Nagisa Oshima

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zedz
Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm

Nagisa Oshima

#1 Post by zedz » Mon Apr 09, 2007 8:17 pm

Nagisa Oshima (1932- )


FILMOGRAPHY

Tomorrow's Sun (Asu no taiyo) (1959) (short)

A Town of Love and Hope (Ai to Kibo no Machi) (1959)

Cruel Story of Youth (Seishun Zankoku Monogatari) (1960) Raro Video

The Sun's Burial (Taiyo no Hakaba) (1960) Raro Video

Night and Fog in Japan (Nihon no Yoru to Kiri) (1960) Raro Video

The Catch (Shiiku) (1961)

Youth on Ice (Kori no naka no seishun) (1962) (TV)

The Rebel / Shiro Tokisada from Amakusa (Amakusa Shiro Tokisada) (1962)

The Forgotten Army (Wasurerareta kogun) (1963) (TV)

It's Me Here, Bellett (Watashi-wa beretto) (1964) (TV)

The Tomb of Youth (Seishun no ishibumi) (1964) (TV)

A Rebel's Fortress (Hankotsu no toride) (1964) (TV)

Gimei shojo (1964) (TV)

Crossing the Pacific on the Chita Niseigo (Chita Noseigo taiheiyo odan) (1964) (TV)

A Small Child's First Adventure (Chiisana boken ryoko) (1964) (TV)

A National Railway Worker (Aru kokotetsu-jomuin) (1964) (TV)

Ode to an Old Teacher (Aogeba totoshi) (1964) (TV)

Because I Love You (Aisurebakoso) (1964) (TV)

Aija no akebono (1964) (TV)

Yunbogi's Diary (Yunbogi no nikki) (1965) (short)

The Trawler Incident (Gyosen sonansu) (1965) (TV)

Pleasures of the Flesh (Etsuraku) (1965)

Violence at Noon (Hakuchu no Torima) (1966) Raro Video

Band of Ninja / Tales of the Ninja (Ninja Bugeicho) (1967)

A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Song / Sing a Song of Sex (Nihon Shunka-ko) (1967)

Japanese Summer: Double Suicide (Muri-Shinju: Nihon no Natsu) (1967)

Death by Hanging (Koshikei) (1968) Japanese New Wave Cinema Classics

The Pacific War (Daitoa senso) (1968) (TV)

Three Resurrected Drunkards (Kaette Kita Yopparai) (1968)

Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (Shinjuku Dorobo Nikki) (1968) Japanese New Wave Cinema Classics

Mao Tse-Tung and the Cultural Revolution (Mo-taku-to to bunka daikakumei) (1969) (TV)

Boy (Shonen) (1969) Japanese New Wave Cinema Classics

The Man Who Left His Will on Film (Tokyo Senso Sengo Hiwa) (1970) Japanese New Wave Cinema Classics

The Ceremony (Gishiki) (1971) Japanese New Wave Cinema Classics

The Giants (Kyojin-gun) (1972) (TV)

Joi! Bangla (1972) (TV)

The Journey of the Blind Musicians (Goze:Momoku no onna-tabigeinin) (1972) (TV)

Dear Summer Sister (Natsu no Imoto) (1972)

Bengal no chichi laman (1973) (TV)

Ikiteiru nihonkai-kaisen (1975) (TV)

The Battle of Tsushima (1975) (TV)

The Golden Land of Bengal (Ogon no daichi Bengal) (1976) (TV)

The Sunken Tomb (Ikiteiru gyokusai no shima) (1976) (TV)

The Isle of the Final Battle (Ikiteiru gyokusai no shima) (1976) (TV)

The Life of Mao (Denki mo-taku-to) (1976) (TV)

In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no Corrida) (1976)

Yokoi and his Twenty-Eight Years of Secret Life on Guam (Yokoi shoichi: guamu-to 28 nen no nazo o ou) (1977) (TV)

Shisha wa itsumademo wakai (1977) (TV)

Empire of Passion (Ai no Borei) (1978)

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) Optimum

Max, Mon Amour (1985)

Kyoto, My Mother's Place (1991)

100 Years of Japanese Cinema (1994)

Taboo (Gohatto) (1999) Japanese DVD


GENERAL DISCUSSION

Nagisa Oshima


RECOMMENDED WEB RESOURCES

Gohatto: or the End of Oshima Nagisa - Andrew Grossman (Bright Lights Film Journal)

Nagisa Oshima - Nelson Kim (Senses of Cinema)

Nagisa Oshima: Boy - Derek Malcolm (The Guardian)

Nagisa Oshima: Six Films - Acquarello (Strictly Film School)

Oshima's Cruel Tales of Youth and Politics - Maureen Turim (Journal of Film and Video)

Ritual, the family and the state: The Ceremony - Ruth McCormick (Cineaste)

Taboo Presskit - includes Positif interview with Oshima

The unkindest cut of all? Ai no corrida - Freda Freiberg (Senses of Cinema)


DVD

Empire of Passion

Gohatto (Japanese DVD)

Japanese Films Not on DVD

Japanese New Wave Cinema Classics (see also Unauthorised Releases (Bootlegs)

Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (Optimum)

Raro Video

Realm of the Senses

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zedz
Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm

#2 Post by zedz » Tue Oct 16, 2007 9:37 pm

Comments relocated from the 1960s List thread. In preparation for compiling my 60s list I made my way through Oshima's 60s work in chronological order for the first time.

Cruel Story of Youth

It starts here, with a generic youth film, but already you can see the emergence of the director's thematic preoccupations (the equation of sex with serious danger, the melding of fiction and documentary in the AMPO protest footage, the interweaving of political and historical subtexts) and some of his technical ones as well. There's a superb long-held shot when Fujii visits Mako after her abortion, accompanied by a mostly off-screen conversation. It's not as elaborate as Night and Fog in Japan's plans-sequences, but it's looking ahead to them. Similarly, the couple's scam gives rise to the kind of cyclical structure he'd continue to explore for years - most all-encompassing in Three Resurrected Drunkards and The Man Who left His Will on Film, but in quite similar form to Cruel Story in the repeated rituals of Boy's con game, The Ceremony's ceremonies and The Realm of the Senses erotic crescendo. Ultimately, it's still a "youth film", but it's one that has a toughness I don't think any American example has ever approached. The hero is one of the most unsympathetic characters ever put in the centre of a film, his one faintly redeeming quality a kind of feral attachment to Mako. But since the only way he can express that attachment is through pimp / prostitute exploitation (as soon as they meet, their relationship starts to spirals downwards to that inevitable conclusion), it's hardly redeeming. It all ends badly of course, but just how badly is hard to believe, and Oshima spits a brutal, sarcastic Romeo / Juliet allusion in our face just before the end title.

