976’s very X-rated In the Realm of the Senses, which features both unsimulated sex and a climactic asphyxiation-castration. 


Post- Last Tango in Paris , Senses devotes more than half of its length to the bump-’n’-grind sessions between a prostitute (Eiko Matsuda) and her brothel keeper’s husband (Tatsuya Fuji). Their epic shtupping becomes a black hole of intimacy, and though the story (based on fact) ends gorily, it’s otherwise the opposite of your typical miserable art-house bonking. Criterion also just released Oshima’s 
follow-up, Empire of Passion (1978), whose fuckbuddies’ (merely R-rated) affair takes a turn into James M. Cain territory.


Also from Criterion, the long MIA Last Year at Marienbad pairs French New Wave elder Alain Resnais with Nouveau Roman novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. As a pair of bourgeosie (Delphine Seyrig and Giorgio Albertazzi) debate, endlessly, their possible history together, time and space collapse, with Sacha Vierny’s dreamy B&W ’scope prowling the hallways and bedrooms and grounds of a pair of lavish Bavarian chateau. Audiences of 1961 hotly argued the film’s mysteries, but it’s a puzzle never meant to be solved, and its heavy formalism drove the infamously prickly Peter Greenaway to exclaim that it’s “absolutely cinematic because it cannot exist in any other form.”


Thanks in part to the popularity of his floppy-haired dreamboat son Louis ( The Dreamers , Love Songs ), New Wave oddball Philippe Garrel has enjoyed belated attention. Exhumed last year, his 1991 I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar sadly chronicles his on-again-off-again relationship with chanteuse Nico—with whom he made seven films—albeit in the most abstract way possible, complete with huge, unexplained leaps in time. The hypnotic, tactile Guitar is paired with 1989’s Emergency Kisses, another gem waiting to be discovered.


Inarguably second in terms of DVD production in the U.S. is Warner Bros., who put out superlative transfers from their extensive and well-maintained vault. Surely no coincidence is the release of both an expanded Woodstock box and Michelangelo Antonioni’s never-properly-videoized 
Zabriskie Point. Where Woodstock is iconic, optimistic, Zabriskie is pessimistic, apocalyptic. (The title refers to the lowest geographical point in America.) A legendary bomb whose reputation is 
finally turning around (now that people can, y’know, see it), the film’s bleak survey of America’s counter- and consumer-
cultures ends in a literally explosive climax.


The studio has also recently begun “The Warner Archive Collection,” for which, for $20, they will burn you a DVD-R of an obscurity that would never (presumably) turn a profit on its own. For anyone who’s ever wanted to peep Nicholas Ray’s Party Girl, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People, the Budd Boetticher-
Randolph Scott joint Westbound or even the proto-buddie picture Freebie and the Bean, this is a dream. Still: 20 bucks? For a usually un-interlaced, sometimes fuzzy transfer? Perhaps that tag will come down, though a true cinephile has never let a pesky thing like a 
dwindling bank account get in the way. ■