Nagisa Oshima and Other Japanese New Wave Films
There have been two retrospectives of Oshima recently in New York, as well as a brief New Wave overview at the Japan Society. Most of these films aren't readily available, and for Oshima at least, people's opinions of him have been skewed by only watching his late work, particularly In the Realm of the Senses (which is really not my thing). So here are quick takes on what I've seen. First, three early Oshima films.
The Sun's Burial (Oshima, 1960): Assorted gang members and other lowlifes in Osaka try to make money and kill each other. Even here, though, Oshima is not concerned with realism. The film is essentially a melodrama and the plot contrivances are designed to generate theatricality and brutality. Oshima is technically fluent, but the film's construction pales next to Imamura's contemporaneous Pigs and Battleships, which takes a more anthropological view toward its lower-class subjects.
Night and Fog in Japan (Oshima, 1960): At a wedding, students, professors, and activists argue over what happened during the student movement against the Japan-America security treaty ten years earlier. There's a lot of political talk without much background, but the depiction of a dead-serious Communist student movement, complete with censure and autocracy, is compelling. The flashbacks and camera movements are vaguely dialectical (the camera has a habit of swinging horizontally backwards and forwards), and it's clear that the political content is meant seriously, not satirically, even if Oshima is ultimately pessimistic about the movements and their hollow leaders. It's a more literal version of what Godard did in La Chinoise.
Pleasures of the Flesh (Oshima, 1963): Based on a book apparently entitled Pleasures of the Coffin, this is another over-the-top melodrama. Our hero murders a man who raped the teenage object of his obsession/love/lust, then comes into a fortune through hard-to-figure circumstances. He spends a year spending money by hiring assorted women as prostitutes. Things go very badly. The material seems to be tongue-in-cheek, but the rampant misogyny (the women just want money, they betray him, they don't have feelings, etc.) is still hard to take. Best example of such: our hero secretly watches a pimp rape his prostitute, but doesn't intervene until the pimp is about to pour acid on her face. Yeah.
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I’ve only seen “Death By Hanging,” which I found tedious and confusing at times. With that one film I thought Oshima was a very flexible filmmaker like Godard, and just as political but very weird.
— Jake · Apr 8, 05:25 PM · #
Well, the positive side to all this ambivalence is that there doesn’t yet seem to be a critical consensus on what Oshima’s “key work(s)” is/are, so you may yet find something you really like, given that he was so versatile.
— Ryan · Apr 9, 01:12 AM · #