Nagisa Oshima

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Nagisa Oshima at Cannes in 2000
Nagisa Oshima at Cannes in 2000

Nagisa Oshima (大島 渚 Ōshima Nagisa?), born March 31, 1932 in Kyoto, is a famous Japanese film director. After graduating from Kyoto University he was hired by Shochiku Ltd. and quickly progressed to directing his own movies, making his debut feature A Town of Love and Hope (愛と希望の街; Ai to kibo no machi) in 1959.

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[edit] 1960s

Oshima's cinematic career and influence developed very swiftly[1], and early watershed films Cruel Story Of Youth (青春残酷物語), The Sun's Burial (明日の太陽) and Night and Fog in Japan (日本の夜と霧) all followed in 1960. The last of these 1960 films explored - in challenging fashion - Oshima's disillusionment with the traditional political left, and his frustrations with the right, and Shochiku withdrew the film from circulation after less than a week, claiming that, following the recent assassination of the Socialist Party leader by a right-wing extremist, there was a risk of “unrest”. Oshima left the studio in response, and launched his own independent production company. Despite the controversy, Night And Fog In Japan placed #10 for the year in Kinema Jumpo's annual best-films poll (among Japanese critics), and it has subsequently amassed considerable acclaim abroad[2].

Subsequently, Oshima directed The Catch (1961), based on a novella by Kenzaburo Oe about the relationship between a wartime Japanese village and a captured African American serviceman. The Catch has not traditionally been viewed as one of Oshima's major works, it did notably introduce a thematic exploration of bigotry and xenophobia which would explored in greater depth in the later documentary Diary Of Yunbogi (1965), and the feature films Death By Hanging and Three Resurrected Drunkards, both from 1968 [3].

Oshima then embarked upon a period of work in television, producing a series of documentaries; notably among them 1965's Diary Of Yunbogi. Based upon an examination of the lives of street children in Seoul, it was made by Oshima after a trip to South Korea[4][5].

One of Oshima's more unusual films was Band of Ninja (1967), an adaptation of the popular manga by Sampei Shirato, Ninja Bugei-cho, a 16th-century saga of oppressed peasants and deadly ninja. It is not a live-action film, or even an animated one; Oshima simply photographed close-ups of Shirato's drawings and added voices. Oshima had used the technique previously in some documentaries, and a willingness to make use of unorthodox techniques was an indication of the mature period of experimentalism which would soon surface in Oshima's work. The film managed to become a modest critical and commercial success in Japan.

Oshima directed three features in 1968. The first of these - Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief - unites a number of Oshima's thematic concerns, within a dense, collage-style presentation. Featuring a title which alludes to Jean Genet's The Thief's Journal, the film explores the links between sexual and political radicalism [6], specifically examining the day-to-day life of a would-be radical whose sexual desires take the form of kleptomania. The fragmented narrative is interrupted by commentators, including an underground noh performance troupe, a psychoanalyst, and an impromptu symposium featuring actors from previous Oshima films (along with Oshima himself), all dissecting varied aspects of shifting sexual politics, as embodied by various characters within the film.

Months later, Death By Hanging (1968) presented the story of the failed execution of a young Korean for rape and murder, and was loosely based upon an actual crime and execution which had taken place in 1958[7]. The film utilizes non-realistic "distancing" techniques after the fashion of Brecht or Godard to examine Japan's record of racial discrimination against its Korean minority, incorporating elements of farce and satire, and a number of visual techniques associated with the cinematic new wave in a densely layered narrative. It placed #3 in Kinema Jumpo's 1968 poll, and has also garnered significant attention globally[8]. Death By Hanging inaugurated a string of films (continuing through 1976's In the Realm of the Senses) that clarified a number of Oshima's key themes, most notably a need to question social constraints, and to similarly deconstruct received political doctrines[9].

Boy (1969), based on another real-life case, was the story of a family who use their child to make money by deliberately getting involved in road accidents and making the drivers pay compensation. The Ceremony (1971) was another satirical look at Japanese attitudes, famously expressed in a scene where a marriage ceremony has to go ahead even though the bride is not present.

[edit] 1970s

Oshima is most famed for his provocative 1976 film In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no korida; 愛のコリーダ), a film based on a true story of fatal sexual obsession in 1930s Japan. Oshima, a prolific critic of censorship and his contemporary Akira Kurosawa's humanism, was determined that the film should feature hardcore pornography and thus the film's undeveloped film cans had to be transported to France to be developed and an uncensored version of the movie is still unavailable in Japan.

In his 1978 companion film to In the Realm of the Senses, Empire of Passion (Ai no borei; 愛の亡霊), Oshima took a more restrained approach to depicting the sexual passions of the two lovers driven to murder, and the film won the 1978 Cannes Film Festival award for best director.

[edit] 1980s and 1990s

In 1983 Oshima had another important critical success with Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, set in a wartime prison camp, featuring David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto as examples of Western and Eastern military virtue.

Max, Mon Amour (1986), written with Luis Buñuel's frequent collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière, was a comedy about a diplomat's wife (Charlotte Rampling) whose love affair with a chimpanzee is quietly incorporated into an eminently civilised ménage à trois.

In 1996 Oshima suffered a stroke, but he returned to directing in 1999 with the period piece Taboo (Gohatto), featuring Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence actor Takeshi Kitano and music by co-star and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.

A collection of Oshima's essays and articles was published in English in 1993 as Cinema, Censorship and the State (ISBN 0-262-65039-8). A critical study by Maureen Turim, The Films of Oshima Nagisa: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast (ISBN 0-520-20666-5) appeared in 1998.

Nagisa Oshima currently lives in Fujisawa in Kanagawa Prefecture.

[edit] Partial filmography

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Bock, Audie. Japanese Film Directors, pp 311. Kodansha International, 1978. Tokyo.
  2. ^ Bock, Audie. Japanese Film Directors, pp 333. Kodansha International, 1978. Tokyo.
  3. ^ Turim, Maureen. The Films Of Nagisa Oshima, pp 168. University of California, 1998. Berkeley.
  4. ^ Bock, Audie. Japanese Film Directors, pp 333. Kodansha International, 1978. Tokyo.
  5. ^ Oshima, Nagisa. Cinema, Censorship And The State, pp 101. MIT Press, 1992. Cambridge.
  6. ^ Turim, Maureen. The Films Of Nagisa Oshima, pp 88. University of California, 1998. Berkeley.
  7. ^ Richie, Donald. A Hundred Years Of Japanese Film pp. 198. Kodansha International, 2001. Tokyo.
  8. ^ Bock, Audie. Japanese Film Directors, pp 335. Kodansha International, 1978. Tokyo.
  9. ^ Sato, Tadao. Currents In Japanese Cinema pp. 177. Kodansha International, 1982. Tokyo.

[edit] External links

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