The Sun's Burial

I'd long had this pegged as a siamese twin to Cruel Story, and the two films have more in common with each other than with any other 60s Oshimas I've seen, but I'd underestimated just what a leap in ambition this film represented. It's a gangster film, but possibly the most squalid gangster film ever made. The main criminal activity we observe, for instance, is the buying and selling of blood. The film, as with Cruel Story, is punctuated by moments of extreme brutality and is ruthlessly unsentimental. Where Oshima is stretching himself is in his juggling of a vast cast (over twenty characters significant to the plot, by my reckoning) and multiple plot lines. This density is best expressed in several long-held shots in busy surroundings (e.g. the local bar) during which the camera tracks, pans and dollies around a relatively static tableau picking up on character and plot 'events'. Unfortunately, he doesn't really pull off the difficult challenge of mastering such an unruly narrative field (it's no Brighter Summer Day), and many of the characters never get beyond the status of stock figures. Nevertheless, the film builds to a hell of a climax. The implicit death of the title is manifold, and at the end it's as if we're observing not just the annihilation of the 'sun tribe' genre, but of youth, and even of Japan itself.

Night and Fog in Japan

Even more leaps and bounds for Oshima. In this film he tackles material as sprawling, and even more esoteric, than The Sun's Burial, but this time he brings the full weight of his intelligence to bear on it and synthesizes his first masterpiece through force of will. It's the first of his films to present its burden of ideas densely organised into a one-of-a-kind cinematic matrix (a la Death by Hanging and Diary of a Shinjuku Thief) that viewers can explore at their leisure. It's deeply political, but not polemic: a generation laid open on the autopsy table for our inspection, but we're the ones who have to conduct the inquest.

Personally, I'm less interested in the subject matter (the many faces of Japanese student radicalism in the 50s and 60s) than in how Oshima deals with it. As with his previous film, he's working with a massive cast of characters, but this time he's found a structure that allows them to find their place. There are about a dozen major characters, radiating out from the bride and groom (Nozawa and Reiko), through his former lover and colleagues (Misako, Nakayama, Toura, Sakamiki, the Professor) and her fellow AMPO protesters (Ota, Kawasaki and another guy, Kitami's friend, whose name eluded me) to the ghosts at the feast (his - Takao, and hers - Kitami). The interrelationships are complex, and only emerge gradually, but by the end it becomes clear that each of these characters represents a different, carefully calibrated attitude towards radicalism (e.g. uninvolved sympathy - the Professor; fiery commitment - Ota; sarcastic disillusionment - Toura; opportunistic dilettantism - Nakayama), and together they represent a dialectic (not an allegory) on the subject.

Quite apart from that is the piecemeal exploration of the buried backstory, or backstories, foremost among them the fate of Takao, revealed in fragmentary flashbacks, which brings us to the genius of Oshima's structure and style. The film basically takes place in real time, at the wedding reception of Nozawa and Reiko, but it's punctuated by a baroque pattern of nine flashbacks (some of which in turn take in multiple timeframes and settings) from the perspectives of various characters (in order: Toura, Ota, Toura, Toura, Misako, Misako, Nozawa, Kitami's friend, Takumi). Each of these flashbacks, though, represents shared experiences, so they're much less individualised than is normally the case, and some seem very much like 'group' memories (e.g. Misako's second flashback). At any rate, the flashbacks are anything but private, as they represent the sharing of information among the characters. The whole film comes to resemble a collective stream of consciousness, and Oshima brilliantly emphasises the hall-of-mirrors aspect of this continual retrospection by approaching the same events from multiple perspectives and adding in a second wedding party (Nakayama and Misako's) as one of the focal points of the flashbacks, thus providing a kind of trompe l'oeil (or trompe la memoire) effect.

But wait - there's more! Not only do we have an intensely creative story and structure, but an amazing style as well. The entire film consists of about 40 shots, the majority of them long, intricate tracking shots. There are a greater number (but only a handful) of conventional-length shots in the flashbacks, but even these can be striking, with flash-bulb freeze-frames or highly artificial lighting shifts. The two longest shots are both over ten minutes, in constant motion. The first one of these, about 17 minutes in, begins by following the characters as Ota reproaches Reiko over the fate of Kitami, panning and tracking around the room to frame and reframe characters or groups of characters. About halfway through, we settle on the drunk Toura, who hears music outside. The camera falls in behind him as he heads out, then overtakes him to reveal the ghost of Takao on the threshold. Suddenly, there's a 180 degree whip-pan back inside, but now the entire reception has been plunged into darkness with only the faces of the characters implicated in the Takao story (Sakamiki, the Professor, Nozawa, Toura, Nakayama and Misako) spotlit. This tableau is held while Takao's eerie song plays out. Then the lights come on, revealing the rest of the wedding party, the camera dollies back in and returns to the fray (Ota's confrontation). At the tail end of the shot, after Takumi appears and takes things in yet another direction, the camera dollies out into the garden (and the night, and the fog) to transition through a hidden dissolve to another night, another fog, another garden and another flashback.

The use of sequence shots was not entirely an aesthetic decision, apparently, but an expedient one to get most of the film in the can and edited before Shochiku realised what Oshima was really doing. This speed does show in the execution of several shots, with shaky dolly work or awkward framings and reframings, but Oshima's tactic sort of worked - he got the film completed before the studio interfered - and sort of didn't - they pulled it from distribution after three days.

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zedz
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#3 Post by zedz » Tue Oct 16, 2007 9:43 pm

Relocated comments continued. . .

Violence at Noon

From Oshima's mid-sixties period (how many other directors of the era were so productive and creatively volatile that they ran through four or more phases in a single decade?), post-TV and pre-ATG. In this film, he's still nominally working within genre constraints (as opposed to the genre- and fourth-wall-busting works of '68 and beyond), and as such, the film probably offers much more readily accessible evidence of his genius than something as far removed from normal frames of reference as Diary of a Shinjuku Thief.

