Peacock wrote:Violence at Noon - The drama in this film mainly plays out between three characters and I'm just not sure if the situation is dramatic enough to really involve you.
I don't want to resort to spoilers, but are you sure you saw Violence at Noon? Hopefully it will strike you differently next time. For me it's among the greatest achievements of an incredible decade.
This set should at least give people a sense of just how creative and un-pin-downable Oshima was in the sixties. If you were unimpressed by Senses or Passion, approach these as tabula rasa. Pre-Ai no corrida Oshima is a different beast entirely.
As for the early films, I agree that Night and Fog in Japan has little in common with the previous two films, which much more clearly draw on (and disembowel and cauterize) the genre of 'Sun Tribe' youth films, but it fits historically and biographically because it definitively slams the door shut on Oshima's early period of studio filmmaking at Shochiku. It's the film where he goes too far and effectively reinvents himself as a filmmaker in opposition to the Japanese filmmaking establishment. As such, it's a signal moment for the Japanese New Wave. So I certainly wouldn't complain if it were packaged with the earlier films. As noted above, Criterion would be asking for trouble if they tried to present it without any contextualising extras. in Eclipse format.
The present Eclipse grouping, however, will probably work as a grab bag, even though there's a lot of social and political subtext in the films (Three Resurrected Drunkards maybe most obviously) that might elude unprepared viewers. At least Drunkards is a helluva lotta fun even without the politics.