Nagisa Ōshima

Nagisa Oshima at Cannes in 2000

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

He first came to prominence with The Catch (1961), based on a novella by Kenzaburo Oe about the relationship between a wartime Japanese village and a captured African American serviceman.

One of Oshima's more unusual films was Band of Ninja (1967), an adaptation of the popular manga by Sampei Shirato, Ninja Bugei-cho, a 16th-century saga of oppressed peasants and deadly ninja. It is not a live-action film, or even an animated one; Oshima simply photographed close-ups of Shirato's drawings and added voices. Nevertheless, it was a modest critical and commercial success in Japan.

Death by Hanging (1968) presented the story of the failed execution of a young Korean for rape and murder. The film uses non-realistic "distancing" techniques after the fashion of Brecht or Godard to examine Japan's record of racial discrimination against its Korean minority.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A collection of Oshima's essays and articles was published in English in 1993 as Cinema, Censorship and the State (ISBN 0262650398). A critical study by Maureen Turim, The Films of Oshima Nagisa: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast (ISBN 0520206665) appeared in 1998.

Partial filmography

• A Town of Love and Hope (1959)
• Cruel Story Of Youth (1960)
• The Sun's Burial (aka Tomb of the Sun) (1960)
• Night and Fog in Japan (1960)
• The Catch (1961)
• Shiro Tokisawa (1962)
• Death By Hanging (1968)
• Boy (1969)
• The Ceremony (1971)
• In the Realm of the Senses (1976)
• Empire of Passion (1978)
• Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) - based in part on the war experiences of Laurens van der Post.
• Max, Mon Amour (1986)
• Taboo (1999)

External links

• Nagisa Oshima at the Internet Movie Database
• Profile at Japan Zone
• Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database
• Japanese New Wave Cinema Classics