Parky at the Pictures (DVD 6/12/12)

The quartet contained in the Student Comedies collection may come as something of a surprise to those who associate Ozu with sedate domestic dramas about troubled salarymen and their neglected spouses, rebellious sons and dutiful daughters. Owing much to the go-getting slapstick of Harold Lloyd and the wry romantic comedies of Ernst Lubitsch, Days of Youth (1929) was Ozu's eighth picture. But it was also his first full-length outing and is the earliest work that is known to survive. Co-scripted by Akira Fushimi after one of their customary all-night storming sessions, the story is charmingly simple and has much in common with the kind of campus romps still being produced in Hollywood today.

College pals Ichiro Yuki and Tatsuo Saito are both in love with classmate Junko Matsui. Neglecting their studies, they devise schemes to seduces her. Yuki tries to entice her into living in his digs by advertising a room for rent, while Saito succeeds in asking her out to tea only to make a fool of himself by getting paint on his hands. They get an unexpected chance to impress her during a skiing holiday after the end-of-year exams, when she shows up at the lodge in Akakura with her aunt Choko Iida. However, Matsui has come to contract an arranged match with ace skier Shinichi Himori and the pair's disappointment is compounded on their return to Tokyo by the discovery that they have been failed by professors Takeshi Sakamoto and Ichiro Okuni.

Having failed the entrance exams for both university and teacher training college, Ozu knew all about scholastic deficiency. However, he had become an accomplished skier while serving as an apprentice to Tadamoto Okubo and the slope sequences are extremely well filmed by Hideo Mohara, whose parents owned the Takadaya Hotel where the action was set. Indeed, Ozu aficionados will note the radical departure from the low tatami mat perspective that characterised his mature works. But, amidst the circular pans, tracking shots, close-ups and fades, there are still several trademark `pillow shots', in which the frame essentially becomes a still life in order to allow the audience to ponder on what it has just witnessed and speculate about what might happen next.

If the emphasis here is on knockabout, the humour is much more situational in I Flunked, But... (1930), as Tatsuo Saito and his gang spend more their time flirting with café waitress Jinuyo Tanaka than heeding the words of tutors Hiroo Wakabayashi and Ichiro Okuni. Indeed, they see no need to follow the example of swats like Chishu Ryu (who would become a key member of Ozu's stock company and the star of Yoji Yamada's long-running Tora-san series about an itinerant peddler). However, while their brilliant plan of scribbling answers on the back of a shirt so they can cheat in an exam works the first time round, Dekao Yokoo, Tokio Seki, Hiroshi Mikura and Goro Yokoyama are left flummoxed when Saito's landlady, Kaoru Futaba, takes his shirt to the laundry and they fail their paper.

It says much for the 26 year-old Ozu's sense of humour that flunking turns out to be a boon, as academic success merely qualifies Ryu and his studious confrères for the soul-crushing world of work, while Saito and his cabal sign up for another year of college at their parents' expense and become cheerleaders in order to find another distraction from their books. But this is a rather lightweight effort that feels stretched from a scenario better suited to a two-reeler. There are unusual stylistic aspects to note, however, as Ozu makes rare use of cross-cutting in the closing sequence to highlight the different worlds that the onetime classmates now occupy. However, there is little social critique contained in the contrasts and even the suggestion that time slows down once one's salad days are over will ring false with anybody looking back on their own student careers and wondering how they suddenly came to belong to a very distant past.

The transition from carefree youth to responsible adulthood is further explored in Ozu's 20th film, The Lady and the Beard (1931), which took just eight days to shoot and reunited Tokihiko Okada and Hiroko Kawasaki, who had headlined the previous year's Young Miss, which had brought Ozu to the attention of international critics for the first time. The tone is more satirical than farcical here, with the hero's climactic makeover suggesting that Japanese society was prepared to accept the outward symbols of modernity while clinging to traditional tenets rooted in the country's samurai past.

Noted for his kendo skills, student Tokihiko Okada is something of a laughing stock with his scruffy robes and bushy beard. Despite his protestations that great men like Karl Marx and Charles Darwin had been bearded, he is teased for being behind the times and warned that he will never find a niche in the new Japan if he keeps cleaving to outdated fashions and ideals. He only takes notice, however, after he rescues typist Hiroko Kawasaki from female crook Satoko Date and she persuades him that he will have a better chance of landing a job with her company if he shaves before his interview.

Typically, his new look not only intrigues Kawasaki, but also Date and his aristocratic friend Ichiro Tsukida's younger sister, Toshiko Iizuka, who had been taken by his graceful dancing at a suave reception. However, Okada has been bewitched by Kawasaki and, even though Date and Iizuka use all their wiles to lead him astray, he remains true to the working girl who had shown him a new way of life. This ending anticipates the cosy domesticity of Ozu's later works, although the script was co-written by Komatsu Kitamura, a novelist, essayist and playwright whose socialist views would be frowned upon during the militarist era. However, this gentle comedy seems to have slipped past the censors, in spite of its references to such radical thinkers as Darwin and Marx, and the intervening eight decades have left it looking rather twee.

Flushed by the success of I Was Born, But... (1932), Ozu planned to make the drama Until the Day We Meet Again. However, the project proved more expensive than he had expected and he decided to return to the student comedy style to raise some quick cash. The result was Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth? (1932), which was scripted by Kogo Noda (who would become a regular collaborator) and harks back to the aforementioned titles with its allusions to Hollywood movies and preference for campus indolence over workplace stress. However, it again presages Ozu's mature style by having the main character sacrifice their own happiness in the name of old-fashioned decency.

Uero Egawa is having a ball at college with equally shiftless pals Chishu Ryu, Kenji Oyama and Tatsuo Saito. Father Takeda Haruo is in no hurry for Egawa to grow up and chides uncle Ryotaro Mizushima for trying to prepare him for the day when he takes over the family business. Indeed, Haruo even conspires with his son when he pretends to be drunk when Mizushima tries to matchmake him with Satako Date, whose mother (Ayako Katsuragi) is concerned that she is too modern in her thinking and needs a taste of matrimony to calm her down.

