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| Nagisa Oshima |
“Social critic, political agitator, and […] well-known television personality, Nagisa Oshima has always pursued a cultural strategy of which film-making is only a part. At the same time, Oshima’s cinema itself does not remain within the domain of classical film art. In his best films he shows an interest beyond illusionism designed for telling a story. This attitude pushed him into the foreground of the Japanese avant-garde in the 1960s, and made him one of the most influential film-makers in Japanese history. (Hiroshi Komatsu, 718)
The 60s modernist paradigm of the New Wave was centred on Oshima and Shohei Imamura, As outlined above, it constituted “an avant-garde movement” initially born within the rigid structure of the commercial studios Oshima took a politico-sociological approach, Masahiro Shinoda an historical, and Imamura a cultural-anthropological one, but all dealt with the problem of a new self-consciousness. Their cinematic form, like that of the French New Wave, was also influenced by a desire to overthrow the narrative and technical conventions established by the studio system. (Audie Bock, 266).
Although of the left, Nagisa Oshima (1932-2013) always distrusted party politics and remained fiercely independent and critical of the Old Left, this opposition given clearest expression in Night and Fog in Japan. “The greatest obstacle to the influence of art in present day Japan, and within it” he said “is the politicisation which enslaves art.” One of Oshima’s predominant themes is the linkage of sex and revolution to represent the “positive energy” of human beings and their most overt defiance of societal conventions” (Max Tessier, 69).
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| Night and Fog in Japan |
The title of Night and Fog in Japan/Rishon no you to kiri (1960), a homage to Alain Resnais' holocaust documentary Night and Fog (similarly “a narration, a memory and an argument”), in which Oshima’s historical, critical and theoretical concerns become clear in a form of post-mortem rather than a call to action per se, or perhaps only to rake over the implications of the failure of the violent demonstrations by the Left that ultimately failed to stop the signing of a new US-Japan Security Treaty in 1960 which was not supported by majority of public opinion. In the film, angry staged exchanges involving the past intruding upon the present as offscreen space intrudes upon onscreen space - flashbacks from the wedding of a former Japan Communist Party activist and a member of the student radical group (the New Left having split from the CP) the wedding meant to be a symbol of reconciliation.
The multidimensional structure which Oshima would later return to in The Ceremony, juxtaposes two groups one in 1952 (the Old Left Communists must deal with a spy) and the wedding banquet in 1960 (the New Left must deal with the failure of the struggle against the Security Pact renewal) are shown focusing on their respective responses in a process of dialectical struggle on two levels - past and present. The constantly panning camera refuses to allow the wedding proceedings to go unchallenged. Shedding light on the internal and external contradictions arising from the May-June 1960 events involves a complex tour-de-force of deliberately outrageous theatricalisation in 43 to 45 sequence shots as internal edits are replaced by lateral pans over the assembled wedding group, objective chronological narrative replaced with the highly subjective flashback structure in which the characters present their own experience of the events. “Out of this strategy a critical political discourse emerges that finally holds the CP members responsible for the failure of the action taken against the bid for power of the pro-American government. After this Oshima calls on intellectuals (his audience) not to repeat this error.” (Tessier 73).
After going through an extremely difficult time in dispute with Shochiku over Night and Fog which they pulled out of release after only four days apparently for political reasons (‘the avant-garde film defied the entertainment demands of the company’). “It employed methods never before seen in Japanese cinema, and proved immensely influential on other young filmmakers “ (Komatsu 718). Oshima walked out with several colleagues to set up their own company in 1961.
One of Oshima’s favourite targets was the need for renewal. He wrote in 1963 about such a need in the form of a new subjective consciousness to replace the pseudo subjectivities - rigidity on the part of the old Left and naivety on the part of the New - that needed to be eradicated and replaced with a single truly subjective movement; pseudo subjectivity he argued was “the victim syndrome.” This, Oshima saw as being reflected in the majority of Japanese films: that fifteen years after the war's end the Japanese saw themselves as “victims of the war” while not attempting to go beyond for its profound causes (Tessier 74). As Komatsu emphasises “Oshima’s films are responses to actual events, changes and problems in Japanese society, and so each film inevitably holds a close connection to the time in which it was made [to be seen] “in form as well as content” (ibid).
