Oshima's complexly self-referential work was originally titled, "He Died After the War," referring to the Tokyo War of 1969, when Japanese students were involved in violent anti-government demonstrations that led to a period of defeat in the early Seventies. The film begins with the death of a student who jumps off a rooftop as he is being chased by police. His friend and comrade believes that the boy's death was a suicide, and that the film in his camera is a last will and testament. But when he screens the film, he finds only street scenes of Tokyo. Obsessed with his friend's story, he begins to "claim" his life, beginning with his girlfriend, and eventually reconstructing the film itself, which in the end becomes a record of his own suicide. Shot in black and white, largely with a hand-held camera, Oshima's film seems to be the contribution of his main character. Joan Mellon writes, "Any causal explanations for his death, however, as in Godard, must be provided through active participation by the audience itself in piecing together the boy's footage, which is randomly projected... Oshima demands of his Japanese audience that it confront what has befallen the restless youths of the New Left... The boy's death comes to parallel the demise of the student movement itself, which...has turned Japan's young people once again back upon themselves with no outlet for their discontent" (in "The Waves at Genji's Door").