Naturally, Date is taken by Egawa's bad boy antics and sets her mind on snaring him, even though his behaviour towards her is quite disgraceful. But he is about to become even more reprehensible when Haruo dies and he becomes head of the corporation. He immediately uses his position to help his friends cheat in their college exams and then rigs the application procedure to ensure Ryu, Oyama and Saito come to work for him.

Now feeling more confident, he also asks soda shop waitress Kinuyo Tanaka on a date, unaware that she is also adored by Saito. Convincing herself she is Egawa's inferior, Tanaka agrees to marry Saito. But, when he learns that Egawa is in love with his fiancée, he breaks off the engagement because he needs to keep his job in order to care for his ailing mother, Choko Iida. On discovering his craven deed, Egawa thrashes Saito and orders him to go through with the wedding and Tanaka (who is besotted with Egawa) has no option but to consent and they leave for their honeymoon and a highly uncertain future as the picture closes.

As scathing in its depiction of subservience as it is of privilege, this is an unusual entry in Ozu's canon, as it shifts so decisively midway through from offbeat comedy to unrelenting melodrama. The lampooning of classroom and boardroom mores is typically astute, but the treatment of Date and Tanaka borders on the misogynist and one is left to wonder if Ozu would have tempered Noda's screenplay had the project not been such a makeweight. It certainly bears little resemblance to Wilheim Meyer-Foerster's play, In Old Heidelberg, which had also been the inspiration for Lubitsch's comic charmer, The Student Prince (1927). But, while the excellent Egawa portrays such an atypically unsympathetic Ozu lead, this still provides a compelling examination of class, family, gender, male bonding and the clash between Western and Nipponese attitudes, which would all become recurring themes over the next 30 years.

The second BFI selection, Three Melodramas, opens with Woman of Tokyo (1933), which feels decidedly like the kind of selfless sister saga that was the speciality of Kenji Mizoguchi. The opening titles insist the screenplay by Kogo Noda and Tadao Ikeda was adapted from a novel entitled Twenty-Six Hours by Ernst Schwarz. But the book was entirely fictitious and seems to have been invented to cover the fact that Ozu had started shooting without a finished script, as he had only nine days to complete the project before returning to Dragnet Girl. The author's name was cobbled in homage to Ernst Lubitsch (whose contribution to the previous year's If I Had a Million is used as the film-within-the-film) and Hanns Schwarz, whose best-known film, The Wonderful Lies of Nina Petrovna (1929), had starred Brigitte Helm as a respectable wife torn between two lovers.

The decent woman compromised by circumstances here is Yoshiko Okada, an office typist who tells brother Ureo Egawa that she spends her evenings as a translator for a kindly academic in order to pay his college fees. In fact, Okada moonlights as a bar hostess and her secret comes to light when Egawa's girlfriend, Kinuyo Tanaka, overhears her cop brother Shinyo Nara discussing the fact that Okada is being investigated because she is unlicensed and, therefore, not paying taxes on her earnings.

Egawa is so mortified by the revelation that he dumps Tanaka for indulging in gossip and beats Okada and accuses her of being a whore. Her tearful insistence that she was only thinking of his future forces him to recognise the humiliation she must have endured on his behalf. Thus, after walking the streets alone for several hours, Egawa takes his own life. When his body is returned the next morning, Okada and Tanaka are questioned by sniping reporter Chishu Ryu, who complains to his colleague as they leave that their trip had been a wild goose chase because nobody would be interested in reading about such an insignificant incident.

By all accounts, Ozu and Noda got the idea for the story while watching an inexpert dance in a Ginza cabaret. Yet, instead of wondering why she had resorted to such a debasing public display and the effect that this might have had on her self-esteem (as Mizoguchi would have done), Ozu considers the shame experienced by the brother, whose suicide becomes a doubly cowardly act, as it makes the sister's sacrifice so worthless. However, it wasn't the discussion of prostitution or self-slaughter that prompted the intervention of the censors, but the fact that Okada also seems to have been donating some of her ill-gotten gains to the Communist Party. Yet, while some sources state that the film was cut to remove these sequences (which perhaps explains its truncated running time), others insist that this sub-plot only appeared in the screenplay and was never filmed.

What is most notable about this picture, however, is the use of the low camera angle that would become an instantly recognisable Ozu trait. He also includes `pillow shots' between scenes and invites the audience to imagine the space beyond the enclosed mise-en-scène in which figures and objects have been positioned so meticulously to achieve both a sense of domestic authenticity and the visual and diegetic rhythm that is so key to Ozu's concept of the shomin-geki or proletarian realist genre.

The idea that life rarely fulfils its promise is also raised in Ozu's 47th film, Early Spring (1956). The longest of all his pictures, this represented a conscious attempt after the acclaim for his previous offering, Tokyo Story (1953), to construct an anti-drama by including as many scenes as possible in which little of momentous significance occurs so that the audience would feel as melancholic as the characters trapped in a vicious circle of ennui. Limning the sadness of existence, this is much closer to a documentary on commuting and working rituals than a ménage melodrama. But the accumulation of small details and the precision of the performances makes this as acute as it is authentic.

Tokyo thirtysomething Ryo Ikebe has been drifting away from wife Chikage Awashima since the death of their child and, when he forgets the anniversary, she discovers he has been having an affair with Keiko Kishi, a typist at his fire brick company who caught his eye during a hiking expedition. Upset by the taunting of her fellow commuters, Kishi shows up at Ikebe's house one night and Awashima (who is already cross with him for bringing home his drunken war buddies) decides to leave him. Following the death of a co-worker, Ikebe accepts a transfer to the remote mountain town of Mitsuishi in Okayama Prefecture. But, while former supervisor Chishu Ryu brokers a reconciliation, there is no guarantee that Ikebe and Awashima's fresh start will succeed.

