Declared obscene in Japan, where it has never been shown in its entirety, Oshima Nagisa's "In the Realm of the Senses," was shown uncut at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976: thirteen screenings were required to satisfy audience demand. The unprecedented explicitness with which the film presented sexual acts inevitably caused widespread controversy. But this is not a film which sets out simply to shock. Oshima's account of a couple whose sexual obsession finds its ultimate expression in murder (based on a notorious true-life incident in 1936 Tokyo) was animated by deep political convictions. As Joan Mellen explains, Oshima wished to break with social conventions as well as the film-making culture of the past. He took a revolutionary position. Refusing to follow the lead of the masters who had gone before him (Mizoguchi, Ozu, Naruse, Kurosawa), disdaining costume drama and poignant family portraits, Oshima attacked the sense of victimhood he saw everywhere in his country's psychic make-up. "In the Realm of the Senses" is the fullest expression of this political intent. Oshima's lovers seek to combat social repression through sexual transgression--but they fail.

In Seven Samurai (1954) a whole society is on the verge of irrevocable change. Akira Kurosawa's celebrated film, regarded by many to be the major achievement of Japanese cinema, is an epic that evokes the cultural upheaval brought on by the collapse of Japanese militarism in the 16th century, but at the same time echoes also the sweeping cultural changes occurring in the aftermath of the American Occupation that followed Japan's defeat in the Second World War. The plot is deceptively simple. A village of farmers is beleaguered by a horde of bandits. In desperation, the farmers decide to hire itinerant samurai to protect their crops and people and defeat the bandits. There had never been a Japanese film in which peasants hired samurai, or an evocation of the social transformation that made such an idea credible. There are six samurai and one who is accepted as such. Together they reflect the ideals and values of a noble class near the point of extinction. Seven Samurai may be the greatest action film, a technical masterpiece unmatched in its depiction of movement and violence, but running beneath the sound and fury is a lament for a lost nobility, 'a dirge for the spirit of Japan,' writes Joan Mellen, 'which will never again be so strong.' Mellen's study contextualises Seven Samurai, marking its place in Japanese cinema and in Kurosawa's film-making career. She explores the film's roots in medieval history and, above all, the astonishing visual language in which Kurosawa created his elegiac epic.

Presents evidence suggesting collusion between US and Israeli intelligence in the attack on a US naval surveillance vessel during the Six-Day War and the more than fifty-year long cover-up. On June 8, 1967, the USS Liberty, an unarmed intelligence ship reporting to the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the auspices of the National Security Agency, was positioned in international waters off the coast of Egypt when it was attacked with deadly violence by unmarked jet planes firing rockets and machine guns and throwing napalm onto its deck. This ambush was followed by a torpedo strike that blew a forty-foot hole in the starboard side of the ship. Lacking the capacity to defend themselves, thirty-four sailors were killed and 174 wounded, many for life. By the end of the day, Israel had confessed to having been the aggressor, simultaneously arguing that the attack had been an "accident" and a "mistake." The facts said otherwise. So intense and sustained was the attack - it lasted for nearly an hour and a half - so specific was the aiming for the antennae and satellite dish on deck, that it was scarcely credible that Israel's aggression was not deliberate; such was the view of Marshall Carter, the director of the National Security Agency, his deputy director Louis Tordella, and Richard Helms, the Director of Central Intelligence. Based on interviews with more than forty survivors, knowledgeable political insiders, and Soviet archives of the period, investigative writer Joan Mellen presents evidence suggesting complicity between US and Israeli intelligence in the attack on Liberty and the more than fifty-year long cover-up. What were the underlying motives? Was this a false flag operation conducted in the midst of the Six-Day War? Was it conceivable that Israel would have initiated such an operation without a green light from the United States? For the sake of justice, truth and the murdered and surviving sailors, this is a story demanding to be told.

Jim Garrison: His Life and Times, The Early Years, is a biography of the former District Attorney of Orleans Parish, Louisiana from his 1922 birth in Iowa and service in World War II - he was among those assigned to Dachau Concentration Camp the day after its liberation - to his years confronting the corrupt politics of Louisiana. In 1997, Joan Mellen started to work on the story of former Orleans Parish District Attorney Jim Garrison's life. That biography turned into the story of Garrison's investigation of the assassination of President John Kennedy, and then into a new investigation of the assassination itself in her book, "A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK's Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History," published in 2005.

Working with thousands of previously unreleased documents and drawing on more than one thousand interviews, with many witnesses speaking out for the first time, Joan Mellen revisits the investigation of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, the only public official to have indicted, in 1969, a suspect in President John F. Kennedy's murder.Garrison began by exposing the contradictions in the Warren Report, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was an unstable pro-Castro Marxist who acted alone in killing Kennedy. "A Farewell to Justice" reveals that Oswald, no Marxist, was in fact working with both the FBI and the CIA, as well as with U.S. Customs, and that the attempts to sabotage Garrison's investigation reached the highest levels of the U.S. government. Garrison interviewed various individuals involved in the assassination, ranging from Clay Shaw and CIA contract employee David Ferrie to a Marine cohort of Oswald named Kerry Thornley, who at the very least was a Defense Intelligence Agency asset. Garrison's suspects included CIA-sponsored soldiers of fortune enlisted in assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, an anti-Castro Cuban asset, and a young runner for the conspirators, interviewed here for the first time by the author.Building upon Garrison's effort, Mellen uncovers decisive new evidence and clearly establishes the intelligence agencies' roles in both a president's assassination and its cover-up, set in motion well before the actual events of November 22, 1963.

Working with thousands of previously unreleased documents and drawing on more than one thousand interviews, with many witnesses speaking out for the first time, Joan Mellen revisits the investigation of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, the only public official to have indicted, in 1969, a suspect in President John F. Kennedy's murder.Garrison began by exposing the contradictions in the Warren Report, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was an unstable pro-Castro Marxist who acted alone in killing Kennedy. "A Farewell to Justice" reveals that Oswald, no Marxist, was in fact working with both the FBI and the CIA, as well as with U.S. Customs, and that the attempts to sabotage Garrison's investigation reached the highest levels of the U.S. government. Garrison interviewed various individuals involved in the assassination, ranging from Clay Shaw and CIA contract employee David Ferrie to a Marine cohort of Oswald named Kerry Thornley, who at the very least was a Defense Intelligence Agency asset. Garrison's suspects included CIA-sponsored soldiers of fortune enlisted in assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, an anti-Castro Cuban asset, and a young runner for the conspirators, interviewed here for the first time by the author.Building upon Garrison's effort, Mellen uncovers decisive new evidence and clearly establishes the intelligence agencies' roles in both a president's assassination and its cover-up, set in motion well before the actual events of November 22, 1963.