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Nagisa Oshima by Nelson Kim Nelson Kim is a writer and filmmaker living in New York City. He is currently a Film MFA student at Columbia University. |
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| Introduction Nagisa Oshima's interest in politics began at a young age. His father, a government official (reportedly of samurai lineage) (1) who died when Oshima was six, left behind an extensive library of Socialist and Communist texts, which the young man read through as he came to maturity. He attended Kyoto University, studying law while dabbling in theatre and becoming deeply involved in student activism. The years of his youth were turbulent ones for Japan, as the nation rebuilt itself after its defeat in World War Two. Food shortages and depressed wages sparked a surge in labour-union activity. The threat of labour unrest, and the dawning of the Cold War mentality, led to crackdowns and “Red purges” of suspected radicals. Slowly, the American occupiers were transforming Japan into a stable capitalist democracy, and as the Cold War got underway, the U.S. came to see its new client state as an essential ally in the region. In 1951, the American occupation officially ended. That same year, the signing of the U.S.-Japan mutual security pact established a permanent U.S. military presence in Japan. Japanese leftists, fearing a return to authoritarianism and militarism, stepped up their demands for greater freedom. At the time of the security pact signing, Oshima was an officer in Kyoto University's left-wing student association, and led the student body in a series of protests. (In one famous incident that occurred while Oshima was a student leader, the Emperor's visit to Kyoto University was disrupted by a mass demonstration.) By the time Oshima graduated in the mid-1950s, he had lost interest in practicing law. Steady employment was hard to find in the post-war, pre-boom years, particularly for a young man with a record of leftist activism, so when a friend notified him of an opening at Shochiku Ofuna studios' assistant-director training program, he applied, though he was not a passionate cinephile. He was admitted, and began to work his way up the ranks as a screenwriter and assistant director. In 1959, as the renewal of the U.S.-Japan security pact (stipulated to occur every ten years) approached, student activists joined forces with the Socialist and Communist parties, intellectuals and labour unions. Strikes, boycotts, rallies and occupations of official buildings erupted nationwide. Revolution seemed a real possibility. Amid the disorder, the Japan Communist Party shifted its stance and denounced the student groups as dangerous extremists, selling itself as “a responsible, civic-minded opposition party working against the security treaty and for the independence of Japan” (2). Many on the left, Oshima included, saw the JCP's actions as a betrayal of the young by their elders. Nevertheless, demonstrations continued, sometimes ending in violent clashes between protestors and police. The treaty was renewed in 1960, the fledging revolutionary movement defeated, but a new spirit of radical agitation had been released into the culture – years before “the sixties” as such really began in the U.S. and Europe (3). During the years leading up to the great disruptions of 1959-60, Oshima was learning his craft at Shochiku, waiting for the opportunity to make a feature. He had also started writing film criticism. In a 1958 essay called “Is It A Breakthrough? (The Modernists of Japanese Film),” he assessed the new crop of Japanese directors (“modernists”) – most of them, except for Yasuzo Masumura, unknown to Western audiences today: Through the 1960s and into the early '70s, Oshima put his youthful theories into practice with a series of films that retain their power to provoke and surprise. Politically and formally radical, they are remarkable documents of their era and constitute a major contribution to the various “new waves” that swept through world cinema during the '60s. As a director, Oshima never settled into an identifiable aesthetic, a particular mode of address; the films range from neorealist naturalism to pseudo-documentary to avant-garde modernism to surrealist farce. There is no such thing as a “typical” Oshima shot or scene. As a result, his detractors have accused him of lacking a style or voice of his own. But form, for Oshima, serves as a vessel for content (see endnote 5). His subject matter was new: post-war alienation among Japanese youth, the failures of left-wing political movements, the rise of capitalism, the hangover from the imperial past. These new stories could not be told in the old ways; new content demanded new forms. Traditional forms – the classical style of conventional studio filmmaking – reflected the political and cultural status quo. To critique and reform a corrupt society, to change the way people think and act, would require a change in how they see and hear. The lack of a signature style, the search for new