Originally written in 1947 with Ryusuke Saito, this scenario had been purchased as a sophomore directorial project for actress Kinuyo Tanaka, following the success of Love Letter (1953). However, studio politics means that Ozu abandoned a revised draft with Saito and Kogo Noda and he only revived it at the end of his three-year sabbatical in the summer of 1955.  Centring more on the lower bourgeoisie than the mid-ranking salarymen he had previously profiled, Ozu explores how the dual impact of the war and the growing influence of `outsider' culture had changed expectations at home and in the workplace. But this is also a poignant human drama, with Ikebe feeling that the plain and put-upon Kishi needs him more than Awashima, who is so wrapped up in grief for her lost child.

The domestic travails prove even thornier in Tokyo Twilight (1957), in which Ozu sought to show that even the members of a supposedly progressive generation tend to repeat the mistakes that their predecessors had made before them. As if to prove the point, the script was based on one that Ozu had written two decades earlier and which had been directed as Unending Advance by Tomu Uchida. However, Kogo Noda fell out with the director while revising the scenario and the perceived melodramatic excesses that Ozu insisted on retaining are usually cited for this being branded one of his rare failures.

Resident in the smart Zoshigawa neighbourhood of Tokyo, banker Chishu Ryu has always tried to be both father and mother to his daughters, since his wife abandoned him and his son was killed in a mountain climbing accident. However, neither is particularly happy with her lot. Having followed her father's advice and married alcoholic professor Kinzo Shin rather than the man she truly loved, Setsuko Hara returns home with her baby after taking another beating, while her younger sister, Ineko Arima, searches the capital's seedier backstreets to find student boyfriend Masami Taura in order break the news she is pregnant. Instead, however, Arima winds up being arrested and undergoing an abortion before she bumps into Isuzu Yamada, the mother she long thought was dead, but who had actually cuckolded Ryu with one of his underlings and is now running a mahjong parlour in the downtown Gotanda district.

In lesser hands, this could easily have descended into mawkish sensationalism, especially after the distraught Arima commits suicide and Hara decides to salvage her marriage for the sake of her own daughter. But Ozu's command of his medium enables him to turn the sordid events into genuine tragedy by presenting them from the perspective of Ryu, who refuses to succumb to bitterness or pessimism despite his shortcomings as both a husband and a parent. Working in monochrome for the final time and setting the action in the middle of winter, Ozu seemed intent on making the dysfunction as dark and unremitting as possible. But, while this ranks among his most pessimistic statements, it is still played with touching integrity by Ryu, Arima and the ever-faultless Hara, whose final gesture is intended as much to ease her father's pain as much as improve her own faint chances of happiness.

Towards the end of his life, Ozu developed a penchant for revisiting former projects, with I Was Born, But... (1932) resurfacing as Good Morning (1959) and Late Spring (1949) being reworked as Late Autumn (1960). Despite the influence of a play by Tadeo Ikeda, A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) was already a remake, as it took its primary inspiration from George Fitzmaurice's carnival saga, The Barker (1928), and Ozu remains largely faithful to the original scenario in Floating Weeds (1959). However, it is much lighter in tone and distinctly different stylistically, as not only is the later version in colour, but it also contains more close-ups and edit points than any other Ozu picture of the period.

There is a consciously old-fashioned feel to the plot, which sees the company of itinerant Kabuki actor Ganjiro Nakamura arrive in the coastal town where his common-law wife, Haruko Sugimura, lives with their son, Hiroshi Kawaguchi. Nakamura passes himself off as an uncle in a bid to get to know Kawaguchi and they strike up an immediate rapport. However, bad weather leads to the cancellation of several performances by theatre manager Chishu Ryu. With money running short and the troupe members having too much spare time on their hands, Nakamura's current mistress, Machiko Kyo, wanders abroad and stumbles upon the truth about his secret family.

When she also learns that he is contemplating Sugimura's suggestion that he quits the road and moves back in with her, Kyo begins plotting her revenge. In addition to coaxing co-star Ayak Wakao into seducing Kawaguchi, she also reveals his uncle's real identity and Nakamura is heartbroken when his son spurns his friendship. Despite still having feelings for Sugimura, Nakamura cannot stand the rejection and leaves town with Kyo, whose triumph is hollow, as she now regards her lover with contempt.

In many ways reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman's Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), Floating Weeds eschews the tragic sense of its 1934 predecessor to achieve a melancholy that reflected Ozu's increased sophistication as a dramatist. Repeating some of the elliptical transitions that made the first film so challenging, he spices up the standard discussion of family break-up with a progressive attitude to extramarital sex. But this is less involving than Ozu's more self-contained domestic studies and its fascination lies in his collaboration with Kazuo Miyagawa, who had been Kenji Mizoguchi's regular cinematographer. As well as helping to sustain the seaside atmosphere, Miyagawa also taught Ozu how to compose in colour and persuaded him to use a rare camera movement in the shot depicting the lighthouse from the bobbing boat. However, he failed to convince Ozu of the merits of CinemaScope and he continued to employ the square Academy Ratio format for what remained of his career.

While Ozu took time to acclimatise to colour photography, Teinosuke Kinugasa demonstrated its potential for conveying spectacle and symbolism in Gate of Hell (1953), the first winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and the recipient of the Grand Prix at Cannes. One of the few Japanese film-makers to have acquired an international reputation during the silent era with A Page of Madness (1926) and Crossroads (1928), Kinugasa had been forced to abandon experimentation during the war years and had contented himself with churning out jidai-geki period pieces. However, this adaptation of a Kan Kikuchi play that was itself based on a 12th-century story restored his wider reputation and further opened the door for film-makers like Ozu and Mizoguchi, whose work was scandalously little known outside Asia until the 1950s.

At the height of the Heiji Rebellion in the 1159, provincial samurai Kazuo Hasegawa is entrusted with a decoy mission to ensure the safe passage of the emperor's sister out of the Sanjo Palace. Handmaiden Machiko Kyo volunteers to impersonate her mistress and endures an uncomfortable passage as her carriage is pursued by ruthless rebels. Hasegawa seeks sanctuary with his brother, Kunitaro Sawamura, only to discover that he has joined the uprising. However, Sawamura refuses to betray his sibling, who shows no such mercy to a servant who tries to sneak away to warn the enemy forces. Indeed, he proves equally pitiless in the ensuing battle that sees his brother killed and the emperor's authority restored.

