Hatsukoi: Jigoku-hen

Hani’s most well-known film explores the relationship of a young couple in a stylistic tour de force that alternates between quasi-documentary footage and hallucinogenic flashbacks and fantasies. Despite her work as a nude model for rich businessmen, Nanami has hung onto her innocence. Shun, meanwhile, is sexually inexperienced and inhibited. His forays into the seedy world of Nanami’s work, where sexual obsession, violence, and power are closely intertwined, are equally captivating and frightening and reawaken buried memories. As his traumatic childhood is revealed in flashbacks, so too are the roots of his fears and sexual inhibitions, as well as his troubled friendship with a little girl. The story, which Hani co-wrote with underground filmmaker and author Shuji Terayama, takes the viewer deep into the psyche and sexuality of young people and the pulsing energy of Tokyo’s subculture.

From the time his career began in the late 1950s, Susumu Hani (*1928) broke with traditional Japanese filmmaking by anchoring his films in the present and combining documentary methods with avant-garde aesthetics.