JAPANESE MASTER NAGISA Oshima was an untrustworthy way-past-30 – albeit still seven years shy of his international breakthrough, In the Realm of the Senses – when he directed the seldom-seen 1970 feature The Man Who Left His Will on Film. Considered his most experimental, it's an improbable movie to have been directed by someone who'd already been working for the Shochiku Film Co. since 1954. But then Oshima was always a brusque modernist bull in the china shop of restrained, delicate Nippon art cinema. Here he throws himself fully into the mode of film-school angry young man post-Summer of Hate, while critiquing that younger generation's mix of immaturity and Marxism. Part of an in-fighting radical sect, frequently hysterical hero Motoki witnesses a comrade's suicidal leap from a building, the stolen Bolex camera in his arms managing to survive the crash. Once it's reclaimed from the police, Motoki studies the opaque film contained within for clues as to why the jumper jumped. But not everyone is convinced the man died, or that events happened at all as Motoki thinks they did. His obsessive quest for truth results in lots of running, mental instability, and the periodic pawings of a passive heroine who was the corpse's girlfriend. The black-and-white Will (whose original title translates as A Secret Postwar Tokyo Story) couldn't be more of its moment. Antonioni jostles Godard for influential supremacy, Toru Takemitsu's soundtrack is pure Pink Floyd-y psychedelia, and dialogue runs didactically wild (e.g., "I'm only a drop-out dogmatist, anyway"), while the sex interludes are equal parts raincoat crowd and Hiroshima mon amour. It's revolutionary elitism in extremis, pretentious as all get-out – though at times (as when hero and heroine literally "roll in the hay") one suspects Oshima is very much in on the joke. See Rep Clock for show times. (Dennis Harvey)