On returning to the palace, Hasegawa visits the Jigokumon or Hell Gate, where the heads of traitors are displayed to intimidate the public and he is distressed to find Sawamura's name among the list of the dishonoured. However, he also sees Kyo praying for the deceased with her aunt, Kikue Mori, and is so taken by her piety and devotion that, when the emperor grants him a request in gratitude for his courage, he asks for Kyo's hand in marriage.

Unfortunately, she is already married to loyal minister Isao Yamagata and has no intention of leaving him. Moreover, the emperor refuses to annul the union and Hasegawa vows to possess her. He competes against Yamagata in a horse race during a religious festival and inflicts his first defeat in years. But Yamagata accepts the result with good grace and the other courtiers intervene on his behalf when Hasegawa challenges him to a duel. Thus, he decides to murder his rival, only for Kyo to have a premonition about his plot and persuade her husbands to swap rooms for the night.

The final sequence, in which Hasegawa is left to repent his deed and Yamagata is tormented by the shame of being unable to protect his wife, could easily be regarded as an allegorical statement on the emasculation of a Japan then under American occupation. However, six decades on, this remains a potent conclusion to what is essentially an historical film noir. Kyo is somewhat chaste for a femme fatale, but Hasegawa is similar to several Hollywood anti-heroes whose dark deeds emanate from their wartime experiences. But few noirs were as visually ravishing, with Kisaku Ito's sets and Sanzo Wada's Oscar-winning costumes being captured in lustrous Eastmancolor by Kohei Sugiyama.

Sadly, Kinugasa would never reach such heights again. But he remained an inspiration to the emerging generation that included Shohei Imamura, who started out as an assistant to Ozu on Early Summer (1951), The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice (1952) and Tokyo Story (1953). However, Imamura became frustrated by the formality of his master's style and left the Shockuku studio in 1954 to be mentored by Yuzo Kawashima at Nikkatsu. It was here that he cut his directorial teeth with Stolen Desires (1958), another tale of travelling players, and the comedies Nishi Ginza Station, Endless Desire (both 1958) and My Second Brother (1959), which he was contracted to make and completed with little enthusiasm. However, he convinced the front office to let him make a more personal picture and the result was Pigs and Battleships (1961), which provoked controversy at home and abroad and established him among the leading lights of the nuberu bagu, alongside such other new wavers as Nagisa Oshima, Susumu Hani, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Yasuzo Masumura, Masahiro Shinoda and  Yoshishige Yoshida.

Having denounced the US presence in Japan, Imamura retreated to the countryside for The Insect Woman (1963). Yet, while he and co-writer Keiji Hasebe opted for a darkly comic approach, this parable spanning some 45 years of traumatic change still comments upon the status of women and the human propensity for cruelty with a trenchancy that typified much independent Japanese cinema in the early 1960s.

The story opens in the northern region of Tohoku in 1918, as a young girl is abandoned by her mother (who bore her out of wedlock to a tramp) and raised by peasant Kazuo Kitamura and his common-law wife Sumie Sasaki. As she grows, Sachiko Hidari comes to spend much of her time helping Kitamura in the fields and is curious when she sees Sasaki in the barn with her lover Masakazu Kuwayama. She asks Kitamura if their actions mean they are married and sleeps with him when he confirms her suspicions. However, she is dismayed when Sasaki taunts her for giving herself to a simpleton and runs away to work in a textile factory, where she has an affair with manager Hiroyuki Nagato.

She returns home when Kitamura falls ill and Sasaki tries to marry her off to the third son of landlord Shigeru Tsuyuguchi in order to settle her stepfather's debt. However, she is already pregnant and the match is cancelled. When she gives birth to a daughter, Sasaki informs her that nobody would judge her if she killed her. But she determines to be a good mother and hopes to have found stability with factory foreman Taiji Tonoyama. However, with the coming of peace, she causes them both to be fired when she is accused of being a Communist for supporting for the union.

Seeking a fresh start, Hidari moves to Tokyo in 1949, where she becomes a maid to Masumi Harukawa, who has a daughter by an American soldier. She is fond of the child, but accidentally causes her death by leaving some scalding water unattended and flees to a Buddhist temple in the hope of finding forgiveness. There she meets Tanie Kitabyashi, who offers her a job as a maid. But she soon realises she has been hired by a brothel madam and is so taken by the luxury in which the geishas live that she begins hatching a plan to ingratiate herself with her boss (by snitching on girls accepting dates on their own time) before betraying her to the authorities.

Once in charge, Hidari proves to be an unscrupulous boss and delights in recruiting Harukawa as one of her hookers. She also allies herself to Seizaburo Kawazu, a yakuza with aspirations to become a respected businessman. However, when Hidari refuses to sleep with one of his clients, he frames her for a crime carrying a five-year prison sentence. She is unaware, therefore, that her daughter, Jitsuko Yoshimura, has come to the capital to buy farm machinery for her boyfriend back home. She is seduced by Kawazu, only she has inherited her mother's resourcefulness and robs her lover and returns to Tohoku with the equipment she needs. On being released from jail, Hidari decides her future also lies in the north at her child's side.

As befitting its Japanese title, Entomological Chronicle of Japan, and the opening shot of a beetle bravely battling its way over inhospitable terrain, this is an almost documentary-like report on a single woman's struggle to find acceptance. Refuting the concept of the suffering, self-sacrificing female so beloved of Mizoguchi, Ozu and Mikio Naruse, Imamura suggests that Hidari every bit as cruel and manipulative as the men who try to exploit her. However, she proves herself their superior through her sheer persistence and this determination to survive at whatever cost became a key facet of the majority of Imamura's subsequent women characters. Some critics complained about the picture's amorality and this, perhaps, explains why it had a limited impact on mainstream Japanese cinema, yet proved highly influential on the emerging pinku-eiga or `pink films' that took an unflinching look at sexual themes in the wake of Satoru Kobayashi's Flesh Market (1962).

