Cruel Story of Youth · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Logs on black water. A girl in among them, a boy standing over her, and the camera holding the shot well past the point where a 1960 studio picture would have cut away. That is the lumberyard scene in Cruel Story of Youth, and most of what Ōshima Nagisa is doing is in the not-cutting. A cut would have made the assault an event: a thing that happens, gets registered, produces consequences. Instead the water keeps moving, the logs knock together, and you stay. Makoto attaches herself to Kiyoshi afterwards anyway. The film never explains why and never frames it as romance.

That refusal to explain is where a philosopher earns his keep. Gilles Deleuze never wrote about Ōshima, but he mapped a kind of film that behaves exactly like this one. His famous division is between cinema built on action — perceive a situation, act, resolve it — and the postwar cinema where action stops working and people can only watch. Cruel Story of Youth sits in a third place he carved between them: the impulse-image. In an action film a character wants and does, and the world moves. In an impulse-image film a character is worked by an appetite, what they do reads as a symptom rather than a choice, and the world doesn't move. It wears down.

The clearest evidence is the ground itself. Deleuze says the naturalist film takes an ordinary setting, the derived milieu, and finds inside it an originary world: a place of raw appetite and blunt beginnings and ends, with no history attached. Usually that has to stay a figure of speech. Here it's the location list. Reclaimed land, lumberyards, docks, construction sites, the grey-brown of waterfront fill. Ōshima shot a Tokyo that was still being poured in 1960. His characters live on made ground, and timber floats where the land hasn't finished being land. The family home, load-bearing room of the whole Shōchiku house style, appears mainly as a place these two have vacated. No arc is laid across that ground either, only a gradient. Deleuze calls it the line of slope: naturalism descends rather than builds. Each episode of the shakedown racket is a variation on the last, and the escalation is quantitative — more money, more violence, more risk — until the mechanism destroys both operators.

Watch how the racket is filmed. Makoto hitches a ride, a middle-aged man picks her up, the car stops, Kiyoshi arrives with fists, the man pays to keep it quiet. Ōshima runs it until you stop seeing an incident and start seeing a machine. Deleuze's word for a body held in a posture that makes a social relation readable is the gest, and repetition is what turns these two into one: not delinquents with a psychology but a small business whose stock is her body. This is also the film's most precise theft. Season of the Sun (1956) had put the honey-trap on screen as a scandalous incident; Ōshima promotes the incident to the structuring unit of the whole film. The taiyōzoku were rich kids on yachts and their transgression was leisure. Makoto and Kiyoshi are poor, and their transgression is work.

Then there's the widescreen. Shōchiku's GrandScope was a prestige format, normally used for balance and spectacle. Ōshima and his cameraman Kawamata Takashi detuned it. A figure is pushed hard to one edge and left there with a large volume of nothing beside her; two people are held at a distance the shot declines to close. Deleuze's any-space-whatever is a space that has stopped working as a stage for action and become pure charge, and the emptiness beside Makoto is not air. It's pressure. The framing is aimed at somebody in particular, too. Ozu's camera sits low and frontal and grants every character a sightline, a look and its answering reverse; Tokyo Story is built on that courtesy. Ōshima withholds it. We watch from outside, at an angle, from a position that is nobody's — a decision about perception before it is a decision about morals.

The politics arrive with the same flatness. Newsreel footage of the Anpo demonstrations, and of the Korean students bringing down Syngman Rhee, appears inside the film, and the couple pass through it without engagement. Those were the largest mass protests in postwar Japanese history, running in the streets the month the film opened; the treaty was renewed anyway and Kishi resigned. Ōshima put the central political event of his lifetime into his movie as something his characters walk past. Deleuze's name for what modern political cinema has to work with is that the people are missing: you can no longer film politics as a people acting, only as the hole where one should be. Makoto's sister Yuki and her old lover Akimoto were the student left of 1948–52. They acted, they lost, and he now performs Makoto's abortion. The film gives the older pair no wisdom and the younger pair no innocence. It proposes that the second is what the first's defeat produced.

What this did to narrative is easy to state. Melodrama runs a moral machine in which sacrifice is legible as sacrifice and love might have saved someone; Ōshima removed the machine and kept the marketable subject. Scenes begin late and break off. The two deaths at the end happen in parallel, separately, neither one witnessing the other. Griffith built parallel montage so that two lines could converge on a rescue; here the crosscut converges on nothing, and denies even the consolation of a shared fate. The rest was borrowed with intent: Crazed Fruit's elliptical youth grammar from 1956, re-staged in the industrial margins with the sunlight taken out; the speech rushed over street noise that Ōshima had praised in Kisses (1957) as the birth of a new Japanese cinema, audible here in the traffic walking over flat, ugly dialogue; the garish wide-frame colour of Giants and Toys (1958), which had made consumer capitalism land as an assault. His reds arrive as bruises and neon. Nothing in the palette is offered as beauty.

The significance runs two ways. Inside the industry, a studio's own machinery was turned to produce its critique and made money doing it, which is why Shōchiku's marketing department promptly invented the "Shōchiku New Wave" to sell Ōshima, Yoshida and Shinoda as a generation, and why all three disliked the label. Black River (1957) had shown from inside Ōfuna that the house style could carry a protagonist it would normally punish; Ōshima kept the protagonist and dropped the punishment. The arrangement lasted about a year and a half, until Night and Fog in Japan was pulled from theatres and he left to build Sōzōsha. Inside the art, the durable move is the one about causes: youth as economically produced rather than psychologically deviant, delinquency as a property of the ground people stand on. Documented influence claims are thinner than the reputation, and it's worth saying so. What isn't in doubt is that this is where the Japanese New Wave became visible, and that the wide frame used to isolate rather than compose, pop music set against violence, and the youth story that refuses redemption run forward from it.

The film leaves one thing genuinely open. Makoto stays. Not from masochism, and the film will not call it love. Deleuze's naturalism would say she is on a slope, but a slope is not a reason. Next time, watch her at the edge of that huge frame with all the empty scope beside her, and ask what she thinks is over there. Ōshima doesn't answer. He just declines to cut.