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| The Catch |
In The Catch/Shiiku (1962), a black American airman is held captive in a small village during the last summer of WW 2. He is used as a scapegoat for all the psychological ills of the villagers. The war ends without them being able to turn him over to the authorities and they end up killing him. The mean hypocritical, deluded behaviour of the adults is highlighted by the reaction of the children. The situation with the villagers provided an opportunity for Oshima to attack the myth of the “victim syndrome,” the island a microcosm of postwar Japan
Max Tessier marks Violence at Noon/Hakuno torima (1966) as “a turning point both thematically and aesthetically in a greatly diversified life’s work that reached a zenith in The Ceremony and In the Realm of the Senses” (p.76). As in other of his films, in the story of a real life sexual psychopath, a rapist and murderer metaphorically characterised as “ Floating Ghost in Broad Daylight” - as the Japanese title translates - in contrast with the darkness enclosing Night and Fog in Japan. Oshima takes up the theme, as he explained, of the obsessed “demonic” criminal who feels inside himself a powerful urge to do evil without necessarily knowing why. He can only obtain sexual satisfaction through rape. The focus is not on a police man-hunt but on two women who knew him and, through them, the history of the village where he was born. Oshima reveals his real subject slowly in frequent flashbacks combined with fantasy scenes : an account of the decay of postwar idealism and the inexorable restoration of the old inequalities and injustices. (Tony Rayns, ‘Time Out’). In place of any semblance of realism is a mosaic of around 2000 shots with constantly changing camera angles obscuring any possibility of a 'single truth’. It is one of several films made by Oshima, 1965-9, with “the links between eroticism and violence, sex and politics, and the ambivalence about the sex roles, all coming together [most explicitly] in In the Realm of the Senses (1976)” (David Desser, 97).
Sexual and criminal obsession fuels A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Song/Nihon s shunka-ko (1967) in which Oshima ridicules the symbols of the imperial state, identified by Tessier with the following four titles below as “essential titles” - five landmarks in the investigation of language that constitutes a radical break from the syntax of Japanese cinema (77).
Japanese Summer: Double Suicide/Muri shinto nihon no natsu (1967) is a study of traditional “double suicide” with a modern twist. A man is looking for someone who is willing to kill him, and a woman is looking for someone to make love to her. The two meet and get voluntarily involved in a gang war. Just before being shot by police they commit suicide. “Filled with anarchy and nihilism, and obsessed by destruction and nothingness Japanese Summer gets lost in Oshima’s fascination with his own structural elements […] it succeeds in communicating this fascination to the viewer” (Tessier 79).
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| Death by Hanging |
Death by Hanging (1968), like all of Oshima's films, with the exception of Max Mon Amour, deals in a challenging way with specifically Japanese questions and problems. Here, in ”one of Oshima’s most sustained assaults on the Japanese state” (ibid 78) taking the form of an absurd comedy about the situation of Korean immigrants in Japan, centring on a state hanging that goes wrong mounted as a sort of witty Brechtian argument. (Tony Rayns )
In Three Resurrected Drunkards/Kaette kite yopparai (1968) one of Oshima’s most clearly Godardian works in the manipulation of film language, returns to the serous topic of the Korean problem, comic conceptual games including playing with the structure of the film itself, involving illegal Korean immigrants who steal clothes to change their identities
Diary of a Shinjuku Thief/Shinjuku dorobo nikki (1968) is a teasing and provocative collage inspired by the student riots of’ ’68 and contemporary youth culture generally, Shinjuku being the entertainment centre for youth culture. While centrally recognised as an exploration of the links between sex and politics, it is also recognised by Desser “as the most completely theatricalized of Oshima’s films” (188) The connecting thread in the themes subordinate to the idea of acting is a relationship between an aggressive and vaguely masculine young woman and a passive and vaguely effeminate young man. The pursuit of satisfactory orgasms with each other takes them through a dizzying mix of fact and fiction including an encounter with a real life sexologist and involvement in a 'fringe' performance of a neo-primitive kabuki show “stealing' roles from the neo-primitive group, the Situation Players. “Existing logical connections are deliberately obscured by contrasting moods, styles and lines of thought” (Tony Rayns). Desser sees “the links between sex and revolution [as forming] the structuring basis of what is one of Oshima's most important films.” His point seems to be [as he explained] that “sexual frustration is one of many sorts of frustration that go with the various forms of rebellion.” (Desser 93)
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| Boy |
Boy/Shōnen (1969) is based on a newspaper story: a down and out family make their young son fake road accidents in order to blackmail motorists for 'hospital fees’. “Starting with character studies of the family members, Oshima develops this story into an open-ended question about the truth of appearances centring on the boy's own fantasies about his sci-fi hero[…] A key film in the struggle for a modern political cinema.” (Rayns). The father, a war veteran who claims war injuries prevent him from working is a cruel patriarch who robs his son of the pleasures of childhood. While classical in form, Oshima sharply turns away from any possibility of the emotion of sentimental family melodrama “by resorting to ellipses or by introducing imaginary scenes “forcing the spectator to reach the level of surreality required by the filmmaker“ (Tessier 78) to the extent of seeming to exonerate the parents. Prior to In the Realm of the Senses, Boy was Oshima's most successful film in western art cinemas.
