Bad Boys (Furyō shōnen) followed by Q&A with director

Bad Boys (Furyō shōnen) followed by Q&A with director

Tuesday, January 29, 2013 - 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Auditorium, Whitney Humanities Center See map
53 Wall Street
New Haven, CT 6510

Bad Boys (Furyō shōnen)
1960-1961, Japan (89 min., English subtitles)
Directed and scripted by Susumu Hani.
Cinematography by Manji Kanau.
Music by Tōru Takemitsu.
With Sachio Yoshida, Kōichirō Yamazaki.

Considered one of the fundamental films of Japanese New Wave, Bad Boys was voted the best Japanese film of 1961 in Kinema Junpo, outvoting Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (Yōjinbō, 1961), Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition (Ningen no jōken, 1959-1961), Nagisa Ōshima’s The Catch (Shiiku, 1961) and other titles by major filmmakers. The film portrays the inner maturation of the juvenile delinquents who were sent to a special reformatory. The protagonists, performed by actual ‘bad boys’ recruited from an actual reformatory, also created most of their own dialogues. Hani’s signature observational style to approach the spontaneity of the subjects vividly captures adolescents swinging between innocence and experience. The assistant director of the film was Noriaki Tsuchimoto, who would later become one of the most important documentary filmmakers in postwar Japan.
Courtesy Harvard Film Archive.

Bad Boys and New Waves: The Cinema of HANI Susumu
Susumu Hani is one of the central and most diverse filmmakers that set the tone for the Japanese New Wave in the late 1950s and 1960s. Outside the mainstream commercial studios, Hani and his films engendered the most important force in reinventing postwar Japanese filmmaking. Yale University presents his best-known feature Bad Boys (1960) and two stunning short documentaries Children in the Classroom (1954)and Children Who Draw (1955) with Susumu Hani in person!

Co-sponsored by CEAS and the Japan Foundation
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