1964 ‘黒い太陽’ Directed by Koreyoshi Kurahara
Akira, a young, jazz-obsessed drifter, returns to his squat, a ruined church, and finds Gill, a wounded African-American GI, on the run after the death of a white GI. Despite terrible misunderstandings and culture clash, Akira agrees to help Gill escape towards the sea, dodging military police along the way.
Tamio Kawachi Chico Lourant Tatsuya Fuji Yuko Chishiro Hideji Ôtaki Shogen Nitta Zenji Yamada Ryusei Ito Tooru Sumikawa Gô Kuroda Takashi Nomura Yû Izumi Hiroshi Chiyoda Toshizō Kudō Hyōe Enoki Katsumi Ishizaki Yūzō Harumi Masaaki Yamamoto Kôji Sugiura Hiroshi Atami Toshihiko Oda Hayato Tani Yoshihiro Yamaguchi Chigusa Takayama Midori Mori Kasumi Motegi Setsuko Watanabe Minoru Nakane Shinsuke Nagasawa Show All…
An incendiary, anarchic masterpiece! It's hard not to fall in love with this film. Part of the Sun Tribe movement that emerged in Japan during 1950's, a youth group that challenged previously held notions of authority and morality, the film is an oddball take on the buddy picture featuring two outsiders: a young, jazz-obsessed Japanese drifter and a black American GI on the lam in Tokyo. Director Kiyoshi Kurahara's style is typically flamboyant, perfectly in tune with the attitude and psychology of his characters. Lots of canted German angle shot and Soviet-style montages. A unique story uniquely told!
It wears out its welcome and reaches diminishing returns by the end of its runtime, but the premise of a Japanese man so autistically obsessed with jazz that he insists the Black GI he finds is his friend because "all Black people are [his] friends" is one of the funniest buddy premises I've come across.
Try as I might I just can't fall in love with this genre of film. Call it my natural tendency to dislike anarchistic, anti-authoritarian works when they seem to exist more for the sake of rebelling than to produce a coherent counter-culture message. There's a childishness in being non-conformist without goal or direction. I could empathize with misdirected lashing-out if given ample evidence as to what the source of oppression was. But so often the characters in these films seem to be incarnate distillations of all past wrongs a culture has endured, propelled in ways beyond their own comprehension. The trouble that comes into the protagonist Akira's life is more so his own doing than anyone else. Fingers are pointed…
“Any black men are my friends, so you are too.”
Something like an origin story to the friendship between the jazz-and-black-culture obsessed young Japanese troublemaker (Tamio Kawachi) and his African American GI friend (Chico Lourant) from The Warped Ones. The two shared a special moment in that film, a rare scene of calm when they took an impromptu trip to the beach to splash away their pain. In Black Sun, Gil (Lourant) is similarly in love with the water, and spends the majority of the film either mumbling about the sea, or his mother.
But let’s back up a bit. Black Sun opens with Mei (Kawachi, who has the best facial expressions) stealing and selling some barbed wire so he…
Sort like a Fuller granade in a 60s Japanese crime thriller package. An allienated Japanese youth and American Black GI go in a rampage together, there large cultural distance made progressive smaller by their mutual anger. It is very exciting shot throughout by Koreyoshi Kurahara and the movie is predicted in n effective contradiction between how it builds up their anarchic rage and play it against an oppressive architecture. It is a barely coherent scream of revolt that is impressively rendered.
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I've heard and read a fair bit about Koreyoshi Kurahara ahead of watching Black Sun but this really wasn't at all like I was expecting.
It was, additionally, extremely irritating. There was nothing really wrong with what Kurahara was saying here, regarding cultural misunderstanding and trying to communicate without a common language. Seeing large areas of Japan still burnt out and abandoned nearly 20 years after the end of WWII was pretty stark as well.
But Kurahara doesn't really choose to explore these themes in any great detail. He jumps Black Sun from repetitive aggression between Tamio Kawaji and Chico Lourant to a sudden cooling of tensions and them being best mates. It's as poorly paced as it is intolerable at times, missing really good opportunities to say anything profound in favour of some discordant counter-culture rubbish that is far too loud for a Sunday afternoon. Disappointing.
This was an interesting one. It reminded me a lot of a Sam Fuller movie in that it is the cinematic equivalent of performing surgery with a sledgehammer. It's blunt and it's pulpy, but that doesn't mean that it can't get at some tough and interesting truths. The truly interesting part about this film is the language barrier. This isn't a movie where people have to talk out their differences because neither speaks the other's language. All they are able to go off of is tone, facial expressions and body language. And somehow they come to understand each other like one does a jazz song or a silent film. Perhaps the Tower of Babel was not meant to separate us, but rather to force us to unite on a deeper, more human level?
This film is batshit crazy in the best possible way. Koreyoshi Kurahara combines elements of neo-realism, psychological thriller and crime drama, then caps it off with a magic realism ending for the ages. Nobuo Yamada adapted the screenplay from a story by Tensei Kino.
Akira, referred to by everyone as Mei (Tamio Kawaji), is a happy go lucky late teenager despite the fact that he is living a precarious hand-to-mouth existence by petty thieving and squatting in the ruins of a church that was partially demolished in Allied air raids. He is a huge fan of American jazz, and bebop drummer Max Roach in particular. The walls of Mei’s squat and the ceiling over his bed are plastered with photos,…
Do You Like Jazz?
Akira and Gill are unlikely friends and wouldn't be friends under other circumstances. Hell they aren't even friends under these circumstances... they're not even frenemies. Akira is very fond of American jazz music and romanticizes the culture which he finds cool and exotic.
He becomes infatuated with Gill and assumes that he loves Jazz music and can play the trumpet because he is black. Akira's stereotypical views come from a place of ignorance and not from a place of hate. Gill is wounded and very cruel towards Akira and even kills his dog (accidentally) but Akira still chooses to stay with him despite knowing full well that Gill is a wanted criminal.
Akira chooses to stay…
In this sequel to 1960's The Warped Ones, we find Akira now squatting in an abandoned derelict church with a dog he's named for Thelonious Monk and stealing to pay for Jazz records. When Gil, a badly wounded black American GI on the run for murdering a fellow soldier, turns up in Akira's squat he forms an uneasy friendship with the man who'd take him hostage.
Koreyoshi Kurahara's follow up to his original 1960 film uses many of the same stylistic tricks, keeping it very much within the same 'world' that he had created for the first. The editing and camera are loose and free-form, at the mercy of the music, but like jazz (like good jazz), are never without…
Black Sun had been on my radar for a good while now, though perhaps for surface level reasons. The mere idea of an Asian and an African-American together in an Asian film struck my curiosity deep; the two demographics seemed to have so little connection with each other, and I was very much intrigued to see what it was about.
It did not disappoint. Black Sun is a scathing rebuke of Asian on African-American discrimination and cultural appropriation, how it is so easy to to absorb both the blind adoration of black culture and hatred stemmed from American systemic racism. It's an issue that does happen, aided perhaps due to a general lack of awareness and visiblity of African-American issues…
Oddball jazz anarchy. Really loved the style, it made me feel like I was watching a French New Wave film for the first time again. I didn't like the two dummies we spend the film with though, their relationship and understanding of each other a machine guns length apart with plenty of bigotry in the middle. One of the most curious aspects of this film is seeing an African American character in a Japanese film in 1964, and when I looked up the actor Chico Lourant, it turns out that his entire film career was launched because a Toho director saw him and thought that he was Sidney Poitier, and then when it turned out he wasn't, he decided to…