Sachiko Hidari (who was married to director Susumu Hani) won the Best Actress prize at the Berlin Film Festival for her courageous performance and Imamura would return to the subject in his 1970 documentary, The History of Postwar Japan As Told By a Bar Hostess (which might have made a better extra than Nishi Ginza Station, a featurette bearing a passing resemblance to Billy Wilder's 1955 gem, The Seven Year Itch, and which was based on a popular song by Frank Nagai, who also stars as the henpecked husband of a pharmacist who is convinced by his vet pal to have a fling with the girl from the nearby stationery store when his wife takes the kids away on holiday).

Imamura reunited with screenwriter Hasebe on A Man Vanishes (1967), a faux documentary that has only recently been seen outside Japan. Hailed as a masterpiece in many quarters, it is certainly an audacious subversion of the conventions of both the actuality and the fiction film, with many of the audiovisual gambits being borrowed from nouvelle vaguers like Jean Rouch, Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard. But, for all its stylistic audacity, this is also a damning indictment of a society that could allow 91,000 people to go missing in such a small space and Imamura pulls no punches in depicting the impersonality of urban living and in reinforcing the lesson learned 17 years earlier in Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon that the camera is under no obligation solely to record the truth.

The scene opens on a bureaucrat walking through a maze of filing cabinets to retrieve the dossier on 32 year-old plastics salesman Tadashi Oshima, who vanished without a trace in April 1965. Back out in the street, director Shohei Imamura and his crew embark on a search for clues that the authorities might have missed and start by returning to Oshima's workplace. Initially, the former colleagues interviewed keep their comments non-commital, as they say that Oshima was a decent fellow who used a lot of pomade on his hair, liked a drink and had a way with the ladies.

However, just as it is revealed that he was also named in a case of embezzlement and that the company withheld his wages in order to settle his debts, Imamura discovers Yoshie Hayakawa, who claims to have been Oshima's fiancée. She denies that he was a rake and there is a decidedly uncomfortable atmosphere when Imamura tracks down the woman Oshima was supposed to have made pregnant. Another rumour surfaces that Oshima had been sleeping with Yoshie's sister, Sayo, and when Imamura seeks the advice of a psychic, he intimates that Sayo may well have murdered him.

As the crew start calling Yoshie `the Rat' because she seems so intent on ingratiating herself into every situation and casting doubt on everyone Imamura and fellow investigator Shigeru Tsuyuguchi wish to question. However, Sayo (who comes to be known as `the Witch') is just as confrontational and she has a stand-up row in the street with a fishmonger who claims to have seen her with Oshima. By this stage, Yoshie and Sayo are barely on speaking terms and Imamura seems much more interested in their relationship than Oshima's whereabouts. Indeed, he virtually disappears from his own story and a meeting is held to discuss the future direction of the film and they decide to spy on Yoshie using hidden cameras and microphones to expose her.

The crew appears to have made its case when Yoshie flirts with Tsuyuguchi, who concedes (after three versions of their tryst in locales as different as a restaurant above a police station and a picturesque fishing village) that he is really an actor who has been hired by Imamura to play a role. But it's not until the teahouse in which a scene is being filming suddenly has its walls removed to reveal the soundstage beyond that viewers can finally discern the line between fantasy and reality - although, even then, they still cannot be sure whether this was a genuine investigation that became sidetracked or was a cunning deception from the outset.

Having once remarked that he tended to make `messy' films, Imamura clearly revels in creating the increasing chaos, as the crew snatches vérité images through windows and blinds and while shooting on the hoof in offices, corridors, alleyways, bustling streets and deserted country lanes. Yet the truth about Oshima remains as elusive as his fate, although this becomes increasingly insignificant as the picture progresses. Indeed, even the rivalry between Yoshie and Sayo comes to seem less important than drawing the audience's attention to the artifice being employed in allowing the visual and sound tracks to run out of sync or in covering the faces of subjects who have already spoken openly earlier in the piece. But, curiously, instead of returning to dramatic features, Imamura spent much of the next decade making genuine documentaries for television like In Search of the Unreturned Soldiers in Malaysia (1971, which spawned a same-year follow-up set in Thailand), The Pirates of Bubuan (1972), Outlaw-Masu Returns Home (1973) and Karayuki-San: The Making of a Prostitute (1975).

Around the time Imamura was making these small-screen actualities, teenager Shinya Tsukamoto was shooting his first films with the Super 8 camera he had been given by his father. Having graduated to 8mm colour sci-fi shorts, Tsukamoto made an astonishing feature debut with the landmark slice of monochrome cyberpunk, Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1988), which he followed with the equally distinctive Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992) and Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (2010). Away from the trilogy, he proved just as unconventional and combustible with Tokyo Fist (1995), Bullet Ballet (1998), A Snake of June (2002) and Vital (2004). But even this back catalogue quite prepares the viewer for the body horror concocted for his latest opus, Kotoko, in which he also stars alongside Tomoko Makishi, who is best known as the pop singer Cocco.

Kotoko lives in constant fear that someone is going to hurt her. Out on the street, strangers seem to menace her and, when she sees double, the second incarnation invariably hurts her. She has a son, Daijiro, but is hopeless at caring for him because she tries to keep him away from prying eyes and cannot cope with his crying. Consequently, when she becomes convinced that she has dropped him from the roof of her tenement block and suffers a breakdown after an incident with a wok, Dajiro is taken away from her and placed in the care of her sister in the countryside.

Cutting herself to prove that her body is still willing to tolerate her failings and excesses, Kotoko stabs a fork into the hand of a man who tries to chat her up. Shortly afterwards, she is granted permission to visit Daijiro and arrives laden with presents to tempt him. But he seems content in his aunt's company and Kotoko fails to distract him by building sandcastles during a trip to the beach. She is pleased that the boy has begun to respond to her by the time she comes to leave and recognises that he is better off where he is. But she still cries at being deprived of him and at being unfit to raise him by herself.

