Japanese Noir

Just as postwar disillusionment infiltrated American pop culture and found its way to Hollywood in the form of film noir, so it did in Japan, where a wave of edgy, existential crime dramas spread like a shadow across the Land of the Rising Sun. With STRAY DOG, Akira Kurosawa applied the chiaroscuro visual style and hard-boiled sensibility of American noir to a corrosive portrait of Japanese society—anticipating a profusion of fatalistic thrillers and policiers that would prove wildly popular throughout the 1950s and ’60s. The so-called “mukokuseki akushun” (“borderless action”) film was a particular specialty of Nikkatsu, the boundary-pushing studio where renegade directors like Seijun Suzuki (YOUTH OF THE BEAST), Shohei Imamura (PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS), Toshio Masuda (RUSTY KNIFE), and Takashi Nomura (A COLT IS MY PASSPORT) frequently jazzed up the pulp formula with elements of the western, comedy, gangster, and teen-rebel genres. Featuring modernist-cool masterpieces like PALE FLOWER and BRANDED TO KILL as well as ripe-for-discovery gems like ZERO FOCUS and INTIMIDATION, these cruel stories of guilt and desperation are a window into the dark heart of postwar Japan.