Bleak House

Every "economic miracle" seems to generate a countering critique. Postwar Japan's sprawling suburbanization, unchecked materialism, and fetish for order after the chaos of World War II spawned all manner of contrarian cinema -- from soft-core porn to Tokyo-stomping monster movies to the Japanese New Wave that's the subject of "Between Two Worlds: Selected Postwar Japanese Films," an 11-movie retrospective at SFMOMA.

Two of the directors featured are well known in the West: Nagisa Oshima, for his notorious hard-core art film In the Realm of the Senses, and Shohei Imamura, most recently for the overrated The Eel. Both are represented here with solid social realist work from the '60s. Less well-known, and hence more intriguing, is Susumu Hani, who jump-started the New Wave in 1961 with Bad Boys. Hani's vision of postwar Japan is the most unsparing of the lot -- his is a bleak landscape of ragpickers' huts, juvenile prisons, and secret sex clubs populated by squatters, delinquents, and whores. Hani uses location shooting and real ex-con actors to bring a documentary intensity to this story of the stunted lives of youthful criminals unable to benefit from their country's boom. Even better is She and He (1963), in which a naive woman from the rising middle class backslides into the grim society of squatting ragpickers living in the shadow of her high-rise; actress Sachiko Hiodari deserved her Berlin Festival best actress award for her superb performance here.

Hani's best-known film, The Inferno of First Love (1968), is an unsettling mix of social and poetic realism. This story of an impotent young man's relationship with a prostitute suffered hefty cuts at the time of its release, and no wonder. With its sadomasochism and nudity, startling flashbacks of molestation, and scenes of horny businessmen drooling over women in bondage, Inferno is still a resonant reminder of the casualties of a culture on the rise.

"Between Two Worlds" is presented in conjunction with the photography exhibit "Daido Moriyama: Stray Dog," which opens at 11 a.m. Friday (and runs through Aug. 3). The film series opens with Bad Boys at 1 p.m. Sunday (and runs every other Sunday through July 25) at the SFMOMA, 151 Third St. (at Mission), S.F. Admission is free-$8; call 357-4000.

-- Gary Morris