Japanese films of the 1970s

ĀTMAN is a visual tour-de-force based on the idea of the subject at the centre of the circle created by camera positions (480 such positions). Shooting frame-by-frame the filmmaker set up an increasingly rapid circular motion. ĀTMAN is an early Buddhist deity often connected with destruction; the Japanese aspect is stressed by the devil mask of Hangan, from the Noh, and by using both Noh music and the general principle of acceleration often associated with Noh drama.

When a lone traveler stumbles upon a remote, drought-stricken village, he finds himself engulfed in a whirlpool of myth, mystery, and magic: in a nearby pond reside spirits who hold the fate of the town’s inhabitants, including lovers Akira and Yuri, in their hands.

The plot follows Mimiko, a bright little girl left alone when her grandmother leaves on a trip. Making a few stops at some local stores, Mimiko comes home to her house in a bamboo grove and finds a baby panda named Panny sleeping on the back doorstep. She quickly makes friends with the little panda, and invites him in for a drink. His father, PapaPanda, soon comes to visit, and they decide to become a family after PapaPanda offers to.

The story is presented as a voiced-over narrative by Arita (Takahiro Tamura), speaking long after the events of the film. In a remote army base in Manchuria, near the Soviet border, long-serving corporal Arita hates the military and looks forward to the day he may leave. Although a university graduate, he has several times deliberately failed the exam for promotion and thus remains a corporal after four years' service.

An outlaw pushes the residents of Edo's red light district to rebel against a growing number of stifling, moralistic laws.

The entangled relations between the son of a seductive tea-ceremony teacher and the women in his father's life. Based on the novel by Kawabata Yasunari.

On a Tokyo dump’s shantytown edge, interwoven vignettes follow residents scraping by: a boy who “drives” an imaginary trolley, a homeless father and son designing a dream house, a young woman brutalized at home, drunks, schemers, and saints of small kindnesses. Kurosawa crafts a ragged mosaic of hardship, fantasy, and flickers of grace that keep people moving forward.

1970 American-Japanese war film

A 16-year-old girl works in a factory to pay her late father’s debt. When she makes up her mind to become a hostess, a boy approaches her with kind and gentle manners...(Also occasionally known in English as “Play”)

A retired racing champion, now a driving instructor, gets involved with the speed tribes after impulsively taking to the streets to relive his former glory.

A nurse is framed for her involvement in the hospital murder of a politician who was threatening to expose corrupt practices. She escapes from jail but is captured and sent back, resulting in the rest of the inmates being punished, added to which of a new, tougher, head of security arrives to take up her new job....

When a space probe crash-lands on a far-flung Pacific atoll, the craft's alien stowaways decide to take over their new world one creature at a time. Soon, the parasitic life forms latch onto three indigenous critters -- a squid, a crab and a snapping turtle -- and transform them into colossal mutant monsters.

1977 film by Yasuharu Hasebe

1971 film by Shūji Terayama

A marquis' mistress becomes pregnant with fraternal twins. He keeps the boy, but sends his bodyguard to dispose of the mother and the girl. Years later…

There's more to picture than meets the eye in this journey into oriental metaphysical imagery. Starting (in a very Christian manner) with the Word, the film draws an explosion of visible forms, as if a sign of the shattering of shapes in the mundane world. But time is cyclical, of course, and what was once a multitude of sensible realities must eventually return to the Word and, finally, to sheer Color. (Sound of Eye)

Delinquent girl boss meets and conflicts with an orphan girl who lives an isolated life after the dramatic deaths of her parents. She plays the piano, but stands up against her lecherous guardian, who is also a school official.

Mentre Tokyo è ormai ridotta ad un cumulo di macerie, Steve Martin, giornalista americano del United World News, racconta di come la città è stata attaccata da una mostruosa creatura. Il racconto poi torna al presente e segue le operazioni che conducono alla distruzione di Godzilla, sconfitto grazie all'intervento del professor Serizawa, vecchio amico di Steve.

An ever evolving alien life-form arrives on a comet from the Dark Gaseous Nebula and proceeds to consume pollution. Spewing mists of sulfuric acid and corrosive sludge, neither humanity nor Godzilla may be able to defeat this toxic menace.