In 1960 Nagisa Oshima could still "pass" at Shochiku, making films in the so-called "sun tribe" sex-and-violence genre that glorified delinquent youth culture as it profited from it. But Oshima's bent in Cruel Story of Youth and The Sun's Burial was clearly subversive, his focus not on the romanticism of disillusionment, but on the politics of despair in postwar Japan. (The context, here unstated, was the Left's unsuccessful protest that same year against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty.) His style was provocative, lurid, alienating and strangely beautiful; it was not clear who was the punk, Oshima or the criminals and nihilistic street kids who populated his films. The Sun's Burial tells of life festering in the sprawling Osaka slums in the sweat of summer. Rival youth gangs scratch at a living, trying to keep one step ahead of a larger, more "sophisticated" if seedy criminal organization by buying into their routine (the young punks put their girls on the streets, beat them when they get pregnant) and into their profitable racket, literally taking the blood of poor dockworkers in need of cash. On an anthill of grasping characters are Hanako (Kayoko Honoo), a steely vixen who lures men by night and draws blood by day, and Shin (Masahiko Tsugawa), the pouty gang leader who confides his secret desire to be gentler than he is. No hope of that. The film was considered shockingly violent in its day, but perhaps the biggest shock was the way in which Oshima played away from the violence in alienating long-shots and pans, away from emotion and even from action, relegating it to the edges of the wide screen. (Note: Cruel Story of Youth will screen on August 8.)