The Japanese Film: A Personal View – 1947–1995

The movie theatre was packed and I was wedged against the back wall looking at the naked screen, waiting for the movie to start - as I had so often in my life.

As for so many of my generation - who, like me, had profitably spent their youth in the dark -it was a moment of promise, the last of the ordinary before the projector's beam focused on the empty screen and a better, truer, more manageable world unreeled.

But this beloved anticipation which I so well knew from long childhood afternoons at the Sigma in far Ohio was now touched with concern as well. For I was no longer a child, twenty-three, this was the Gekijo Tokyo Kurabu in Asakusa, and I was transgressing.