The Man Who Left His Will on Film/Secret Story of Postwar Tokyo/Tokyo senso sengo aiwa (1970) described by Tessier as “undoubtedly a rough draft of a film, unsatisfying but necessary to the development of the next film, The Ceremony, “which appears to be the summation of Oshima’s work to date” (81). It is a biting and cautionary film, Oshima's post-68 analysis of the failure and disillusionment of the student left. Motoki, a student, and members of the “Posi Posi” group act out their own parts. Motoki discovers that he is incapable of filming the street uprising named “the Tokyo War” at the time of the post -1968 demonstrations. He finally commits suicide, leaving his fantasies on film. Like Death by Hanging, it starts with a riddle (the real or imagined disappearance of a student militant) and then follows through all the implications with a remorseless logic. It's less a mystery thriller than a series of provocative questions. What is militancy? Does struggle mean violence? Is it really possible for an individual to identify with the interests of a group? And what part do sexual problems play in determining the feelings and actions of young people? (Rayns)
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| The Ceremony |
The Ceremony/Gishiki (1971) is a thinly disguised commentary on Japan's post-war history using ceremonial family gatherings (mainly weddings and funerals) as a key to the changes in Japanese society: individual characters represent specific political factions, just as events in the narrative mirror the twists and turns in Japan's domestic and foreign policies. The nature of rituals recurring through Oshima’s work beginning with Night and Fog, their theatrical nature and “the way in which the Japanese ruling class ropes together religious and political ideology to naturalize its existence is deconstructed in The Ceremony” (Desser 187). Oshima “keeps the dense allegory accessible by stressing individuals' feelings – their dreams, aspirations, frustrations and agonies - as much as ceremonies” (Rayns). “ Oshima reveals that it is precisely the ceremonies that function to keep the family together, but when such ceremonies are revealed as hollow, meaningless (such as the “brideless” wedding sequence), as the structures which bind the family are unraveled” (Desser 188). “The director’s “flow of consciousness” is still active. Banquets interrupted, family contradictions, songs - military, romantic, bawdy, or political. Oshima, however, adds a few episodes of his invention sending the film over into fantasy and surrealism once again” (Tessier 82). In 1971 Oshima’s prognosis for the future was not optimistic, the Japanese in 25 years, he concluded, had undergone no basic change.
“Along with Death by Hanging, A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Song and Night and Fog in Japan, The Ceremony ranks as one of Oshima’s own favourite films - the ones he feels that only he could have made […] It is the complexity of its commentary on the whole 25 years of Japanese postwar history that redeems the sentimentality for him […] the amount of himself he recognises in the main character of the film, Masuo” (Bock 324). Oshima considered that during ceremonies Japanese are possessed of particularly delicate emotions often completely unrelated to their daily lives, a time when the special characteristics of the Japanese spirit are revealed. In a statement released at the time of the international release of The Ceremony, Oshima further explained that his own spirit wavered during such occasions. What worried him was that one might easily reject, both intellectually and emotionally, militarism and xenophobic nationalism in daily life, but that these forces are not so easily denied.
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| Dear Summer Sister |
Dear Summer Sister/Natsu no imoto (1972) is a parable about Japan's Okinawa problem beginning in present day Okinawa, a holiday resort for the Japanese. The underlying thread of a girl's search for her long-missing brother begins to conjure up guilt-ridden memories of the island as the site of war-time atrocities. Continuing exploration of film language, the improvisation method proven in Shinjuku Thief and The Man Who Left His Will.. “without breathing new life into them or probing more deeply” (ibid).
