Nagisa Ōshima
Nagisa Oshima (大島 渚 Ōshima Nagisa, born March 31, 1932) 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.
Oshima, born in Kyoto, 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 Senses, 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.
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.
In 1996 Oshima suffered a stroke, but he returned to directing in 1999 with the period piece Taboo (Gohatto), featuring music by Ryuichi Sakamoto who also co-starred Oshima's 1983 movie Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.
Filmography
- A Town of Love and Hope (1959)
- Cruel Story of Youth (1960)
- Night and Fog in Japan (1960)
- The Catch (1961)
- Shiro Tokisawa (1962)
- 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)