It's one of the great serial killer films, and Oshima's brilliance lies in fragmenting the tale into unexpected flashbacks, visions, blurting radio broadcasts, and still-photo ‘documentary' sequences evoking multiple viewpoints while surreptitiously realigning the story to focus on the relationship between the two women closest to the killer (the ubiquitous Kei Sato), Shino, his one-time lover and two-time victim, and Matsuko, his wife. As with so many Japanese New Wave films, it's continually visually arresting (extreme close-ups, extreme long-shots, radical decentring, sun-bleached flashbacks) and has great music (by Hikaru Hayashi, who contributed so much to Oshima's 60s work, but is probably best known now for his work with Shindo – Naked Island, Onibaba, Kuroneko).

The editing style of this film is simply astonishing, and in drastic contrast to the long tracking shots of Night and Fog in Japan (I think Desser counts several thousand shots for this film, as opposed to Night and Fog's 43). And it's an editing style that owes as little to classic Hollywood editing as it does to modish Godard jumpcuts. Typically, Oshima will cover a given scene from a multitude of angles and distances, and create chains of edits that view the same material from different positions. In contrast to the earlier film, the camera is almost always static (the few exceptions are tilts, until we get to the penultimate scene in which the two female leads meet in a train carriage, which is covered by a series of mysterious and extreme back and forth pans), but the effect is one of constant, dynamic motion. The dense montage creates a sense of deconstructed camera movement: a series of shots of the same character from different angles being a deconstructed circular track, for example; a series of shots of the same character from different distances (ending up on an extreme extreme closeup of their eye, say) a deconstructed zoom. The use of the soundtrack is also arresting and original. When Shino has her first flashback during Eisuke's initial attack, it's totally silent, but when we return to her present, the sound only gradually bleeds back in. The content of this film is utterly compelling, but it's the style that keeps me rivetted to the screen every second.

Three Resurrected Drunkards

Common sense would tell you that this is a one-of-a-kind film, but its main structural conceit has since been borrowed by Groundhog Day and, to an extent, Syndromes and a Century. Three Japanese kids go swimming, find their clothes replaced by Korean uniforms, and spend the rest of the first half of the film persecuted by both the Japanese (because they're mistaken for stowaway Koreans) and the stowaway Koreans (who want to kill them and thus fake their own deaths). Oshima liked to pick the scab of Japan's ‘problematic' relationship with Korea (Death by Hanging plays arcane variations on this film's identity politics), but that's only one of the thematic plates Oshima keeps spinning in this deceptively comic film.

At the halfway point of the film, the three characters end up back where they started (on the beach, competing to recreate the famous photo of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting an enemy in the head) and the film begins again, shot for shot. Gradually, the repeated narrative diverges from its model, primarily because, second time around, the three characters know what to expect and can avoid it. It's smart and funny, but step by step gets odder and more intriguing, as two of the characters gradually lose their sense of (Japanese) identity and internalize their ascribed (Korean) roles. It's a mind-bending comic variation on many of the themes explored with more weight in Death by Hanging (identity, social role-playing, racism, memory, culpability).

Death by Hanging

This is where Oshima's thorny, dense mature style really emerges. As noted above, this film is closely related to Three Resurrected Drunkards (which I think barely preceded it), but TRD is sort of the streamlined, Chuck Jones version. Death by Hanging is an encyclopedia in comparison, though it's a prankster's encyclopedia. At one level, Oshima's 'messages' come through loud and clear: the death penalty is an abomination, Japan's treatment of Koreans ditto. But he piles so many different intellectual layers onto the absurdist premise (R, a convicted murderer, is hanged but fails to die) that the film sprawls into more dimensions than it - or you - can contain. In the course of the film, Oshima teases out the metaphysical, moral, legal, psychological, political and historical implications (and there's probably more angles I've overlooked) of R's failure to die, while all the time being strikingly staged and blackly funny. The officials need to get R to acknowledge his guilt, and his R-ness, before they can re-execute him, and they attempt to do this by ever more elaborate re-enactments of his crimes - Oshima's favoured cyclical structure is again evident. In this film, Oshima returns to his long, fluid takes, but they're less flashy than those of Night and Fog in Japan, and in general the style is much more staid than Violence at Noon, maybe because the content is anything but.

I have immense respect for this film, but seeing it again, I loved it less than other 60s Oshimas, so while Violence at Noon will be racing up my list, this one's probably staying put. I should also put in a word for the film's trailer, one of the best I've seen. It's more like an incredibly informative "director's introduction" to the film, specifying the material's historical basis and clarifying the filmmakers' intentions. The series of mug-shots of the film's cast and crew is wonderful.

Diary of a Shinjuku Thief

It's hard for me to be objective about this film. As the first Japanese New Wave film I saw, it really tore the top of my head off, and it still has a similar effect on me. What I found / find so amazing about it is the sheer profligacy of its technique and the knottiness of its treatment of its subject (sexuality, crime, revolution, performance): "an unsolvable, solvable mystery". Oshima throws everything up on the screen: black and white (classical studio and grungy verite) and colour (with rogue Roeg reds); documentary footage and highly theatricalised set-pieces - and actual theatre, and street theatre; song inserts (I just know that Kara Juro's 'Ali Baba' song will be rattling around my head for at least a fortnight - "Bero Bero Bero Bero Bero Bero. . .") and intertitles (which can convey suppressed dialogue, interstitial narration, the date and time in major international cities, or local weather reports).

It's almost a compendium of everything Oshima had done up to that point, with significant nods to important colleagues as well (Yoshida-like radical decentring in some passages, for example, but also strong whiffs of Godard and Pasolini). You never know what to expect. The first shoplifting scene is delivered through hand-held, highly mobile documentary camera work, in amongst the crowds; the second through Violence at Noon-style fragmentary montage. The scene in which Birdey and Umeko spy on Toura through fake rain features a hypnotic series of slow zooms out; the meeting with the sex therapist combines shaky, up-close, hand-held (i.e. 'documentary') footage containing audible camera noise with more distanced, statically-mounted (i.e. 'staged') footage. The whole film wriggles around in a no-man's land between documentary and fiction, but in a completely different way to, say, Imamura's A Man Vanishes. Oshima isn't mixing things up to complicate or explore or expose reality, but is co-opting the real to add some gritty texture to his fictional world, and, in some cases, to provide the most direct route to the ideas he's exploring in his fiction.

