Juvenile Jungle – The Films of Ko Nakahira

Alongside such colleagues as Nagisa Oshima and Yasuzo Masumura, Ko (Yasushi) Nakahira (1926–1978) is regarded as one of the most important innovators in post-war Japanese cinema. In the West, his oeuvre is usually reduced to his 1956 debut, adolescent drama JUVENILE JUNGLE, whose unconventional compositions did not merely challenge the Japanese cinema establishment, but also became an important reference point for the French New Wave. The film inspired François Truffaut to make the following eulogy to youthful abandon: "Youth is in a hurry, it is impatient, bursting at the seams from all the tangible ideas it has. Young filmmakers must make their films at a manic tempo."

Nakahira stayed equally true to Truffaut's yearning for the remainder of his career too. In the 1950s and 60s, he shot film after film at breathtaking speed for production company Nikkatsu and later worked in Hong Kong for the Shaw Brothers amongst others. His work move through every single genre: comedies, melodramas, action films and erotic films. Arsenal is showing a selection of eight films from the first half of his career.

It's hard to explain why these films remain completely unknown outside of Japan to this day: they reveal a cinema dedicated to a freedom of form and content which simultaneously attacks the narrative and stylistic shackles of commercial cinema as well as the restrictive petty bourgeois realm of experience and sexual morals of Japan's postwar society: the young generation's desires in particular could no longer be contained, neither by the boundaries of the shot, nor by the standards expected by traditional family ideology.