forms, is part and parcel of the never-ending struggle to see contemporary Japan with fresh eyes. Restlessness equals development and growth; repetition leads to self-satisfaction and the weakening of the will. From a 1961 essay: Reality, however, is always changing. Thus, the filmmaker who is unable to grasp it immediately ceases being a filmmaker and degenerates into a mere crafter of images. Constant self-negation and transformation are necessary if one is to avoid that debilitation and continue to confront circumstances as a filmmaker. Naturally, that means preparing a new methodology. Moreover, those transformations and that methodology must not themselves be made into goals of the ego, but, as weapons used to change reality, must always follow through with their objective of revolutionizing consciousness. With this in place, the law of self-negating movement is not merely a law of production or of the filmmaker, but a law of human growth and of the development of the human race – a law of the movement of all things. The filmmaker must uphold that law (6). This was how the young Oshima defined his mission. But, as we shall see, even in his earliest films, theory did not always walk hand in hand with practice. The films display tremendous anger at social and political corruption, but also great scepticism about the possibility of effecting positive change. The aspiring revolutionary becomes a brilliant anatomist of failed revolutions; the rebel youth who set out to reform society ends up making film after film exploring the twisted, murky psychology of the rebel. Early Films Oshima got the chance to direct his first feature after a series of box-office failures led Shochiku's management to promote some of its more promising assistant directors. A Town of Love and Hope (1959) sounded acceptably conventional in outline: a social-realist drama about a poor teenage boy who sells a homing pigeon to gullible buyers as a pet, only to later recall the pigeon and sell it again. A close friendship with a rich girl ends when the girl discovers the boy's scam, and orders the pigeon shot. But, Japanese critic Tadao Sato reports:
Social commentary shares the foreground with the tale of the two lovers. The boy's close friend is a student protestor taking part in the anti-security-treaty demonstrations, real footage of which appears in the film. And the girl's older sister is a former activist of Oshima's generation; watching her younger sister's heedless flouting of convention reminds her of her own vanished youth. She reconnects with her former lover, now a doctor, but their meeting ends in disillusionment and a sad recognition of compromised ideals: she settled down with an older man for security, while he supplements his meagre income performing back-alley abortions. The doctor is arrested (after giving the heroine an abortion) and the young lovers meet separate, bloody ends. Oshima's next film presented an even harsher view of lowlife Japan. The Sun's Burial (1960) depicts the struggle between two criminal gangs in an Osaka slum. Prostitution, black-marketeering, identity theft, rape and robbery are the going concerns in this ensemble piece. Oshima repeatedly ends scenes with cityscapes of the sun setting over the decrepit slum. The Sun's Burial, with its corrupt, conniving characters, its squalor and cruelty, is the director's disgusted mockery of the nation's self-image as the “land of the rising sun”. These first three pictures showed Oshima working largely within the boundaries of conventional genre storytelling: A Town of Love and Hope was an urban melodrama, and Cruel Story of Youth and The Sun's Burial were approved and marketed by Shochiku as part of the then-popular Taiyo-zoku (or “Sun Tribe”) films about rebellious contemporary youth. Oshima's fourth feature, and (astonishingly) his third to appear in 1960, marked a significant breakthrough – an audacious and original work, conceptually rigorous, blisteringly political. Night and Fog in Japan begins at the wedding of a thirtyish journalist and a younger activist, who met a few months earlier at the bloody height of the security treaty protests. The groom's friends are from Oshima's generation, those who took to the streets in the early 1950s. Some have left the movement, some have consolidated their power within it, some hang on at its margins. The bride's friends are from the younger generation, the students freshly wounded in the recent protests. (The contrast between the two generations recalls the older and younger pairs of lovers in Cruel Story of Youth.) The wedding's formalised serenity is very quickly broken, as guests invited and uninvited begin to speak of their shared pasts. Night and Fog in Japan takes place during three separate time frames: the present of the wedding, the recent past of the 1960 demonstrations, and the more distant past of the older generation's activism during the early 1950s. As the guests' tongues loosen and memories take hold, recriminations and accusations are flung about, and old jealousies and resentments come to light.