The film lurches from set-piece to set-piece, but now I can see the clear (if sometimes arbitrary and dream-like) narrative thread that ties them all together. Some sequences have acquired additional significance for me over time. The sequence in which we eavesdrop on members of Oshima's stock company musing about sex, in scanty available light, used to seem overlong, but as I've become more familiar with some of the key figures (e.g. Toura, Sato and Watanabe) it's become considerably more interesting. I still find the Kara Juro sequence at the end of the film one of the less satisfying ones. Maybe because he's punctuated the film all along it's less surprising than other sequences, or maybe I like to think of the bookshop as the focal location of the movie, and it starts to wind down once the characters leave it behind.

Boy

The last Oshima of the sixties had previously been nudged out of my list, but seeing it again has probably nudged it back in. Stylistically, it's a much more ‘classical' (or at least moderated) film than many of the ones that preceded it: it's basically linear and all pretty much takes place within a single level of fictional reality, for instance. Nevertheless, it serves as yet another example of Oshima's formal range, with the dominant filmic unit this time being single-shot, fixed-position phrases, with extremely enthusiastic, though sub-Yoshida, placement of action on the frame edges.

In terms of subject matter, the film is as tough as anything else he did at the time. The ‘Boy' of the title is a child exploited in the most ghastly way by his parents, having to hurl himself in front of passing cars so they can extort money from the drivers. It actually harks back to The Sun's Burial in its pointed sordidness and the implication of all of Japanese society in the critique. Not only do the titles run over converted / subverted Japanese flags, the rising sun become a black hole, but Oshima smuggles the flag into the background of scene after scene. Just look at how a Japanese flag appears somewhere in practically every shot that comprises the first motoring-accident sequence, or how that ominous red circle can be faintly made out behind textured glass in the family's apartment about halfway through.

The film explores several modes, from family drama to first-person reverie (in many cases we share the boy's limited or distorted perception of what's going on, and his passive equanimity is what gives the film its huge emotional punch) to semi-documentary. Like many of Oshima's films, it seems to be riffing on actual events, but in an imaginatively radicalised way that goes way beyond neo-realism. Fantastic modernist score as well.

This was the film that first got Oshima serious recognition in the west, and it remains a superb entry point to his challenging, exhilarating body of work. It should also caution us about assuming we know what's going on with film: even at a time in which western eyes were arguably most attentive to world cinema, those amazing preceding works were overlooked.

Mark Metcalf
Joined: Sat Oct 06, 2007 1:59 am

Oshima

#4 Post by Mark Metcalf » Fri Jun 20, 2008 11:17 pm

Most of these Oshima films I have been trying to see for 20 years. Now that they are coming out from Yume Pictures, does anybody know how the DVD quality will be? I have "Naked Youth", and the picture quality is watchable, but not great.

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zedz
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Re: Oshima

#5 Post by zedz » Fri Jun 20, 2008 11:26 pm

Mark Metcalf wrote:Most of these Oshima films I have been trying to see for 20 years. Now that they are coming out from Yume Pictures, does anybody know how the DVD quality will be? I have "Naked Youth", and the picture quality is watchable, but not great.
Based on the Raro releases, which seem to be the same transfers, that's what you'll get. Like you, I'm so glad just to be able to see the films at all that they're well worth it. They're certainly not unwatchable, as you note. I'm holding out some hope for Violence at Noon, as being black and white might cover a multitude of sins, and Pleasure of the Flesh, which hasn't already come out in a bleh Raro transfer.

wpqx
Joined: Sun Jun 15, 2008 5:01 am

#6 Post by wpqx » Sat Jun 21, 2008 6:58 am

As far as I know there is a VHS of Violence at Noon still around somewhere and if I remember correctly it was at least in the right aspect ratio. I'll take almost any Oshima any way I can get it and am still looking for The Ceremony. Last week I got a chance to see The Man Who Left His Will on Film but the print/transfer was terrible much like Shinjuku which left a little to be desired. No idea what has kept the majority of his work so elusive to home video, but I certainly hope that changes.

TIVOLI
Joined: Fri Oct 05, 2007 5:58 pm

Oshima

#7 Post by TIVOLI » Sun Jun 22, 2008 11:07 pm

Is anyone aware of the likelihood of Oshima's 1960's work appearing (Eclipse box?) eventually in Region 1? Or are the Yume releases the best that we can expect in the relatively near future?

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zedz
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#8 Post by zedz » Mon Jun 23, 2008 12:24 am

Recent bumping reminded me to relocate film comments from the 1970s thread:

The Man Who Left His Will on Film

This is a film which has much of the stylistic diversity of Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, but harnessed to a propulsive, if mysterious, storyline. In the first few minutes we experience straight documentary filmmaking, extreme point-of-view footage, highly distanced 'paranoia perspective' shots (roll over and beg, The Parallax View and The Conversation, Oshima was there first), and reasonably straight dramatic filmmaking. The opening sequence holds all of these different modes together to deliver a simply brilliant action sequence: the filmmaker flees, our hero in hot pursuit. Cut from frantic shaky-cam to dispassionate, objective shots of the pursuer scanning the neighborhood for him. Cut to implicitly sinister long shots of same: the observer observed? Our hero finally locates his quarry on top of a building, just before he crashes to the pavement below, body smashed but camera intact. A crowd gathers, the police arrive. Our hero seizes the camera and runs for his life. The camera is wrestled off him and he chases the police car through the streets until we all black out.

The film's action centres around a radical cell - along with the incestuous family a key social unit of the Japanese New Wave, as seen in Eros Plus Massacre and Ecstasy of the Angels - but devolves to the slightly dissociated couple of Motoki (our hero) and Yasuko, the deceased cameraman's girlfriend. The film preserves the earnest discussions of the young radicals, and even namechecks the New Wave filmmakers, including Oshima, who are presumed to support them, but with each of these discussions Oshima slyly undercuts their dogma by introducing 'refined' classical music partway through, then slowly messing it up electronically. (The fantastic score is one of Takemitsu's best, its main components being ominous industrial clangs and jazz that sounds like the 'In a Silent Way' sessions crashed by Alice Coltrane.)

