Black Board (1986)

Best known in the west for his supernatural horror films, Onibaba and Kuroneko, filmmaker Kaneto Shindo's career actually spanned six decades, and is most well known in Japan for his searing dramas about pressing social issues and injustice. Shindo's 1986 film Black Board is one such film. Predating the hysteria over cyberbullying by twentysomething years, Black Board tells the story of a middle school student who is found murdered; when two of his classmates confess to the crime, they say it was to escape his constant bullying. Through the eyes of an ambitious reporter, the entire case is dissected, and the tumultuous lives of these adolescents unspools before our eyes. On one level, Shindo brings an almost documentary-like realism to the story, but he also indulges in purely cinematic stylization. During the staff meeting at the school, he constantly cuts to shots of the different teacher's feet shaking; and some sequences feature melancholy and romantic pop ballads. The characters are well-drawn, and realistically reflect actual teenagers. Shindo avoids quick judgements of his characters, and prefers instead to remain an objective observer, only seeking out the truth. Compared to western films about the subject, Shindo's film may seem quite low-key; as opposed to glamorizing the subject, he almost downplays it, focusing instead on the complicated relationships between the characters. Compare this with Larry Clark's 2001 film Bully, also about a bullying-related homicide, which reveled in the hedonism of its characters, and Black Board may seem quite flat. But make no mistake, this is a searing and important film, in part because Shindo focuses on the psychological and sociological as opposed to just the events themselves. Not only is Black Board about bullying, but it is a larger expose of Japanese society, and more universally, life in an advanced capitalist economy. The murdered boy comes from a poverty-stricken working class background, and lashes out at society because of the hopelessness he feels when it comes to his own upward mobility. At its heart, Black Board is an indictment of a society that only begins to care when it is too late.