Punishment Room

While Hollywood's '50s take on teenage rebellion (Rebel Without a Cause, etc) sparked excitement and consternation worldwide, Japan had its very own moral panic centred around the so-called taiyozoku (or 'sun tribe') films following in the wake of Shintaro Ishihara's Zeitgeist novel Season of the Sun. The college kids in Ishihara's work were no hard-working model citizens, but sensation seekers revelling in the new consumer society while rejecting the conformity of the previous generation. Adapted from another Ishihara novel, Ichikawa's celluloid contribution to the cycle is a provocatively non-judgmental affair, as brashly aggressive student Kawaguchi strides his way through extortion, gang warfare and, in the most controversial sequence, drug assisted date rape. Various authority figures come in for vigorous lambasting, yet the protagonist's indiscriminate rage is hardly productive either, and Ichikawa's restless camera, high contrast lighting and jazz splashed soundtrack refuse to allow the viewer a moment's complacency. A remarkable and still-edgy precursor to Oshima and the iconoclasm of the '60s.