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 (see August 1), whose camera similarly probes the planes of time; but it is also a specifically Japanese reference to the darkness after "the sun's burial" (the title of Oshima's previous film). 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.