Stylistically, the film departs from the naturalism of Oshima's first three features. During the wedding scenes, the actors, spread out along the wide Cinemascope screen in neat rows, stand motionless while the camera pans and tracks across their faces, registering their expressions as they take in what's happening and think back on the past. The stiff, still tableau of the wedding, traversed by the restless camera, correlates to the state of the characters' lives, frozen in the present as their history swells and swirls around them. Many scenes are filmed in a heavily theatricalised shorthand – call it minimalist expressionism: a massive protest march is rendered as the sound of crowds chanting, glimpses of waving flags and flashing lights, and a lone protestor stumbling through shadows. Night and Fog in Japan is a demanding viewing experience, but a rewarding one. We don't sink comfortably into the flow of the story but instead are constantly thrown out of it, forced to shift our conception of what has happened to these people as more facets of their past are revealed. Oshima doesn't want us to “like” his characters, but to understand them, and to see how contemporary social history plays itself out through their lives. Though some first-time viewers might be put off by Oshima's obsessively detailed re-creation of decades-old Japanese political infighting, ultimately the film works as a portrait of any movement of true believers that falls apart when truth and belief prove hard to hold onto (the critic Paul Coates calls Night and Fog a “prescient post-mortem of 1968 before the fact”) (8). A few days after the film was released, Shochiku withdrew it from circulation, claiming concerns about social stability following the assassination of Inejiro Asanuma, chairman of the Japan Socialist Party. Oshima was furious, denouncing the studio in the press for its cowardice, and even (like a character in his film) making a grandstanding anti-Shochiku speech to the guests at his own wedding to actress Akiko Toyama. He left Shochiku to form his own independent production company, Sozosha (Creation). Thus ended his career as a studio filmmaker, to the relief of both studio and filmmaker. The 1960s and Early 1970s The next few years saw Oshima collaborating with novelist Kenzaburo Oe on a film about a Japanese village holding an American POW during the war (The Catch, 1961), making a biopic about an eighteenth-century revolutionary (Amakusa Shiro Tokisada, 1962) and travelling extensively in Korea and Vietnam. His Asian travels led to a series of documentaries for Japanese television (9). Then, in 1965, he returned to features with Pleasures of the Flesh, about a criminal who pursues a life of dissolute sensualism. Pleasures of the Flesh signalled the beginning of a remarkably fertile period: over the next eight years, Oshima would turn out a dozen features. Many of these films are difficult to find today. But at least half of them made their mark on international contemporary cinema; they form the better part of Oshima's filmmaking legacy. The first of these was Violence at Noon (1966). The story was inspired by a real-life serial rapist and killer who terrorised the nation in the late 1950s. Oshima and his screenwriter Tsutomu Tamura (working from a novel by Taijun Takeda) make their criminal, Eisuke (Kei Sato), a fugitive from a collective farm that had failed a year before, adding a social and political backdrop to this noir tale of private perversion. Oshima was by now reinventing his style for each new work. No two films from this prolific period look alike: the director was living up to his credo of “constant self-negation and transformation.” Violence at Noon, in stark contrast to the long sequence shots of Night and Fog in Japan, consists of some 2,000 shots. Scenes seem to break apart and re-form before our eyes, as Oshima jump-cuts from angle to angle with unsettling speed, fracturing space like a cubist. The fragmented style brings us into the criminal's consciousness, a jumble of fetishised memories and uncontrollable urges. By the end, Eisuke has receded in importance next to the two women whose lives he has haunted: his schoolteacher wife and his first rape victim. Eisuke is brought to justice, but the women find no comfort, no escape, no happy ending (significantly, Eisuke's capture and execution are never shown but reported from offscreen, denying us any sense of relief). Oshima's obsession with crime and criminals runs deep, from the boy with the homing-pigeon scam to the killers who populate his later work. (Audie Bock: “[I]n every Oshima film at least one murder, rape, theft or blackmail incident can be found, and often the whole of the film is constructed around the chronic repetition of such a crime” (10)). In his writings and interviews, Oshima sometimes equates the outlaw with the artist: both live lives of risk and uncertainty, closer to the edge than those who conform to social norms. This is not an original or profound observation, and Oshima can sound naïve, vain, or foolish when expounding on the theme in print: Doesn't this also explain why it is difficult to establish a movement in the film world? It is easy for one person to commit a crime, but it is really difficult to commit a crime in a group. People who try to commit a crime in a group are inevitably shot down (11). The reason we show an abnormal interest in crime and scandal is that a life, which usually drifts by, thereby appears caught up by a pole in the river's flow. A drowning man grasps at straws. For we find, in crime and scandal, a tiny trace that reminds us of human dignity.... The path to human dignity lies through the act of one who, having been previously involved in a crime or scandal, chooses that option for himself once again, in the very midst of the flow (12).
