The true title should have been One Hundred Years of Stills from Japanese Cinema. Oshima certainly has a rich enough topic, one of the world's chief cinematic traditions, a subject that could provide enough material for a six-hour documentary, but Oshima tries to squeeze the material from the six-hour examination into a one-hour space through a barrage of stills. Example: "After Rashomon won an award at the Venice Film Festival, there was a second golden age of Japanese film". This is then followed by stills (no clips) from Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Gate of Hell, Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff, Tokyo Story, and ten other films at such a pace that only a Japanese film historian or someone with total recall would hope to remember a handful of the lesser-known films an hour later. Clips are used all too sparingly, a begrudging breather from the onslaught of stills. (The big three, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu, all have brief clips from No Regrets for Our Youth, Osaka Elegy, and I Was Born, But ..., respectively. Only Oshima himself gets more than one clip.) As if the machine-gun assault of static images was not enough information overload, Oshima also attempts pouring a socio-political history of Japan into his already full cup, ending up with analysis little better than militarism is bad. You will leave this knowing little more about Japan or its cinema than you did when you entered. One thing I do remember: A film called something like The War at Sea: From Hawaii to Malaya 1942 was the ancestor of the special effects seen in the Godzilla movies.

Note: The tape died about 2/3 of the way through the presentation of this film, but I believe I saw enough to write a review in good conscience.