While singing on a bus, Kotoko attracts the attention of Tanaka, a novelist who is keen to establish a relationship, even after (or perhaps especially after) she stabs his hand with a fork. Having read his novel in a single session while scarfing on snacks, Kotoko agrees to go on a date, which concludes with her impaling his other hand. But Tanaka is undeterred and, acting on impulse, rushes round to her apartment in the middle of the night to find her bleeding from the wrists.

The amusing sequence that follows, as Kotoko keeps sending Tanaka back into the bedroom for more suitable towels to staunch the bleeding, betrays that Shinya Tsukamoto is more intent on a black comedic parody of his previous body horror outings than in adding to his reputation for cult gore. Indeed, this suspicion is reinforced by the fact that no sooner has Tanaka left Kotoko for the night than he has a premonition after slipping in the gutter that she has slashed herself again and he has to calm her down with force as she wails into the night what a bad person she is.

But a hint of normality intrudes, as Kotoko and Tanaka go to visit Daijiro and he moves in with her. Yet it quickly becomes clear from his badly swollen and bruised face that Tanaka is willing to be beaten savagely by the rake-thin Kotoko and even offers to abandon his writing career to dedicate himself to being her S&M victim. However, he disappears soon after Kotoko sings him a sultry song about conquering demons and, not long afterwards, she is awarded custody of her son.

Almost as soon as Daijiro returns, however, Kotoko starts seeing double again and imagining that all sorts of harm has befallen him at playgroup. She even convinces herself that a gin-wielding figure off the television news has designs on attacking him. So, she strangles him. But, either the crime failed or took place in her imagination, as years later, she is visited in her asylum by the teenage Daijiro, who waves to her from behind the tree at the end of the path in the same way that she used to bid farewell to him as a child.

Lacking the ferocious intensity of the Tetsuo films, but still making excessive demands on the average arthouse viewer, this is a typically uncompromising Shinya Tsukamoto. His accomplice on this occasion is Cocco, a quirky pop star in the Björk mould, who also collaborated on the screenplay and contributed the songs to the offbeat soundtrack that often fights a losing battle with Masaya Kitada's imposing sound design. The mostly handheld visuals fashioned by Tsukamoto and Satoshi Hayashi are equally abrasive. But there are curious moments of tenderness between Kotoko and her son and between Cocco and Tsukamoto as one of recent cinema's most terrifying couples.

Quite what all of this is about is anyone's guess. The growing impersonality of modern urban society, the possibility for love and violence to co-exist within a relationship and the awful responsibility of parenthood are all possible themes. But nothing can be taken at face value in a Tsukamoto movie and it's wiser to speculate without conviction than try to find meaning, method or madness in this endlessly provocative, but never wholly exploitative saga.

Adapted by Shiro Maeda from his own play, Gakuryu `Sogo' Ishii's Isn't Anyone Alive? is a muddledly absurdist apocalyptic satire that packs in too many under-drawn characters while stinting on wit and clarity to attract anything other than a cult audience. Switching between a university campus and an adjoining hospital, the action takes place in the aftermath of a subway crash. But, while Maeda and Ishii refuse to speculate on the origins of the mysterious scourge causing indiscriminate extinction, their decision to chronicle the fate of characters with no backstory and even less of a future makes it very difficult to identify with their plight, especially as so many of them exhibit such capricious eccentricity.

As news reaches the student body of a train smash that was caused by the driver suddenly blacking out, waiter Shota Sometani tries to take a drinks order from Rin Takanashi and her fiancé Asato Iida, who have come to meet with the girl he has impregnated, Hakka Shiraishi. While they fuss over the menu, Mai Takahashi basks in the sunshine with pals Ami Ikenaga and Yumika Tajima and pass acerbic comments on the classmates. They are joined by the blonde-dyed Kota Fudauchi and Hiroaki Morooka for a discussion of urban myths that continues after Tajima, Ikenaga and Fudauchi head off to the campus theatre to rehearse a dance for Takanashi's imminent nuptials.

Soon after her disappearance, Takahashi chokes on a piece of kelp and agonises over her last words while student pop star Tatsuya Hasome staggers into shot complaining of an anal obstruction he is at a loss to explain. Bemused by what he is witnessing, Keisuke Hasebe goes in search of a serum that can counter the perplexing symptoms and bumps into Jun Murakami, a witness to the rail catastrophe who is wandering in a daze with the assistance of Shojiro Tsuda.

As they strike out towards the hospital, Tajima, Ikenaga and Fudauchi begin planning their dance routine. However, Fudauchi dies eating a loaf of bread and, when Tajima quickly follows, the distressed Ikenaga returns to the garden to slip away beside Takahashi and Morooka. Meanwhile, Takanashi goes blind at the café table and lies on the floor beside her late fiancé, as Shiraishi wanders away and Morooka's mother, Chizuko Sugiura, comes looking for him to check he is okay.

Over at the hospital, Hasebe, Murakami and Tsuda arrive in time for doctor Eri Aoki to hand them a tape that he insists they pass on to colleague Tateto Serizawa. They are joined in a long corridor by the agonisingly inconvenienced Hasome and Aoki's stepbrother Kiyohiko Shibukawa, who has just been released from prison. They listen to the tape, which contains some pathetically plaintive love songs, and proceed to expire, just as patient Konatsu Tanaka ventures out of the room in which she has long been isolated because the dangerous disease that is slowly killing her.

Wandering through a landscape strewn with bodies, Tanaka reaches the café, where she strangles the convulsing Takanaski before following Sometani and Sugiura, as they strike out for the sea, where they will supposedly be safe. However, not everybody reaches the coast in one piece.

