Japanese New Wave

The generation after the Japanese masters was hired by the same studios and paid to burn the furniture.

Shochiku, Ozu’s own house, marketed its young directors as a Japanese New Wave, and Oshima answered with films the house could barely release: politics, crime, the nation’s unfinished arguments. Imamura went digging under the polite surface for what he called the lower half of Japanese society, insects and all. Suzuki turned cheap gangster assignments into pop-art hallucinations on studio time and studio money. In 1968 Nikkatsu fired him over Branded to Kill, calling it incomprehensible; he sued, lost a decade to the blacklist, and the incomprehensible picture is what the studio is remembered for.