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Nagisa Oshima: Diary of a Shinjuku Thief at Close-Up Film Centre

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Time 21:30
Date 22/09/18
Price £10.75

Nagisa Oshima weaves a tale of ideological book thievery, situationist performance, fantasy Noh theatre productions, sexual revolution, and personal liberation in this Art Theatre Guild classic.

Organised by the Japanese Avant-Garde and Experimental Film Festival (JAEFF) in partnership with the Japan Foundation, catch Nagisa Oshima's stylistically wild, Japanese new wave film - Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, plus, Desktop Treasure, a short directed by Ummmi.

Desktop Treasure
A film which attempts to go beyond borders through mixing up personal areas of the Internet by bringing out online and analogue records, personal spaces lived in by the actor, old blogs and e-mail log in screens, and mixed video footages of various qualities.

Diary of a Shinjuku Thief
Diary of a Shinjuku Thief was heavily influenced by the post-Shingeki theatre movement, whose main practitioners were Juro Kara and Shūji Terayama. Rejecting the long modern trajectory toward “realist” theatre, these playwrights turned toward pre-modern theatrical forms, including Noh, Kabuki, and Bunraku. Much like Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide, this film questions the relationship between reality and art, sending the protagonists into plays-within-a-film and featuring actual people as themselves in ad-libbed scenes. Shinjuku was a major centre for the art-theatre scene in the late 1960s, and several settings remain largely unchanged today, including Kinokuniya and the plaza outside the east exit of the station.

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