As a key member of the Nuberu Bagu or the Japanese New Wave (in particular for his 1960 film Cruel Story Of Youth), Nagisa Ōshima — who said he had no interest in making films that could be grasped within 15 minutes — would live through a decade of political and social turbulence. This period would culminate in the 1968–1969 Japanese university protests, which were in turn inspired by the May 1968 movement in France. With the end of the movement and the dissipation of its rebellious spirit and pretentions to change the world, the 1970s arrived and the revolutionary dream seemed to disappear, undone by police repression and a lack of societal backing, but also in part by fragmentation within the student movements themselves. The Man Who Left His Will On Film is a portrait of precisely this end-of-an-era moment, yet, this being Ōshima, it is itself also a fragmented, frenetic and febrile portrait, a reflection on the role of cinema and its images, on the potential for a political cinema, employing a metaphysical mystery to question the decade’s legacy of contestation and idealism.

The film’s opening sequence is highly indicative of the small storm that one event will cause among a group of students involved in political struggle. A subjective point of view shows us the footage shot by a camera seemingly trying to escape, held by an unknown person running, among other haphazard movements, in the opposite direction from another figure, who we later find out is Motoki, a student. Next, an objective point of view (now outside the camera’s gaze, as a neutral observer), shows us Motoki looking up at the roof of a building, from which the person escaping in the first shot, Endo, jumps, committing suicide while still clutching the video camera. For Motoki, who witnesses all of this, it becomes of pivotal importance that he gets hold of the camera and the footage it contains, as if the key to what happened might be found in those final shots. But to his bafflement, when he wakes up in the student film club headquarters, nobody seems aware of what has happened, of his friend’s death. Moreover, Endo’s girlfriend, Yasuko, rejects Motoki’s version of events, stating that nothing untoward has happened to Endo. Next to them, a group of students argue endlessly about the best plan of action to recover the footage and camera from the police, envisioning a protest for freedom of expression.

After this confusing beginning, between the real and imaginary and regarding which version of events corresponds to reality, Motoki will develop an obsession, first for the final images shot by Endo, and next for Yasuko, as if, in the absence of answers, he seeks to take Endo’s place and thereby understand what happened. As a consequence of this symptom, Motoki appears to be infected by society’s ills, forgetting any kind of collective struggle for justice regarding what happened, and focussing instead on his own individual need to make sense of what he believes took place. Motoki gradually becomes bad-tempered, selfish, misogynistic and violent, transforming the frustration caused by his internal confusion into external acts of aggression and moral vacancy. His erratic behaviour becomes a metaphor, as if his internal confusion, his uncertainty regarding the reality of the events, his withdrawal from those around him, were a comment on the fragmentation and disillusionment of the student movement itself, once its sense of idealism and romanticism has been lost.

Motoki is not the only one feeling alienated from the events around him; Yasuko, too, appears strangely drawn to this mood, as if both of them were different versions of the same person. The two try to unravel this existential mystery by deciphering and reliving the final images captured before the fatal moment, evoking a connection to Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up. In that film, and here, the obsession with captured images and the search for meanings they may contain, as if the materiality of a record of reality were capable of providing a kind of truth, is shown to be dangerously deceptive, just one step closer to the precipice.