Nagisa Ōshima (大島 渚, Ōshima Nagisa, March 31, 1932 – January 15, 2013) was a Japanese filmmaker, writer, and left-wing activist who is best known for his fiction films, of which he directed 23 features in a career spanning from 1959 to 1999.[1][2] He is regarded as one of the greatest Japanese directors of all time, and as one of the most important figures of the Japanese New Wave (Nūberu bāgu), alongside Shōhei Imamura. His film style was bold, innovative and provocative. Common themes in his work include youthful rebellion, class and racial discrimination and taboo sexuality.
His first major film was his second feature, Cruel Story of Youth (1960),[3] one of the first Japanese New Wave films, a youth-oriented film with an earnest portrayal of the sexual lives and criminal activities of its young protagonists. And he came to greater international renown after Death By Hanging (1968), a film on the theme of capital punishment and anti-Korean sentiment, was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1968.[4] His most controversial film is In the Realm of the Senses (1976), a sexually explicit film set in 1930s Japan.
Profile
Early life
Nagisa Ōshima was born into a family of aristocratic samurai roots. His father was a government official who had a large library. Ōshima spent very little time with his father, who died when he was six, which left a deep mark on him. Ōshima would point to this as the most important event of his childhood in his 1992 essay My Father's Non-existence: A Determining Factor in My Existence.[5] After graduating from Kyoto University in 1954, where he studied political history,[6] Ōshima was hired by film production company Shochiku Ltd. and quickly progressed to directing his own movies, making his debut feature A Town of Love and Hope in 1959.
During the 1960s
Ōshima's cinematic career and influence developed very swiftly,[7] and such films as Cruel Story of Youth, The Sun's Burial and Night and Fog in Japan followed in 1960. The last of these 1960 films explored Ōshima'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 Inejiro Asanuma by the ultranationalist Otoya Yamaguchi, there was a risk of "unrest". Ōshima left the studio in response, and launched his own independent production company. Despite the controversy, Night and Fog in Japan placed tenth in that year's Kinema Jumpo's best-films poll of Japanese critics, and it has subsequently amassed considerable acclaim abroad.[8]
In 1961 Ōshima directed The Catch, based on a novella by Kenzaburō Ōe about the relationship between a wartime Japanese village and a captured African American serviceman. The Catch has not traditionally been viewed as one of Ōshima major works, though it did notably introduce a thematic exploration of bigotry and xenophobia, themes which would be explored in greater depth in the later documentary Diary of Yunbogi, and feature films Death by Hanging and Three Resurrected Drunkards.[9] He 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 Ōshima after a trip to South Korea.[8][10]
Ōshima directed three features in 1968. The first of these - 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.[11] The film utilizes non-realistic "distancing" techniques after the fashion of Bertold Brecht or Jean-Luc Godard to examine Japan's record of racial discrimination against its Korean minority, incorporating elements of farce and political satire, and a number of visual techniques associated with the cinematic new wave in a densely layered narrative. It was placed third in Kinema Jumpo's 1968 poll, and has also garnered significant attention globally.[12]Death By Hanging inaugurated a string of films (continuing through 1976's In the Realm of the Senses) that clarified a number of Ōshima's key themes, most notably a need to question social constraints, and to similarly deconstruct received political doctrines.[13]
Months later, Diary of a Shinjuku Thief unites a number of Ōshima'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,[14] 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 Kara Jūrō's underground performance troupe, starring Kara Jūrō, his then wife Ri Reisen, and Maro Akaji (who would go on to lead the butoh troupe Dairakudakan). Yokoo Tadanori, an artist who created many of the iconic theatre posters during the 1960s and '70s, plays the thief, who gets a bit part in Kara's performance. The film also features a psychoanalyst, the president of Kinokuniya Bookstore in Shinjuku, and an impromptu symposium featuring actors from previous Ōshima films (along with Ōshima himself), all dissecting varied aspects of shifting sexual politics, as embodied by various characters within the film.
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.
1970s career
The Ceremony (1971) is a satirical film on traditional Japanese attitudes, famously expressed in a scene where a marriage ceremony has to go ahead even though the bride is not present.
In 1976, Ōshima made In the Realm of the Senses, a film based on a true story of fatal sexual obsession in 1930s Japan. Ōshima, a critic of censorship and his contemporary Akira Kurosawa's humanism, was determined that the film should feature unsimulated sex and thus the undeveloped film had to be transported to France to be processed. An uncensored version of the movie is still unavailable in Japan. A book with stills and script notes from the film was published by San’ichishobo, and in 1976 the Japanese government brought obscenity charges against Ōshima and San’ichishobo.[15] Ōshima testified in the trial and said. "Nothing that is expressed is obscene. What is obscene is what is hidden."[16] Ōshima and the publisher were found not guilty in 1979; the government appealed and the Tokyo High Court upheld the verdict in 1982.[15]
In his 1978 companion film to In the Realm of the Senses, Empire of Passion, Ōshima 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.[17][18]
A collection of Ōshima's essays and articles was published in English in 1993 as Cinema, Censorship and the State.[22] In 1995 he wrote and directed the archival documentary '100 Years of Japanese Cinema' for the British Film Institute.[23] A critical study by Maureen Turim appeared in 1998.[24]
In 1996 Ōshima suffered a stroke, but he recovered enough to return to directing in 1999 with the samurai film Taboo (Gohatto), set during the bakumatsu era and starring Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence actor Takeshi Kitano. Ryuichi Sakamoto, who had both acted in and composed for Lawrence, provided the score.
He subsequently suffered more strokes, and Gohatto proved to be his final film. Ōshima had initially planned to create a biopic entitled Hollywood Zen based on the life of Issei actor Sessue Hayakawa. The script had been allegedly completed and set to film in Los Angeles, but due to constant delays, declining health, and Ōshima's eventual death in 2013 (see below), the project went unrealized.[25][26]
Nagisa Oshima was known for the protean nature of his work. From one film to the next, he would frequently shuffle between black-and-white and color, between academy ratio and widescreen, between long takes and fragmented cutting, and between formally composed images and a cinéma vérité style.[28]
Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. New York: Continuum Int. Publishing Group.[31]
'Transgression and the Politics of Porn. Ōshima Nagisa's In the Realm of the Senses (1976)'. In: Phillips, A. and Stringer, J., (eds.), Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts. Abingdon: Routledge, pp 217-228).[32]
^Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey (2013). "Nagisa Oshima and the Japanese New Wave". Making Waves, New Cinemas of the 1960s (Revised and Expanded ed.). Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN9781623565626.
^Turim, Maureen (1998). The Films of Oshima Nagisa: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast. University of California Press. p. 7. ISBN9780520206663.
^ abBergen, Ronald (January 15, 2013). "Nagisa Oshima obituary". The Guardian. London. Retrieved January 16, 2013.
^ ab Alexander, James R., Obscenity, Pornography, and Law in Japan: Reconsidering Oshima's 'In the Realm of the Senses' (April 17, 2012). Asian-Pacific Law & Policy Journal, vol. 4 (winter 2003), pp. 148-168., Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2041314
^Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: "Gil Rossellini Interview with Nagsia Oshima (Part 3 of 3)". YouTube. March 19, 2010. Event occurs at 3:15. Retrieved December 21, 2014. Yes, I am planning to shoot a story of a Japanese. His name is Sessue Hayakawa. He was the only Japanese star in Hollywood. It was the 1910s silent film period of Hollywood. I will try to describe this star and the situation of the Japanese in the states.