The radical cell's understanding of recent events is curiously at odds with that of the protagonist (and ours, since we experienced those events from his perspective): they claim the filmmaker simply dropped the camera, but didn't die. You start to wonder: are you watching a ghost story, a political thriller, or something much stranger and unprecedented? The answer is yes.

When the film is recovered, everybody's surprised to see, not the record of protest actions that were meant to be covered, but in their place seemingly innocuous shots of ordinary Tokyo streets. The central sequence in which the newly-formed couple go in search of the nondescript locations recorded on the film is another bravura sequence, the kind of detective film Greenaway or Lynch would appreciate, especially when the investigative process leads Motoki to his own front door.

That's the second iteration of the 'landscape' material (and the film includes several other layers of Oshima-esque ritualistic repetitions), and the third one brings the film to its climax. Although the action has become exceedingly ritualised and abstract by this point, I find a genuine emotional resonance in it. Motoki is trying to refilm the film created by the dead filmmaker; Yasuko is trying to disrupt this process by entering his shots (i.e. by making herself, not the landscape, the subject of the film, thereby frustrating the cyclic repetition). Even though we have only a vague idea of the significance of these abstracted actions, something tells us that Motoki's project is dangerous and self-destructive, and we want Yasuko to succeed in interrupting it. At each site, however, third parties frustrate her attempts at frustration, with increasing violence. This ends up in an abduction and gang-rape that I'm not sure Yasuko survives. She continues to appear after this sequence, but
SpoilerShow
she seems to be much more in the 'world' of the boy, even to the extent of glimpsing her own dead body from the rooftop.

The film ends the only way it can, closing the loop that Motoki has forged. This hardly resolves everything in conventional terms, but it offers an extremely satisfying structural closure, encasing the film's action in a beautiful symmetrical Escherian design.

The Ceremony

If I had to select a single film to convince a neophyte of Oshima's talent, it would probably be this one (maybe with Boy second), simply because so many of this film's virtues are classical ones. Selecting a film to convince them of his originality and gutsy brilliance would be a different matter entirely.

In many respects, this is a very novelistic film. It has a fearless density to its narrative, with extremely complex familial relationships you need to parse in order to understand the full significance of what's going on (this time around I kept notes, and the act of doing so very quickly drew me deep into the film). For example, the key secondary figure of Setsuko is: the illegitimate daughter of the patriarch's sister; the former lover of the protagonist Masuo's father (Masuo is the patriarch's grandson); Masuo's object of desire; the occasional lover of Terumichi (the son of Masuo's father's fiancee - not his wife - and scion of the family); the mother of Ritsuko (cousin and potential wife of either Masuo or Terumichi). And then, behind these explicit relationships lies another layer of actual relationships that knits together three generations of incest or proto-incest, so that every relationship noted above threatens to turn into something darker.

The film's themes, metaphors and motifs are also developed in a thorough, formalised, rather literary fashion. The family is an obvious metaphor for Japan itself, and Oshima builds multiple references to recent Japanese history (the war, Manchuria, the 'humanisation' of the Emperor, 1950s student protest, 1960s neo-imperial radicalism) into the family saga. At times, the metaphors come right to the surface, as when Terumichi attacks his family with spray, yelling, "All of Japan will be disinfected"; elsewhere, they develop in the margins and only really hit home towards the end of the film (e.g. the baseball motif).

The motifs and metaphors are developed with care and solidity, so that they can resonate on every level of the fictional construction: the fear of being buried alive recalls a specific personal experience of Masuo, while also acting as a metaphor for his particularly poisonous family relationships, for families in general, for Japanese society, and for modern society in general. This is yet another Oshima film in which identity is at issue and under assault. How do you define yourself according to your context when that context (family, the social group, the nation) is utterly corrupt or compromised? Towards the end of the film we even get scenes, in an otherwise generally realist context, of the kind of absurdist role-playing the director had previously explored in Three Resurrected Drunkards and Death by Hanging: a wedding without a bride; a funeral in which a living relative displaces the corpse and crawls into the coffin.

Even structurally, the film falls neatly into chapters, based on the five family ceremonies recalled in flashback as Masuo and Ritsuko travel to visit Terumichi. The modern narrative inches forward with each chapter while the backstory leaps years at a time. The ceremonies recounted are two weddings, two funerals and a 'memory service' for Masuo's deceased father, but every ceremony is shadowed by death: they all become funerals of a sort. The successive ceremonies provide the outlines of the family saga - one of the ideas being explored is how family relationships are mediated by these ceremonies - giving us snapshots of dysfunction in 1947, 1952, 1956, 1960 and 1970, or thereabouts. Each ceremony has a different tone, and these become more stylised, both visually and dramatically, as they progress. The third ceremony, a wedding, takes the form of an exchange of songs with highly charged subtexts; the fourth, Masuo's phantom wedding, is a bizarre farce in which the absence of the bride is ignored, the wedding celebration even pausing while the non-existent bride goes off to change her non-existent dress. This wedding-without-a-bride somewhat recasts the first ceremony, the memory service for Masuo's father, as a funeral without a corpse.

Oshima's visual style is comparatively restrained in this film, employing exquisite, classical widescreen compositions and relying, in terms of camera movement, on only a few precisely defined movements, primarily a slow track in to scenes. Lateral tracks provide a secondary element of syntax, but there are hardly any other flourishes (e.g. tracks out, pans, zooms), although the settings and staging become more extravagant in the final twenty or so minutes, and there's the ostentatious superimposition, kanji by kanji, of Terumichi's climactic telegram on the scene preceding its arrival.

The soundtrack, however, is more consistently audacious, with a superb reliance on non-naturalistic sound, particularly in the muting of noises. The scene in which a young Masuo is listening to the ground is almost entirely silent, with only occasional wisps of the score intruding until the music wells up and dialogue begins. In the scene in which the present-day Masuo and Ritsuko wander about on the boat's deck at night, the roar of the wind and the sea is hollowed-out and faint, though their dialogue is at a normal level. Other scenes are also accompanied just by etiolated effects tracks and the score.

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shirobamba
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#9 Post by shirobamba » Wed Jun 25, 2008 1:22 pm

UPDATE: July 29th, 2008: added comparisons of the new Yume release of "Violence at High Noon" with the earlier Shochiku and RARO releases.

Received the new Carlotta releases yesterday and decided to post some comparisons of most of the existing versions for some films.
I couldn't include the new Yume releases, because I didn't buy them. (If a forum member owns them, and knows how to create screen grabs and the other data, please PM me, and I'll add them to the post later.)

