While watching Night & Fog in Japan, I think I’ve understood why so many political films from the ’60s & ’70s have now been forgotten: They were products of their time.
Dealing with problems & taboos of that period. Not ours. At some point, some directors like Nagisa Oshima seems to criticize for the sake of criticize, always showing how society can be so wrong. And it (may) has lost strength with times, because society has changed.
They surely helped to change it, but then what? Men are still the same, aren’t they?
Of course, for example, Night & Fog in Japan offers also an interesting point of view about how works a political group, men blinded by their ideals. But, did Oshima try to capture clearly this universal point, or did he just think about the leftist organizations in Japan and that’s it?
In other words, what was more important: Criticizing leftist organizations or using them to point out an universal ‘mistake’? I only know, in one case, we wouldn’t need to know the political situation of Japan in 1960 to understand it.