Film/Video JAPANESE NEW WAVE CINEMA WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 27, 1999, $6 ($4 WALKER MEMBERS) ADMITS TO BOTH SHOWS AUDITORIUM

GATE OF FLESH (NIKUTAI NO MON)
DIRECTED BY SEIJUN SUZUKI
7 PM
Long revered by cultists, Suzuki is now recognized as one of the giants of Japanese cinema. This, his most extreme and controversial work, is decidedly not for the faint-hearted, the politically correct, or the transcendentally inclined. It lives up to its tawdry title with every lurid frame. Flesh offers an unforgettable portrait of a group of prostitutes scrambling to survive in the corpse-strewn ruins of postwar Tokyo, where black marketeers battle for territory and American soldiers attempt to impose democracy and Christianity on the defeated nation. Suzuki uses looming CinemaScope close-ups, flagrantly fake and roughly lit sets, and garish color- coding to punch across his nightmarish vision of sexual savagery. 1964, Japan, 90 minutes.

BAD BOYS (FURYO SHONEN)
DIRECTED BY SUSUMU HANI
8:45 PM
Gate of Flesh employs its group portrait of "bad girls" as a metaphor for postwar Japan's belief in "survival at any costs." The New Wave classic Bad Boys has an entirely different tone, but its purpose is somewhat similar. Focusing on a group of delinquent boys in a reformatory, Hani fashions the gritty, real-life setting into an image, a microcosm, of the authoritarian country in which they live. He persuaded a group of actual delinquents to reconstruct their lives for the film, turning their stories into fiction, thereby offering them catharsis. The sequences involving armed robbery and bullying are electrifying in their erasure of the line between reality and fiction. Print courtesy The Japan Foundation, Tokyo. 1961, Japan, 89 minutes.