Town of Love and Hope

Distribution: Shochiku
Runtime: 1:02:12
Average Bitrate: 9.80 MB/sec
Format / RC: NTSC / R2
OAR: 2.35:1
Transfer: Anamorphic 16X9, letterboxed, progressive
Subs: None
Features: Trailer

Distribution: Carlotta
Runtime: 1:02:14
Average Bitrate: 8.22 MB/sec
Format / RC: PAL / R2
OAR: 2.35:1
Transfer: Anamorphic 16X9 , letterboxed, progressive, same source as Shochiku DVD
Problems: slight ghosting, perhaps due to inproper NTSC > PAL conversion
Subs: French (forced, but player generated)
Features:
- Les soleils de demain (French subs)
- 100 ans de cinéma japonaise (French VO)
- Trailer (French subs)

Shochiku
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Carlotta
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Cruel Story of Youth

Distribution: Shochiku
Runtime: 1:36:18
Average Bitrate: 8.87 MB/sec
Format / RC: NTSC/ R2
OAR: 2.35:1
Transfer: Anamorphic 16X9 , letterboxed, progressive
Subs: None
Features: Featurette w/ Oshima Interview clips (15’)
Trailer

Distribution: Carlotta
Runtime: 1:36:21
Average Bitrate: 7.24 MB/sec
Format / RC: PAL/ R2
OAR: 2.35:1
Transfer: Anamorphic 16X9 , letterboxed, progressive
Problems: slight ghosting, perhaps due to inproper NTSC > PAL conversion
Subs: French (forced, but player generated)
Features: Le Japon sous tension: Video Intro by Donald Richie (Language Engl./ French
subs (25’)
Extraits des Carnets de notes d’Oshima (Language French/ Subs: none)
Trailer (French subs)

Distribution: RARO
Runtime: 1:36:54
Average Bitrate: 5.7 MB/sec
Format / RC: PAL/ R0
OAR: 2.35:1
Transfer: Non-Anamorphic 16X9 , Letterboxed, analog-sourced
Problems: heavy ghosting, far too much contrast boost,
Subs: Italian, English
Features: Trailer (unsubbed)
Intro by filmhistorian Adriano Apra (Engl. subs)

Shochiku
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Carlotta
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Raro
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Burial of the Sun

Distribution: Shochiku
Runtime: 1:27:36
Average Bitrate: 5.92 MB/sec
Format / RC: NTSC/ R2
OAR: 2.35:1
Transfer: Anamorphic 16X9 , letterboxed, progressive
Subs: None
Features: Tomorrow’s sons
Trailer

Distribution: Carlotta
Runtime: 1:27:39
Average Bitrate: 8.68 MB/sec
Format / RC: PAL/ R2
OAR: 2.35:1
Transfer: Anamorphic 16X9 , letterboxed, progressive
Problems: slight ghosting, perhaps due to inproper NTSC > PAL conversion
Subs: French (forced, but player generated)

Features: La Revolte d’Oshima (Language French/ Subs: none (24’)

Distribution: RARO
Runtime: 1:28:09
Average Bitrate: 5.53 MB/sec
Format / RC: PAL/ R0
OAR: 2.35:1
Transfer: Non-Anamorphic 16X9 , Letterboxed, analog-sourced
Problems: heavy ghosting, far too much contrast boost, edge enhancement
Subs: Italian, English
Features: Trailer (unsubbed)
Intro by filmhistorian Adriano Apra (Engl. subs)
Booklet 60 pages (Engl./ Ital.)

Shochiku
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Carlotta
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Raro
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Night and Fog in Japan

Distribution: Shochiku
Runtime: 1:47:12
Average Bitrate: 9.11 MB/sec
Format / RC: NTSC/ R2
OAR: 2.35:1
Transfer: Anamorphic 16X9 , Letterboxed, progressive
Subs: None
Features: Trailer

Distribution: Carlotta
Runtime: 1:42:52
Average Bitrate: 8.48 MB/sec
Format / RC PAL/ R2
OAR: 2.35:1
Transfer: Anamorphic 16X9 , Letterboxed, progressive
Subs: French (forced, but player generated)
Features: Mises au point (Language: French/ Subs: none) (11’)
Trailer (French subs)

Distribution: RARO
Runtime: 1:47:20
Average Bitrate: 8.3 MB/sec
Format / RC: PAL/ R0
OAR: 2.35:1 (cropped AR on DVD: 2.28:1)
Transfer: Non-Anamorphic 16X9 , Letterboxed, analog-sourced
Problems: heavy ghosting, far too much contrast boost, edge enhancement
Subs: Italian, English
Features: Interview w/ Roberto Silvestri (Language Italian/ Subs: None)
Booklet 10 pages

Distribution: Panorama
Runtime: 1:47:04
Average Bitrate: 4.19 MB/sec
Format / RC NTSC/ R3
Subs: Chinese, English
Features: None

Shochiku
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Carlotta
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Raro
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Panorama
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Pleasures of the Flesh

Distribution: Shochiku
Runtime: 1:30:51
Average Bitrate: 6.17 MB/sec
Format / RC: NTSC/ R2
OAR: 2.35:1
Transfer: Anamorphic 16X9 , Letterboxed, progressive
Subs: None
Features: Trailer

Distribution: Carlotta
Runtime: 1:27:15
Average Bitrate: 8.22 MB/sec
Format / RC: PAL/ R2
OAR: 2.35:1
Transfer: Anamorphic 16X9 , Letterboxed, progressive
Subs: French (forced, but player generated)
Features: L’Au delà des interdits (Language: French/ Subs: none) (25’)
Trailer

Shochiku
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Carlotta
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Violence at High Noon

Distribution: Shochiku
Runtime: 1:39:06
Average Bitrate: 5.63 MB/sec (4.4 GB)
Format / RC: NTSC/ R2
OAR: 2.35:1
Transfer: Non-anamorphic, 16X9, Letterboxed, progressive
Subs: None
Features: Trailer

Distribution: RARO
Runtime: 1:39:27
Average Bitrate: 7.3 MB/sec (Mainfeature: 5.4 GB)
Format / RC: PAL/ R2 (720 X 576)
OAR: 2.35:1
Transfer: Anamorphic 16X9 , Letterboxed, interlaced
Subs: Italian, None (optional)

Features: Interview with Bruno Di Marino (Italian / Subs: none) (13’)
Interview with Amir Naderi (Language: English/Subs: Italian) (7’)
Trailer (unsubbed)
Bookletino (8 p.)