Oshima's concern with the legacy of Japan's former colonisation of Korea manifested itself in three films from the late '60s. A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Song (1967) touches on the subject as part of a larger study of sexual fantasy. Three Resurrected Drunkards (1968) is a mistaken-identity comedy about a Korean soldier and a Japanese student. Death by Hanging (1968), the only one of the three to be widely seen outside Japan, is essential Oshima, an aggressively difficult, feverishly inventive film. Once again, the director and his scenarists started from a real-life story. Chin'u Ri, a poor 22-year-old born in Japan to Korean parents, had been arrested, tried, and executed for raping and killing a Japanese schoolgirl. Ri's case made headlines, particularly after a journalist published a book of Ri's letters showing him to be, in Oshima's words, “the most intelligent and sensitive youth produced by post-war Japan” (14). Ri's defence team had argued that his actions must be understood in the context of his second-class social status: It begins like a documentary about capital punishment: a prisoner, “R” (Yundo Yun), is led to the gallows, and his body drops through the trapdoor. But the prisoner survives, and now a clearly fictional drama starts to unfold, about the not-dead R and the Japanese jailers who must figure out what to do with him. For the botched hanging has induced amnesia in R, and by a legal technicality, he can't be executed if he's not aware that he committed a crime. An absurdist comedic tone takes hold as the jailers try different ways to get R to acknowledge his guilt so they can kill him: from verbal interrogations and abuse, to psychological probing, to explorations of R's past. We move far afield of conventional realist storytelling into a kind of dream-world, as the spaces of the courthouse become the rooms of R's childhood, and as R and the jailers find themselves at the scene of the crime, re-enacting the assault. Then the rape and murder “victim” comes to life as R's “sister,” urging him in long, didactic speeches to embrace his identity as a Korean in Japan, representative of an oppressed minority. Finally, R accepts that he is R, and submits to hanging a second time. A voice-over thanks us for watching. Character and narrative continuity, spatial and temporal logic: all are systematically undermined in Death by Hanging as Oshima scrambles together political polemic, Brechtian alienation effects, Kafkaesque parable and a surrealist assault on perception worthy of Buñuel. (And as in much Buñuel, the comedy is magnified by the solemnity with which the characters go about their business, seeming all the crazier for their attempts to behave “rationally” in a mad world.)
By 1970, the U.S.-Japan security pact was once again up for renewal, and a younger generation of student activists (further energised by their opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam) took to the streets in protest. But history repeated itself: despite massive demonstrations, several of which ended in violence, the treaty was renewed. There was, however, one thing that made the youth protests of '69–70 different from those of '59–60: cinema. The international New Wave had happened. Godard and Oshima, et al., had happened. It was the period of cinema verité, the camera stylo, and “truth 24 times a second,” of a new generation that saw filmmaking as a weapon in the battle for social change. The Man Who Left His Will on Film focuses on one such group of young men and women. In the opening scene, Motoki (Kazuo Goto) is seen through the lens of a camera carried by one of his friends. The cameraman runs away – we see only a rushed blur of street movement – with Motoki in pursuit. Motoki's friend commits suicide by jumping off a roof. Motoki grabs the camera from the police, but they catch him and take custody of the dead man's footage. Motoki and his peers, a collective of young Marxist filmmakers, recover the footage and screen it. The dead man was supposed to be filming political demonstrations, but his camera captured only dull street scenes: uninflected, unexciting quotidian reality. In a bravura sequence, Oshima shows us the footage as we hear voice-over debates among the spectators about what they're watching: “But what was he thinking when he shot this?” “Watching this is a waste of time. He was bankrupt, politically and artistically.” “Maybe he figured that by linking meaningless shots he could make meaning by paradox.” In our heads we join Motoki and his friends in the debate, searching for meaning and coherence in the seemingly random footage. Soon Motoki grows obsessed with the dead man, initiating a romance with Yasuko (Emiko Iwasaki), the deceased's girlfriend, and eventually restaging and reshooting the scenes we watched earlier. As in Death by Hanging, identity is a fluid process and not a fixed fact: we, and Motoki