Monday | December 15, 2008 9:15 pm

Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs
(Nihon shunka-ko)

Screening on Film

Directed by Nagisa Oshima.
With Ichiro Araki, Hideko Yoshida, Koji Iwabuchi.
Japan, 1967, 35mm, color, 103 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
Print source: The Japan Foundation

A bizarre and bewitching film, Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs is equal parts ribald comedy and radical mode of cultural anthropology. Oshima makes innovative use of a diptych structure to juxtapose the film's first half—the quest of three sexually imaginative high school students to pass their university placement exams—with the students' later encounter with a hard-drinking teacher determined to instruct his protégés in the rough poetry and revelatory history of the Japanese drinking song.