Distribution: Yume
Runtime: 1:39:12
Average Bitrate: 7.3 MB/sec (Mainfeature: 5.4 GB)
Format / RC: PAL/ R2 (720 X 576)
OAR: 2.35:1
Transfer: Anamorphic 16X9 , Letterboxed, interlaced
Subs: English, None (optional)

Features: Trailer (unsubbed)

In sum:
The Shochiku release of 2006 is non-anamorphic, but has the best (albeit quite soft) picture, because it’s native NTSC and progressive. The RARO NTSC > PAL transfer isn’t done properly (see the same runtimes) resulting in lots of ghosting problems. In addition it’s non-progressive (interlaced) and has slight contrast boosting. The same of course is true for the Yume release, which is an exact port of the RARO DVD.

Shochiku
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RARO
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Yume
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Last edited by shirobamba on Sun May 02, 2010 2:55 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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sidehacker
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#10 Post by sidehacker » Wed Jun 25, 2008 3:16 pm

Thanks for the screens.

The Shochiku disc of The Sun's Burial actually does have subtitles, its just that they're Japanese subtitles. I posted more captures from the disc in the screen captures thread.

jojo
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#11 Post by jojo » Wed Jun 25, 2008 3:53 pm

By the way, I just want to say I appreciate the info you're posting, Zedz. Oshima is someone I know very little about and the more I read about his stuff the more I want to see them. The screens Shiro posted here have whetted my appetite more. These films look gorgeous!

Can't wait for the Oshima retrospective coming to my town this Fall!

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shirobamba
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#12 Post by shirobamba » Sat Jun 28, 2008 11:40 am

sidehacker wrote:The Shochiku disc of The Sun's Burial actually does have subtitles, its just that they're Japanese subtitles. I posted more captures from the disc in the screen captures thread.
Not on my disc. But there might be two different versions (w/ and w/out subs). My DVD comes from one of the boxsets, and I suppose you've bought a single release?

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#13 Post by myrnaloyisdope » Tue Jul 01, 2008 3:51 am

I've only watched In The Realm of Senses by Oshima, which I thought was pretty compelling. I actually stumbled onto the story of Abe Sada a couple of weaks before I watched this, and didn't know anything about the film when I watched it.

I thought it really depicted to eroticism and sexuality of Abe Sada quite well, and really emphasized the sexual dependence of the relationship with Kichizo Ishida.

Add to that that it was wonderfully filmed, and it contains the only cumshot I've seen in a mainstream film, and I have to give it my full support, even if I never want to see it again. (Dudes getting their wangs cut off is kind of uncomfortable to watch.)

wpqx
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#14 Post by wpqx » Sun Jul 06, 2008 12:24 pm

Outstanding reviews Zedz. After watching The Ceremony last night I realized there wasn't a tremendous amount written on it, and I felt that with one viewing I couldn't begin to do it justice. Oshima definitely seems to be of that poly-stylus school which makes his films so unpredictable yet ultimately so rewarding, you never really do know what you're going to get with them. The Japanese New Wave disc of The Ceremony was a good transfer although I'm not a huge fan of subtitles being printed in the black bars of the widescreen image. I believe there was a family tree special feature included, which would help a first time viewer like myself.

Before too long I'll watch Boy and be prepared for a whole new kind of Oshima.

btw I wasn't aware he made so many TV films, any word on availability of these?

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#15 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Sun Jul 06, 2008 1:21 pm

Most of the TV films were documentaries, although there are some dramas mixed in as well. To my knowledge, none of them bar 100 Years of Japanese Cinema are available on DVD anywhere, not even in Japan. This is a pretty gaping hole IMO, and the available critical commentary (at least in English) doesn't do much to fill it. Maureen Turim's study provides a rundown of most of the docs, with detailed descriptions of three -- Mao Tse-tung and the Cultural Revolution, The Pacific War and Yokoi and His Twenty-Eight Years of Secret Life on Guam -- that sound fascinating. I'd particularly like to see the Mao film, which (having aired in 1969) is more of an experimental current-affairs program than a historical documentary. I hope at least some of the TV work is included in the upcoming retrospective.

Also, the JNW disc of Ceremonies has two sets of subtitles for each language (English and French) -- one set for 4:3 monitors that places the subs in the black area, and a 16:9-safe set that places them over the image itself. Very thoughtful of them, considering that even some commercial distributors don't think of doing this.

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#16 Post by jojo » Mon Jul 07, 2008 1:34 pm

I caught a screening of "Boy" in Toronto on Saturday and it was an interesting experience. This is the first time I've seen ANY Oshima film.

I had already gotten the basic story from reading the plot summary, but the film was still interesting on a number of levels.

Superficially, there was a great sense of "place" that the film establishes. You really get a physical feel for the various environments in Japan. It works on a sort of travelogue level.

More intriguing was Oshima's inversion of the traditional family structure (I hesitate to strictly say 'Japanese' because even in the Western world in the 60s, the tradition family was typically patriarchal dominated). I had gone into the film expecting slightly stock stereotypes of a shrewish stepmother and enigmatic father, but Oshima afforded them more focus and depth than you would expect in a child-centred movie. The stepmother especially, turned out to be sort of the 'alpha dog' of the family, despite lacking the typical physicality of the father, the latter of which manages to look pathetic, immature and weak despite his penchant for temper tantrums and cuffing "Boy" and the stepmother on the face from time to time. It's the stepmother who wins Boy's trust and respect, it's the stepmother who shows him the ropes--even putting herself at physical risk at times--and it's the stepmother who basically makes all the meaningful decisions as to the family's next moves. At times, it seemed like Boy and the stepmother were the "married couple", while the father was the pouty son tagging along for the ride. Not that either of the parents aren't totally loathsome at times, but I ended up liking her more than I expected.

Naturally, this is a tale about "outsiders" but it's the way the film almost paints the unusual circumstances and behaviour of Boy's family as almost regular, normal day to day behaviour that gives the film its gut punch.