As far back as his first film made at Shochiku's Ofuna studio, Yoshishige Yoshida (1933-2022) was “trying to achieve a new type of drama by deconstructing the traditional ideology of the company” (Komatsu 717). The height of his achievement is to be found in Eros + Massacre (1969). Desser writes that Yoshida's film, with two others, Hani's The Inferno of First Love (1968) and Oshima's The Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970), “reveal the essence, the height, and the end of the New Wave...[They] encapsulate virtually all of the themes […] and portend the end of the movement. In some sense they stand as elegies not only to the New Wave of the cinema, but to the end of the era of the 60s in Japan […] which began with Ampo toso, the Anti-Security Treaty demonstrations in 1959-60” (192), although, as Desser details, protest action against the US military (anti-nuclear, Vietnam) continued throughout the decade, actually peaking in intensity in 1969.
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| Yoshishige Yoshida |
It is not clear that the three filmmakers - Hani, Yoshida and Oshima - realised that they were witnessing the last phase of violent protest (195). The '69 demonstrations were far more violent and spectacular than those in 1960. Desser states that Oshima was saddened by the reappearance of Stalinism in small sects of student activists which he felt destroyed his generation. There was also the feeling of being unable to communicate with the student activists and with youth in general. This led the filmmakers to reexamine their politics and its relationship to cinema. (196)
Reflexivity in their above three films takes various forms. All three focus on filmmaking as diegetic ( fictional) activities. There is a focus on projecting and viewing films. The use of projectors is understood as a projection of desire, the desire to create cinema, the will to film. But this inevitably leads to death, in all three a protagonist dies : that there is nothing to film, that the will to film leads to the death of film, a function of failing political aspirations. The breakdown of narrative reflects the fragmentation of reality and of individual character, clearest in Hani's Inferno. The death of narrative is most overt in Oshima's The Man Who Left His Will on Film in which no story emerges because there is no character. The unresolved dialectical tension in the film between documentary and fictional modes “may be expressed as the struggle between Marx and Freud, documentary and fiction, exterior and interior, between, if you will, Lumière and Méliès.” (ibid 200).
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| Masahiro Shinoda |
Of the New Wave directors Masahiro Shinoda (1931-2025) who directed his first three films in two years focussing on youth and youth gangs, was the most versatile and prolific directing more than 30 features, 1960-2003. His approach was described by David Desser as “never as radical as Oshima nor as consistent as Yoshida and certainly not as satirical as Imamura” (138). He made films set in a variety of periods ranging from a standard Samurai film like Samurai Spy (Sarutobi ,1967) to the “extremely deconstructive” Assassination (Ansatsu, 1964). Shinoda’s particular contribution reached “a maturity of vision and style” to the politicised image of women in his ninth feature Pale Flower (Kawaita hana, 1963) in linking his female figures with youth images. While he did not feel part of “anything like a school,” Shinoda said that what they did share was antagonism to the older generation’s confidence in a settled humanism with conclusive characterisation and story according to a set script, instead being drawn to a more open, improvised approach, as in Pale Flower where “in the script […] one line ‘they are gambling’ […] became 120 shots” (interview in ‘American Film’ May 1985).
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| Susumu Hani |
Noel Burch saw Susumu Hani as standing somewhat apart from Oshima and Yoshida as perhaps the unwitting elegists of the New Wave when the decade of violent protest transpired to be a final surge. Burch finds Hani, in his films like The Inferno of First Love (1968), lacking in his grappling with “the theoretical aspects that make all of Oshima's films so important” although they do contain “some brilliantly impressive passages” (347). The main characters “are definitely first cousins of the “mad' young people in Diary of a Shinjuku Thief and Yoshida's Eros Plus Massacre but Burch considers that Hani “does not seem committed to them, and his eclecticism has nothing to do with Oshima's constant concern to renew himself” (ibid). Burch also sees Hani as a figure apart in the New Wave, his films marked by a mix of the methods of fiction and non-fiction abounding in the subtle touches to be found in She and He (1963), seen to be equal to that of Antonioni at that time.
Yoshida in Eros + Massacre is similarly dialectical as Hani in juxtaposing documentary with fiction, but also additionally “Marx to Freud, history to myth, politics with sexuality.” Yoshida alternates two time-frames, the present (1969) and the past (1916-23) and compares the political/sexual struggle of an anarchist couple in the ‘past’, Osagi Sakae and Ito Noe, to fictional characters in the 'present', students Eiko and Wada. Desser states “the past is both imagined and recreated. Past and present merge. Characters in the past emerge in the present.” Scenes are repeated and performance theatricalised in line with post-Shingeki theatre's rejection of Shingeki's modern realism and its accompanying ideology (Desser 173). Visually, the off-centre stark compositions in black and white on widescreen ratio, more than rival Antonioni's.