himself, aren't sure if Motoki is on the trail of a mystery with a plausible solution, or if he's losing his mind in attempting to take the dead man's place. In the end, Motoki becomes the victim of his obsession: he takes a camera up onto the same roof seen at the start of the film, and jumps to his death. A hand reaches into the frame and steals Motoki's camera, just as Motoki himself had earlier grabbed the camera from the cops. The end. We realise: Motoki himself was the dead man, and the story we just watched has formed a Möbius loop of repetition compulsion. Motoki's despair at his own ineffectiveness as a filmmaker-revolutionary, evident in scene after scene, is shown to be the same despair that led his “friend” to take his own life in the beginning. Noël Burch writes that The Man Who Left His Will on Film ties together a number of Oshima's concerns:
The International Years After making one more film, the little-seen Dear Summer Sister (1972), Oshima's career took a new turn. Though sex plays an important part in almost all his films, he had for years wanted to make a picture that took sexuality as its central concern. But he held back:
Some accused Oshima of opportunism and commercialism in making In the Realm of the Senses, but in hindsight it looks like a necessary move from an artistic point of view as well. The utopian ideals of the '60s had collapsed. Social revolution seemed an impossibility and Oshima no longer felt at home making films within the Japanese system (18). Where could the Oshima protagonist go, then, except turn inward? In Realm, the characters' search for freedom has no political or social dimension; it is a purely selfish act. No rebellion against society is possible or desirable, only a shutting-out of society and an obsessive focus on one's own pleasure (and pain). At one point, while Kichi is awaiting Sada's return from a rendezvous with her sugar daddy, he wanders outside, where a regiment of the imperial Japanese army is marching off to war. A crowd of citizens stands by the road cheering them on. This is the film's only acknowledgment of the world outside the lovers' bedroom, the world where history is being made, armies are massing, nations falling and rising, great causes being lost and won... Kichi, uncaring, walks past the crowd and retreats to his room. In 1978, Dauman and Oshima reunited for Empire of Passion. Like Realm, Empire of Passion starred Tatsuya Fuji, had a period setting (this time the 1890s), and centered on a doomed love affair. It was even titled In the Realm of Passion in some English-language releases. But the transgressive intensity of the earlier film was replaced by a sombre study of guilt and remorse. Toyoji (Fuji), a labourer in a provincial village, falls in love with Seki (Kazuko Yoshiyuki), the wife of a rickshaw driver, Gisaburo (Takahiro Tamura). Toyoji and Seki kill her husband to prevent him from discovering their affair, but when Gisaburo's ghost begins to haunt Seki, the lovers slowly fall apart. Despite some steamy sex (far less explicit than In the Realm of the Senses) and horror-shocks, the storytelling is mostly restrained, the mood mournful and tender. Oshima blends film noir (the early scenes in particular have the heat and tension of a James M. Cain thriller), ghost-story, and period-piece tropes to make this one of his most accessible and entertaining works. Overshadowed at the time of its release by its more sensationalistic predecessor, the film is due for rediscovery. The two collaborations with Dauman inaugurate a shift – the central dividing line, in fact – in Oshima's body of work. He becomes an international filmmaker, dependent on international co-production deals for financing, and (for his next two films after Empire of Passion) working with international casts and crews, in foreign languages. He seeks a larger, more global audience. In an essay titled “Perspectives on the Japanese Film,” Oshima explained the reasons for this change. With the internationalisation of the Japanese economy, foreign films – in mass terms, that meant largely American films – ate away at the domestic box-office share of Japanese films. Raising money became more difficult, with more filmmakers competing for fewer production and distribution opportunities. I don't work under these conditions. However, even if I can't attract large audiences everywhere in the world, I can make films that are sure to attract audiences everywhere, even if they are small. Although the numbers in each country will be small, they will add up to a certain total worldwide. That is probably what makes it possible for me to make my next film. This is how I would like to make international films... Not one country has been able to find a breakthrough point – which is to say that industrially the size of film audiences only decreases, while practically no films are made that broaden the artistic possibilities of the form (19).
