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The dark fantasy “Flashback Before Death” is the directorial debut of composer Hiroyuki Onogawa, who is best known for his collaborations with Sogo Ishii, and his wife Rii Ishihara. Set in 1930s Japan, the director tells an eerie story about death and sorrow.

Flashback Before Death is screening at Japan Cuts

After completing his studies in France to become a translator, Kikuo, played by Masatoshi Kihara, returns home to his sister Tsuruha (Hanae Seike). It is a stormy and gloomy night as she embraces him at the door and leads him to a dinner table with a creepy doll. The audience is also kept in the dark about the main plot points and has to gather hints to make sense of the events. The doll used to be Tsuruha's child and was named Hinano. Due to a disability, she had to suffer a lot and was longing for death. Hinano's...

Above: MandalaOnly up until the last few years has Akio Jissoji remained on the margins of canonical Japanese cinema of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The director’s status as an outlier—not dissimilar to those of his two closest contemporaries, Koji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi—had, perhaps, not as much to do with his deployment of the staples of exploitation cinema or subject matter that addressed cultural taboo, but with how his films addressed each through the prism of European new wave aesthetics that had reached Japan by the 1960s that has come to be known as the Japanese New Wave.The opening sequence of Jissoji’s 1971 Mandala—a series of sex images set against what appears to be a field of white, followed by a fade-in to a montage of Buddha wall paintings—establishes a thesis of sorts for his de facto “Buddhist trilogy.” The films explore...

After the completion of his Buddhist trilogy, Japanese director Akio Jissoji followed up with a period drama set in the 13th century. Even though it is not counted as part of the trilogy, the film, again shot by Masao Nakabori, who also worked on the last film of the trilogy, “Poem” (1972), follows similar themes. At the same time the film oscillates between the two tones defined by “Poem” and “This Transient Life” as it presents notions of rebirth and renewal, while also a deep awareness of the corrosion of the system it portrays.

In general, Japan as presented in the film is in a state of upheaval with the threat of the Mongol Empire, its riders and soldiers, having already tried to set foot on the Western shores of the country. It is during this time that a young girl named Shijo (Janet Hatta) is sold to...

In 1972, Japanese director Akio Jissoji concluded his Buddhist trilogy, whose previous entries were “This Transient Life” and “Mandala”. As viewers are now finally able to experience these films on blu-ray format thanks to a recent release by Arrow Academy, we can take a closer look at an important entry within the Japanese New Wave Movement, which many of us associate with names such as Seijun Suzuki and Nagisa Oshima since they, among others, remain the most known or popular artists of that time (at least for many Western audiences).

In general, Jissoji addition to the movement, or rather Japanese cinema as a whole, is a bridge between modernity and tradition, between the revolutionary ideologies of the 1960s and the system of beliefs which have defined the country for so long (and still do). As film scholar David Desser points out in his introduction to “Poem”, Jissoji has managed to create...

The second film of the Atg-produced “The Buddhist Trilogy” was even more experimental than “This Transient Life”, since the innovation also extended to the narrative, apart from the visuals.

Two couples of university students, Yukiko and Shinichi and Hirochi and Yasuko, swap their partners inside two hotel rooms, in two rather unusually depicted sex scenes that kickstart the movie. The two women then return to their “proper” rooms and through a visual style that could be described as minimalistically kaleidoscopic, we get to know their train of thoughts, particularly of the males. A bit later, during a walk in the seaside, the couple is attacked by two men who end up raping Yukiko brutally, after they have knocked Shinichi unconscious. When Shinichi comes to his senses, however, the two of them seem anything but shocked by the events; instead, they are interested in their aggressors and...

Akio Jissoji’s first film produced by the Art Theatre Guild (Atg), “This Transient Life” was also one of the most successful, receiving a wider release outside the Atg circuit and winning the Grand Prix at the Locarno film festival in 1970, thus gaining international acknowledgement for both the director and his movie, and the Guild.

The film revolves around siblings Masao and Yuri who live in a huge estate near Lake Biwa, north of Kyoto. Despite being born in a rather traditional family, both siblings are rather rebellious for the particular times, with Yuri rejecting all proposals from her parents to marry her off, and Masao to attend the university or follow in the footsteps of his merchant father, instead obsessing with books and Buddhist sculptures. Masao in particular fights frequently with his father regarding his life decisions, with the latter threatening to disown him a number of times.

In the course of the 1960s some of Japan’s most creative and prominent film directors grew frustrated with the mainstream studios restricting their artistic freedom. This led to the emergence of the Art Theatre Guild (Atg).

The Atg quickly pulled in New Wave directors such as Nagisa Oshima, Shohei Imamura, Masahiro Shinoda, and many more. Here they could freely develop their visions as they saw fit, no matter how experimental. Another one of these directors was Akio Jissoji who, in 1970, proceeded to direct one of the Atg’s most significant and haunting masterpieces.

“This Transient Life” centers itself around Masao, a rebellious young man who refuses to work or go to college. He lives with his parents and has a close relationship with his sister Yuri. A relationship that gets a little too close early in the film, and (d)evolves into an incestuous affair. They keep this a secret,...