Self referentiality, reflexivity and a dialectical narrative structure characterise these three films (by Oshima, Hani and Yoshida) for the purpose of posing the question of the nature of political filmmaking in the face of political disappointment. The question of youth's search for identity is similarly present in all three films (Desser 200-1). As indicated, Eros juxtaposes and compares two generations of political and sexual radicals. What is lacking is information as to how the films, Oshima's and Yoshida's in particular, were received by critics and audiences. For Noël Burch Eros is “Yoshida's masterpiece...few films in western cinema are as freely disjunctive and as dialectical in their approach to space-time” (348). However, except for Burch, David Desser and Keiko McDonald, Eros + Massacre is largely by-passed in analyses and discussions of the New Wave reflecting the degree of difficulty it presents for the uninitiated viewer. Originally running three and a half hours, a circulating version on DVD of Eros is 166 mins, however a recent Blu-ray release restores the film to 186 minutes.
The centrality of women to questions of identity and sexuality, translates into the above three films each with important female characters. Historically the short-lived left-leaning tendency films of the late 20s - early 30s, focused on the working class, the majority with women as central characters looking forward, as Desser notes, to the New Wave's finding of women as a powerful metaphor for the situation of alienated groups in the postwar era (109). The replacing stream of films, termed “feminisuto” (from the Japanese pronunciation of feminist) were produced by directors who had a feminist viewpoint such as Mizoguchi, Shindo and Imamura.
Japanese critic Tadao Sato differentiates the nuances of feminisuto as a tendency to idolise women as uncomplainingly rich in endurance rather than as figures of pathos, “the worship of womanhood as a special Japanese brand of feminism […] having its roots in the moral consciousness of the ordinary people” (Sato 78). He also notes that in Mizoguchi’s postwar masterpieces the romantic and realistic approaches were combined harmoniously with the central theme of worship of womanhood. Writer- director Kaneto Shindo (1912-2012) who had studied scriptwriting under Mizoguchi, can be considered the inheritor of this theme in the dramas he directed himself, “all of which were centred on women that were neither naively beautiful or awe-inspiring.” Desser sees his view of women “as almost a direct extension of Mizoguchi’s […] most specifically in the atmospheric horror film Onibaba (1964) ”which focusses on women as innocent victims of war yet with commitment to survival comparable to Imamura’s women forcing them into the role of spider women” (120).
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Many of the films mentioned in this post by Bruce may be viewed in high quality subtitled copies by searching The Internet Archive.
Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links
Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more
Part Two - Defining Art Cinema
Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism
Part Four - Authorship and Narrative
Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles
Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror
Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke
Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms
Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE
Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry
6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group
6(10) France - Part Two - The Left Bank/Rive Gauche Group and an Independent
6(11) France - Part Three - Young Godard
6(12) France - Part Four - Godard:Visionary and Rebel
6 (13) France Part 5 Godard with Gorin, Miéville : Searching for an activist voice
6(14) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Bresson
6 (15) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Jacques Tati
6 (16) - Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Carl Th Dreyer
6 (17) - Italy and Luchino Visconti
6(18 - Italy and Roberto Rossellini - Part One
6(19) - Rossellini, INDIA and the new Historical realism
6(20) - Rossellini in Australia
6 (21) - Italy - Michelangelo Antonioni
6 (22) - Italy - Federico Fellini, Ermanno Olmi
6 (23) - Italy - Pasolini, Rosi
6 (24) - Interregnum - Director/Auteur/Autoren
6 (26) - Alexander Kluge Part One
6 (27) - Alexander Kluge Part Two
6 (28) - The Young German Cinema: Reitz, Schlondorff, von Trotta
6(29 ) West German Cinema - Fassbinder
6 (30) West German Cinema - Straub & Huillet
6 (33) Nordic Cinemas - Bergman and Widerberg
6 (34) - Scandinavia - Sjoman, Zetterling, Troell
6 (35) - East Germany - Konrad Wolf, Frank Beyer
6 (36) - East Central Europe - Poland
6(37) - East Central Europe - Hungary Part One
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