Oshima’s The Man Who Left His Will on Film

Radical politics meet radical aesthetics in Nagisa Oshima’s most experimental feature, The Battle of Tokyo, or the Story of the Young Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970). In this fragmented tale, a young leftist finds the loaded camera of a comrade who leapt to his death while fleeing the police. While the young man, Motoki, obsessively attempts to retrace his comrade’s political and erotic past through the experimental film found in the camera, Oshima intertwines avant-garde techniques, including projection onto a naked body, with documentary and narrative forms in an adventurous interrogation of the potential of film as a political and aesthetic weapon. (Irina Leimbacher)