Film Screening: Dry Lake aka Youth in Fury (Kawaita mizuumi)

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The self-contradictory, mixed-up effect produced by this study of alienated young people drove Shinba Eiji, the author of its literary source, to bitter complaint. Undoubtedly, the incoherence was exactly what twenty-nine-year-old Shinoda felt was needed to express his personal experience of Japan in 1960. Because the young characters in Dry Lake derive benefit from the established order, their rebellion against that order can only reproduce its violence in an exaggerated, ironic mode (cf. the scene, recalling Fellini’s La dolce vita of the same year, in which a rich young man forces a woman to strip before his party guests). In the end, the chaos of the characters merges into the chaos of student protests against the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty. The screenplay is by the legendary Terayama Shuji; the chamber jazz score is by Takemitsu Toru, who would score numerous other films for Shinoda (including all in this series). – Chris Fujiwara

New 35mm print

Directed by Shinoda Masahiro.
With Mikami Shinichiro, Honoo Kayoko, Iwashita Shima.
Japan, 1960, 35mm, color, 89 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
Print source: HFA

From the Shochiku Collection at the Harvard Film Archive: Sixties Shinoda film series co-presented by the Japan Foundation and co-sponsored by the Reischauer Institute