Seven years before Godard's La Chinoise, Oshima dared to devote a feature film to investigating the factions and nuances of left-wing politics in Japan; the move cost him his contract at Shochiku studios. In a strident subversion of both ritual and romance, Oshima turns a wedding into the occasion for an all-out, angry debate between members of the wedding-comrades in a long, communist-youth struggle culminating in the protest against the Japanese American security treaty-and the groom, a newspaper reporter whose behavior in the recent demonstrations is questioned. Continuing his audacious exploration of widescreen space, in this film Oshima virtually destroys depth-of-field in order to travel through time on a horizontal plane. Flashbacks-within-flashbacks unfold out of a fog through which Oshima obscures any illusion of real time or space. The film's title is an evident homage to Alain Resnais, whose camera similarly probes the planes of time; but it is also a specifically Japanese reference to the darkness after the "sun's burial" (see July 31). At times, only his dizzying pans about the room convey the violent conflicts between otherwise static characters; at other moments, music drowns out their impassioned speeches. It is a still Noh drama intercut with sporadic bursts of hyperactivity: it is radical politics in Japan.