into several organizations that continued to retain the name. Night and Fog in Japan, with extensive political dialogue peppered with Marxist rhetoric, tries to make sense of political defeat and the reconciliation of these two generations. Although the marriage of Nozawa and Reiko seems to suggest the possibility of reconciliation, Nakayama looms large as the imposition of forced forgetting and the denial of reflection in favor of Party orthodoxy. Director Nagisa Ōshima clearly was critical of Stalinism and the failure of political reflection. This pessimistic assessment pervades the film (Ōshima had been involved in, and sympathized with, student movements himself), especially in the portrayal of personal motivations in political movements. Release For its time, Night and Fog in Japan was amazingly daring, formally and politically. Ōshima received the funding and creative latitude as part of Shochiku's strategy of promoting films by several young directors they called the Shochiku-Ofuna New Wave. Three days after it was released, the film was abruptly pulled by the studio in the wake of Japanese Socialist Party politician Inejiro Asanuma's assassination by far right student Otoya Yamaguchi. In a blistering statement, Ōshima protested what he saw as the politically motivated censorship of his bold film. In this response, he expressed faith in the potential of the audience to receive controversial political films, taking issue with the political repression of the film industry and critics. Ōshima's political commitments to the struggles depicted in the film are confirmed here, as he claimed "my film is the weapon of the people's struggle," and, of the resistance to censorship: "that is the voice of the people demanding that the future of the Japanese film be directly tied to their own future." Reception Commentators on Night and Fog in Japan have noted its formal innovation, especially its theatricality. Maureen Turim describes, in addition to innovative long take and shot sequences reminiscent of Kenji Mizoguchi, a new filmic theatricality. Spatial restriction, lighting, color, and gesture figure in it, but most importantly it is the way spoken lines and confrontations are ordered by camera movement and shot, so that "the cinema becomes a device for redefining theatrical language." Dana Polan sees the film as part of a broader element of Ōshima's cinema in which political meaning emerges "as process between screen and spectator." For example, in the ten-minute opening shot, camera movement and the symmetry of the wedding ceremony suggests a political stability