Despite the excruciating intricacy of the above, none of it really matters. The notion that living and dying have become performance arts in an age of instant communication and constant surveillance is neat enough, as is the idea that mass extermination could be so banal. Moreover, there is something intriguing about being plunged feet first into a drolly unpredictable scenario that makes as little sense to the protagonists as it does to the onlookers. Yet, for all the gameness of the cast and the chic restraint of Toshihiro Isomi's minimalist production design and Yoshiyuki Matsumoto's unobtrusive visuals, this winds up being something of a cinematic memory test that lacks the flashes of profundity that might have made it more fascinating than frustrating. There is every chance that devastating insights into the ennui and vacuity blighting modern Japanese youth have been lost in translation. But this misses the punk attitude that made previous Ishii outings like Burst City (1982) and The Crazy Family (1984) so edgy.

Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda has built his reputation on such poignant studies of death, loss and the memory as Maborosi (1995), After Life (1998), Nobody Knows (2004) and Still Walking (2008). However, with Air Doll, he ventures into territory previously covered in Luis Berlanga's Life Size (1973), Robert Parigi's Love Object (2003) and Craig Gillespie's Lars and the Real Girl (2007), and, while the result scrupulously avoids the seediness its subject would suggest, this adaptation of manga artist Yoshiie Gouda's short graphic story, `The Pneumatic Figure of a Girl', it also feels a touch strained in its efforts to replace human fragility with magical innocence.

When not waiting in a small Tokyo restaurant, middle-aged Itsuji Itao devotes himself to Nozomi, the inflatable doll who is his dinner guest and lover every single night. In addition to bathing her, Itao also buys her expensive clothes and ensures he kisses her goodbye on leaving for work each morning. However, Nozomi has acquired a heart and soul and metamorphoses into a living being the moment Itao departs. Curious to explore the world outside, she puts on a French maid outfit and is very taken by the sights and sounds she encounters.

Nozomi is particularly smitten by Arata, a clerk at the video store owned by Ryo Iwamatsu, who readily hires her as a new assistant. One of the things human nature has taught Nozomi is how to deceive and returns home each evening to resume her duties as Itao's inanimate companion. However, she soon realises that she cannot maintain the deception for much longer, as she has fallen deeply in love with Arata. But she has also become involved in the lives of several other people, including disgruntled poet Masaya Takahashi, single father Tomomi Maruyama and his young daughter Miu Naraki, trepidatious receptionist Kimiko Yo, bulimic Mari Hoshino and elderly Sumiko Fuji, who keeps confessing crimes she could not possibly have committed to exasperated cop Susumu Terajima. Consequently, Nozomi wants to share their experience completely and seeks out her maker, Joe Odagiri, to see if he can help her, even if it means having to age and die.

Notwithstanding the efforts of a genial supporting cast, the entire picture is dominated by a delightful display of awed wonderment by South Korean actress Bae Doo-na. In spite of spending lengthy periods naked, she retains an irresistible sweetness from the instance of her first transformation (which is impressively achieved without benefit of post-production effects) and through her winsome efforts to walk, talk and behave like the people she meets. Thus, as lit by Taiwanese cinematographer Mark Lee, Bae feels far more like a figure from a fairytale by Hans Christian Anderson or Carlo Collodi than a socio-sexual satire exposing the difficulty of making meaningful and lasting connections in an increasingly impersonal world. Yet, while Kore-eda burdens the slender central storyline with subplots that sometimes over-emphatically illustrate the key themes of loneliness, ageing, love and purity, this is still a film of probity and charm.

Emerging on the scene slightly later than Kore-eda, South Korean auteur Kim Ki-duk quickly became known as a prolific provocateur and Terracotta has astutely paired his debut feature with the anti-documentary that recently ended a self-imposed three-year hiatus.

Having studied fine art in Paris, Kim began making films with no practical experience and relied on the expertise of cinematographer Lee Dong-sam and editor Park Gok-ji to complete Crocodile (1996). Yet, while the visuals were striking, it was the boldness of the story and the unflinching depiction of the deprivation and violence on the margins of Korean society that made this such a daring picture.

Jo Jae-hyeon lives on the banks of the Han River with elderly Jeon Moo-song and young boy Ahn Jae-hong. They survive by stealing from the corpses of suicides and using their belongings to extort money from their loved ones. But Jo takes finders keepers to extremes when he rescues Woo Yun-gyeong from the water and turns her into his personal sex slave. However, so voracious is his appetite for brutality and control that he pursues other women and shockingly rapes the girlfriend of a businessman he is attempting to blackmail.

Yet Jo is aware of the darkness of his own soul and explains to one of his victims that he will use a condom because he couldn't stand the thought of being responsible for bringing someone equally wicked into the world. Moreover, he also recognises the impact that Woo has had on him. Thus, when she jumps into the rive again, he opts against trying to rescue her and settles for sharing in her fate, so that they can always be together and he can not only end his struggle to survive, but also spare others distress.

Whether employing fish hooks in The Isle (2000) or golf clubs in 3 Iron (2004), Kim has never shied away from presenting violence in all its pitiless savagery. However, he also dwells on rapacity and poverty with equal rigour in this powerful, but sometimes surprisingly lyrical study of the lower depths. Seething with self-loathing, Jo Jae-hyeon makes a terrifying lowlife whose willingness to exploit the vulnerable and the bereaved makes his protective friendships with Jeon and Ahn and his primeval romance with Woo all the more affecting, especially during those harrowing final underwater moments, which have a harsh beauty that contrasts so arrestingly with the grim modernity of the unfeeling metropolis.

Kim made a striking return to film-making with Arirang, after suffering a nervous breakdown after blaming himself for an actress's near-death during the making of Dreams in 2008. In some ways resembling Jafar Panahi's This Is Not a Movie in allowing access to a director's home and mindset, this distinctive comeback is the ultimate work of auteurist cinema, as Kim is solely responsible for every aspect of its action on screen and behind the scenes. Sometimes almost unbearable to watch because of its seemingly genuine self-lacerating honesty, but at others feeling more like a slickly cynical in-joke, this is strictly for fans of the prolific maverick. Yet its insights into the artistic and emotional anguish of making films and having them judged by rivals, critics and audiences are intriguing.