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence is based on an English-language novel, and co-written by an Englishman. English actors get more screen time than the Japanese, and though the film is bilingual there's more English than Japanese spoken on the soundtrack. We learn much about Lawrence and Celliers' pasts, less about Yonoi and Hara's. And yet the film is Oshima's most thorough fictional treatment of the Japanese during World War Two, teetering between the high noon of their imperial ambitions and their imminent, ignominious defeat. Lawrence explains to Celliers: “They were an anxious people. They could do nothing individually. So they went mad en masse.” Oshima is working on an international scale for a global audience, but he uses the “foreign” point of view to take a fresh look at his own nation's history. His next film was in essence an entirely European venture, filmed in French and English. Max, Mon Amour (1986) was produced by Serge Silberman, co-written by Jean-Claude Carrière, and made in France with a French crew led by cinematographer Raoul Coutard. Silberman and Carrière were Buñuel's partners during his late flourishing in France in the '60s and '70s, and much about Max resembles Buñuel's work. An English couple residing in Paris, Margaret and Peter Jones (Charlotte Rampling and Anthony Higgins), have their lives thrown into disarray when Margaret falls in love and carries on an affair. The film is a light domestic farce satirising bourgeois manners – with the added twist that Margaret's lover Max is a chimpanzee. The social satire fuses with the kinky-surrealist monkey business and yields some comic gems, as when Max joins a dinner party but ignores the food and drink to stroke, nibble, and kiss Margaret in full view of the guests (who are too polite to object), or when Peter grows crazed with jealousy wondering just what it is Max and Margaret actually do in bed. Along with the Buñuelian elements of the story, Oshima and Coutard also seem to have borrowed Buñuel's late style: simple camera setups, unobtrusive editing, no flash and dazzle; the bizarro events onscreen are made more real to us by the director's lack of interest in hyping them up with jazzy angles and cutting. Max, Mon Amour is minor Oshima – in so many ways it hardly seems like “an Oshima film” – but it's a fun joke, enjoyably sustained over the film's running time.
Taboo seems, on the surface, to be Oshima's least original film. It's full of generic hand-me-downs: cherry blossoms, swordplay, dialogues about samurai honour and duty. It has the feeling of something we've seen before – except that at its heart it's a study of gay desire. The samurai film is a venerable Japanese genre, and Oshima obeys its codes only to inject this unfamiliar element into its bloodstream – to blow up the tradition from within its gates. But the director is not interested in scoring easy points off the social prejudices of an earlier era (as Todd Haynes was in the accomplished but smug Far from Heaven [2002]): the warriors accept man-on-man love as a natural occurrence in military life. What links Taboo to Oshima's earlier work is its depiction of the social order shaken by unstoppable human urges. (Taboo most obviously resembles Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence: a rigid military hierarchy crumbles into chaos with the arrival of a beautiful stranger.) Tellingly, it's the lower-ranking men who openly express their desires. Kondo and Hijiketa, the leaders, smother their own passions in the name of duty. We absorb much of the story through Hijiketa's eyes, and we hear some of his thoughts in voice-over, but Kitano might as well be acting with a mask on: he gives almost nothing away, until his banked emotions flare up in a sudden, startling release in the final scene. The mood of the film fits its meaning: the tone is stately, restrained, but the presence of Kano charges each scene with tension. Oshima suffered a second, more serious stroke after completing Taboo; there may be no new films forthcoming. Though the social and political upheavals that inspired much of his work have now passed from the headlines to the history books, and his international reputation has declined since its peak in the 1970s, his best films remain a potent testament to radical cinema's capacity to “revolutionise consciousness” – one viewer at a time. © Nelson Kim, March 2004 Endnotes:
Filmography Feature
films only; does not include short films, documentaries, or work made
for television 
Bibliography Joseph
L. Anderson and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry,
expanded edition, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1982.
Articles in Senses of Cinema The
Unkindest Cut of All?
by Freda Freiberg
Web Resources International
Harvest
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