After the screening, I heard a few mutterings from the audience about the seemingly arbitrary switches from colour to black and white and back again throughout the film, and I must confess I am also at a loss as to the reasoning behind it--I can't think of any stylistic reasoning as to why Oshima decided to do this, and I also considered the possibility that budget issues may have came into play? That said, reaction seemed generally positive throughout; like me, I think many of the first time Oshima viewers are looking forward to exploring more of his work, and the retrospective on Oshima coming here this fall should be exciting stuff.

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#17 Post by tavernier » Wed Jul 09, 2008 12:03 pm

Oshima retro will be part of this year's NY Film Festival.

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#18 Post by ptmd » Wed Jul 09, 2008 12:38 pm

Oshima retro will be part of this year's NY Film Festival.
I was afraid of that... As if the Film Festival didn't make scheduling screenings during early October hard enough. Still, I can't wait to see these films.

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#19 Post by shirobamba » Tue Jul 29, 2008 5:11 pm

UPDATE: Added comparisons of the new Yume release of "Violence at High Noon" with the earlier Shochiku and RARO releases.

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#20 Post by Steven H » Wed Jul 30, 2008 12:15 am

shirobamba wrote:UPDATE: Added comparisons of the new Yume release of "Violence at High Noon" with the earlier Shochiku and RARO releases.
Well now I'm just all kinds of disappointed. I suppose that's what I get for getting my hopes up for the YUME releases. Thanks a million Shiro for posting those captures.

I have my fingers crossed someone in NTSC land takes a stab at these films and uses those gorgeous Shochiku transfers.

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#21 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Sat Aug 30, 2008 6:47 am

Variety has a bit of info on the retrospective. The full retro will comprise 26 films, including "all his fiction features" (23 by my count) and "late documentaries" (which can only mean Kyoto, My Mother's Place and 100 Years of Japanese Cinema); I'll hazard a guess that Yunbogi's Diary is #26. After the NYFF it'll hit Minneapolis, Vancouver, Cambridge, Seattle, Berkeley, D.C. and Rochester, "among others."

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#22 Post by zedz » Tue Sep 09, 2008 12:39 am

Thanks to the generosity of a fellow forum-member, I've been able to plug three more gaps in my Oshima viewing (only three of his sixties features to go!), so here are some comments.

The Catch (1961)

An independent production, Oshima's only option in the immediate aftermath of the Night and Fog in Japan debacle, and somewhat tamer formally than the previous film, this is nevertheless rather audacious. It's a period film, but the film's concerns - society gone feral, the corruption of patriarchy, racism - are completely in line with Oshima's concerns in his contemporary films throughout the sixties. In the dying days of WWII, Japanese villagers capture a black American soldier and keep him imprisoned like a wild animal. As if the situation weren't already charged enough, the relentless hate speech digs further fishhooks into the sores. It's hard to imagine an American film of the time tackling racism in such a head-on manner, and that's only part of what Oshima's doing here.

The Rebel (1962)

Surely the most conventional Oshima film of the 1960s, this period action drama charts the rise and fall of Amakusa Shiro Tokisada, Christian rebel, in the 17th century. It's well done and all, but it's the only 60s Oshima that I could imagine being directed by somebody else.

It almost seems like a mea culpa for Night and Fog in Japan, a film which very consciously spat in the eye of Shochiku. Perhaps Oshima was showing Toei that, yes, he could play by the rules, if they'd only let him back in the sandpit. They didn't fall for it, and it would be several years before he'd be permitted to direct another feature.

For all its conventionality, it's still a good, interesting film, and there's plenty here for an Oshima follower to appreciate. For instance, several scenes utilise refinements of the plans-sequences of Night and Fog in Japan.

Pleasures of the Flesh (1965)

This is a much more full-blooded Oshima film, anti-social, nihilistic and visually ambitious (including some extraordinary multiple superimpositions and premonitory glimmers of Violence at Noon's ultra-fragmented editing style). It exhibits the residue of exploitation cinema in its pulpy, twist-filled storyline (crime, sex, death, dissipation), and for me this is something of a limiting factor.

It's nevertheless a really great pulpy hook: a man kills a blackmailer and is in turn blackmailed by an embezzler, forced to look after his stolen cash while he serves out his five-year jail sentence. When the blackmailee decides to commit suicide four years in, he figures he might as well blow all the money on mindless sexual pleasure before he goes. It's sublime and ridiculous at the same time (you can just imagine what different filmmakers could have made of it: Fuller, Fassbinder, Hitchcock), but the set-up is much stronger than the pay-off.

Oshima's subsequent film, Violence at Noon, could also be seen to be built on an exploitation hook (the hunt for a serial rapist), but it immediately transcends that basis to become something fresh and original, and gets stronger and more distinctive as it progresses. Pleasures of the Flesh seems a little more tentative, though this is only in comparison to the run of startling originality that followed.

Looking at the film from that retrospective angle, you can see Oshima trying out all sorts of things. There are scenes that are decentred and fragmented in their composition and structure; there are bravura slips into slow motion (a fleeing bride, a fall into water); arch use of silence and soundtrack (striking work here by Joji Yuasa, who seems to have had a very selective scoring career: Matsumoto's Funeral Parade of Roses, Itami's The Funeral, Gorin's My Crasy Life!); and other visual set-pieces (an upside-down kiss, that seductive, superimposed, dissolving 'sex' montage). You sort of get the sense that Oshima was so grateful to be back in charge of a feature film that he was getting as much as he could out of his system, even if the material didn't quite warrant it. His style in later films, though sometimes chaotic or diffuse (as in Diary of a Shinjuku Thief), tended to be more uniform and obviously aligned to his content. Whatever its shortcomings, Pleasures of the Flesh kickstarted one of the great creative runs in cinema history.

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#23 Post by colinr0380 » Thu Oct 23, 2008 10:51 am


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Matt
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#24 Post by Matt » Thu Oct 23, 2008 11:38 am

The Fanciful Norwegian wrote:Variety has a bit of info on the retrospective... After the NYFF it'll hit Minneapolis, Vancouver, Cambridge, Seattle, Berkeley, D.C. and Rochester, "among others."
The retro hits the Walker in Minneapolis in November. It doesn't look like they're showing all 26 films in the package. James Quandt is there on the 5th to kick everything off.

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#25 Post by Barmy » Thu Oct 23, 2008 11:46 am

For the most part that selection is the best stuff. Some of NO's work is justifiably obscure.

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