Living inside a tent in a shack on a remote hillside, Kim and his feline companion seem to be  hiding from the world. As records of days in the life go, this one shifts from mundane to manic remarkably quickly. Kim shows himself doing everyday chores while camping out on a mountainside like chopping wood and making a meal. We are even treated to the sight of his relieving himself in the snow and reminiscing about unfulfilled projects such as the story he was discussing with Willem Dafoe about a Korean War veteran who returns to find the body of the woman he killed and winds up confronting her spirit through a shaman.

Putting his hair into a pony tail, Kim begins to interrogate himself through cross-cutting and explains why he had to withdraw after the Dreams incident and has to work out what to do next as making films is his sole reason for existence. Suddenly, he starts slugging back the Korean hooch known as soju and begins to unburden himself torrentially as he launches into a diatribe against the colleagues who have betrayed him, the money men who have failed to back him, the governing politicians who feted him for mostly self-serving reasons (especially as several of his films present South Korea in such a dim light) and the reviewers who have pronounced on his work without either having seen his canon in its entirety or understood what he was trying to achieve in any given picture.

Kim also blames himself, however, particularly for the accident that saw Lee Na-young nearly suffocate while filming a hanging suicide sequence and left Kim sufficiently traumatised to quit cinema for three years. But this is more an accusatory than a confessional work, with Kim acting as his own inquisitor and audience as he pieces together snippets of footage to deconstruct both the interviewing and film-making processes. He even seems to involve his shadow in the questioning and the ingenuity of his imagery leads one to suspect that, even if this wasn't meticulously scripted, it was certainly premeditatedly planned so that every expletive-strewn outburst is shot from just the right angle to make the most audiovisual impact.

Given Kim's past genius for controversy, it's almost surprising that this isn't more outlandish and defamatory in denouncing such erstwhile collaborators as Jang Hoon and the actors specialising in playing villains, whom Kim insists are so convincing because they are actually evil. He seems to let genuine emotions slip out while singing the folk lament `Arirang' and watching his 2003 masterpiece Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring on DVD. But the suspicion that this is less a confessional exercise than a piece of mischief making start to be aroused when Kim faces questioning by his own shadow and keeps being disturbed by mysterious knocks at the door.

However, the authenticity of the enterprise is only conclusively thrown into doubt when Kim draws on his former career as a machinist to fashion a gun out of spare pieces of metal and leaves his hideaway declaring that he is going to mow down his betrayers. Climbing into his car, he drives to Seoul where three shots are heard at different locations before Kim is shown using wires to pull the trigger on himself. So have we just witnessed the painfully frank outpourings of a soul in personal and professional torment or another gleeful gesture of defiance by a director who simply refuses to play by the rules?

The intention is more obvious in Ann Hui's A Simple Life. But this is another beguiling drama by one of the leading lights of the 1980s Hong Kong new wave and it is baffling that so few of her films have been shown widely here since she first came to prominence with the Vietnam trilogy entries The Story of Woo Viet (1981) and Boat People (1982) and the autobiographical Song of the Exile (1990). Inspired by the experiences of film producer Roger Lee, who co-scripts with Susan Chan, this is a poignant dissertation on class, dependency, loyalty and isolation that is superbly played Deanie Ip, who won the Best Actress prize at the Venice Film Festival for her performance opposite frequent co-star Andy Lau.

Now in her seventies, Deanie Ip has spent her entire life working for the wealthy family of Andy Lau, a film producer whose work often keeps him away from home for long stretches. With the majority of his family now resident in the United States, Lau usually has the place to himself and enjoys being fussed over by Ip, who serves up delicious meals using ingredients chosen at the local market as much for their price as their quality. He even enjoys her fretting about his lifestyle, as he knows she can't refuse him anything - even his favourite oxtail dish, which they both know is unhealthily rich.

However, it's Ip who falls ill and Lau not only feels utterly impotent when she has a stroke, but also hugely guilty that his `amah' refuses to let him pay for her care and insists on moving into a mid-range nursing home on deciding to retire because she can no longer serve him according to her exacting standards. Typically, however, Ip offers to help him recruit a replacement, but none of those who apply for the job prove suitable and her disdainful glances at those who prefer electric rice steamers to traditional clay pots are often returned with interest by women who view domestic posts as just another job rather than a lifetime vocation.

Lau's mother Wang Fuli flies back to Hong Kong to visit Ip, but she only looks forward to her surrogate son calling to treat her to dinner, escort her to his latest premiere or simply to sit and chat. She even tries to matchmake him with the hospice director Qin Hailu, who tries to make her charges comfortable in spite of stretched resources. Lau wishes he could do more and asks Qin to let him know if anything happens to Ip so he can return for the funeral. However, Ip doesn't want to cause him any inconvenience and his request is denied.

Opening breezily with Ip scolding the stall-holders for their inflated prices and inferior produce, this soon settles to become a moving melodrama. Ostensibly, the emphasis falls on Ip's determination to look after Lau even though she can no longer keep house for him. But one only has to compare Lau's scenes with Wang and Ip to realise that this is also the tale of a grateful child trying to express his gratitude to the woman who has been most central to his life. The café sequences capture the strength of this bond and it aids Hui greatly that Ip and Lau have been in several mother-son situations on screen before.

But this is not all about the tenderness between the stars. Ann Hui was supposedly on the verge of quitting cinema after struggling to find suitable assignments and it is a relief to report that the combination of her happy experience shooting this picture and its positive reception has convinced the 65 year-old to continue working. Maybe cameoing colleagues Tsui Hark, Sammo Hung, Anthony Wong and Chapman To helped persuade her or she settled a few scores with her biting depiction of the Hong Kong film industry. Either way, Hui shows again here what a fine storyteller she is. She might have toned down Law Wing-fai's a touch, but she elicits exceptional performances from Ip and Lau and combines effectively with cinematographer Yu Lik Wai and production designer Albert Poon to capture the enduring affection that transcends the grandeur and the uniformity of the family and nursing homes.