Background
Oshima, Nagisa was born on March 31, 1932 in Kyoto.
大島渚
Oshima, Nagisa was born on March 31, 1932 in Kyoto.
Graduated from Kyoto University.
His masterpiece is The Ceremony, a bleak but luminous picture of how domestic ritual destroys or perverts the life force in a family. Once again, the stinging touch of a Buñuel is evident in the scenes like that in which the young mistress is discovered bound to a tree dead and, as the camera circles, the sword is drawn out of her body and an arc of blood jumps out behind it.
hi the Realm of the Senses and Empire of Passion were erotic events of the 1970s, provoking censorship and controversy, and treating the body with a new graphic directness seldom free from sadomasochism. These films made Oshima famous, but they seemed calculated sensations compared with his earlier films.
There was worse to come. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence was a story about British and Australians in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, but it was also smitten with the aura of David Bowie—in short, it came out bizarre, confused, and with little bearing on reality. In trying for an international picture, Oshima had lost his roots. Max Mon Amour attempted to describe the love between a woman and a gorilla—and it made King Kong seem ever better than one had thought. Oshima must be regarded now as a major example of fatal hesitation or misdirection.
Oshima was then hampered by illness for many years. In response, he turned to documentary and work for television. But in 1999, he returned with the remarkable Gohatto—a triumph of style and wit, dazzlingly beautiful, and full of poetic innuendo about gender and role-playing. It was so complete a return that Oshima was automatically reacclaimed as a master.
Japanese cinema in the 1960s produced a battery of young talent, but none as serious, precise, or versatile as Oshima. Arguable, he was the first Japanese director who seemed to be functioning within a totally modern world. He had rejected the period film and grappled with the agonizing forces compelling Japan to choose betw een its traditions and modernity. Much of his early work is still unknown in the West, but his subject matter indicates the new postwar consciousness: The Sun’s Burial is a picture of a seething slum community; The Catch deals with a Negro soldier taken prisoner during the war.
But it was in 1968 that Oshima made his decisive impact with Death by Hanging and Diary of a Shinjuku Thief. The first is the story of the execution of a young Korean who had raped and killed two Japanese girls. It has the icy claritv of composition, scraped clean of direct emotional associations, and with the first evidence of Oshimas almost surrealist eve for the ritual workings of Japanese society. As for Shinjuku Thief it is not fanciful to compare it with the Buñuel of L'Age d’Or, for it sees animal self-expression as being in brutal confrontation with social mores and the codes of Japanese living. Like Buñuel, Oshima is effortlessly shocking but always chaste, watching the vivid sexual performance of his characters as if they were insects.
Oshima has shown a taste for dramatic human stories that are metaphors of the recent history of Japan. Boy, an extraordinary account of a wandering family that fake road accidents for insurance settlements, as well as having great narrative interest, is a portrait of the moral confrontations forced upon the new Japan.
Married Akiko Koyama, 1960. 2 children.