Silent Witness

Named after Alain Resnais' essay film on the abandoned landscapes of postwar Auschwitz that bear silent witness to the tragedy of the Holocaust, Night and Fog in Japan, Nagisa Oshima's fictional deconstruction of the left movement in the aftermath of the ratification of the second U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo) in 1960 is also a caustic and pointed cultural interrogation into personal and collective accountability that, as implied by Resnais' film, have been (consciously) obscured by the fog of guilt and memory.

Play is a movie about a lonely man and a lonely woman whose paths will almost cross as they search for love in a hostile city, Santiago de Chile. Cristina takes care of an old man in a modest city. Tristan is heart broken in a modern city. Cristina and Tristan walk around a hot and polluted Santiago de Chile in the summertime. He tries to recover something he has never had. She is the silent witness of his downfall. Irene doesn't love Tristan, and Cristina doesn't love Manuel. The lack of love when examined under a microscope makes even the smallest things grow.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents is well known for its title sequence. The camera fades in on a simple line-drawing caricature of Hitchcock's rotund profile. As the program's theme music, Charles Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette, plays, Hitchcock appears in silhouette from the right edge of the screen, and then walks to center screen to eclipse the caricature. He then almost always says "Good evening." (The theme music for the show was suggested by Hitchcock's long-time musical collaborator, Bernard Herrmann.)