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Nagisa Oshima (大島 渚 Ōshima Nagisa), born March 31, 1932 in Kyoto, is a famous Japanese film 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.

Contents 1 1960s 2 1970s 3 1980's and 1990's 4 Partial filmography 5 Notes 6 External links

Oshima's cinematic career and influence developed very swiftly^[1], and early watershed films Cruel Story Of Youth (青春残酷物語), The Sun's Burial (明日の太陽) and Night and Fog in Japan (日本の夜と霧) all followed in 1960. The last of these 1960 films explored - in challenging fashion - Oshima's disillusionment with the traditional political left, and his frustrations with the right, and Shochiku withdrew the film from circulation after less than a week, claiming that, following the recent assassination of the Socialist Party leader by a right-wing extremist, there was a risk of “unrest”. Oshima left the studio in response, and launched his own independent production company. In spite of the controversy, Night And Fog In Japan placed #10 for the year in Kinema Jumpo's annual best-films poll (among Japanese critics), and it has subsequently amassed considerable accalim abroad^[2].

Subsequently, Oshima directed 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, and was loosely based upon an actual crime and execution which had taken place in 1958^[3]. The film utilizes non-realistic "distancing" techniques after the fashion of Brecht or Godard to examine Japan's record of racial discrimination against its Korean minority, incorporating elements of farce and satire, and a number of visual techniques associated with the cinematic new wave in a densely layered narrative. It placed #3 in Kinema Jumpo's 1968 poll, and has also garnered significan attention globally^[4]. Death By Hanging inaugurated a string of films (continuing through 1976's In The Realm Of The Senses) that clarified a number of Oshima's key themes, most notably a need to question social constraints, and to similarly deconstruct received political doctrines^[5].

Boy (1969), based on another 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 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.

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 0-262-65039-8). A critical study by Maureen Turim, The Films of Oshima Nagisa: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast (ISBN 0-520-20666-5) appeared in 1998.

Nagisa Oshima currently lives in Fujisawa in Kanagawa Prefecture.

• A Town of Love and Hope(愛と希望の街) (1959)
• Cruel Story Of Youth(青春残酷物語) (1960)
• The Sun's Burial (aka Tomb of the Sun)(明日の太陽) (1960)
• Night and Fog in Japan(日本の夜と霧) (1960)
• The Catch(飼育) (1961)
• The Revolt (1961)
• Shiro Tokisada(天草四郎時貞) (1962)
• A Small Child's First Adventure (1964)
• Yunbogi's Diary(ユンボギの日記) (1965)
• The Pleasures of the Flesh (1965)
• Violence at Noon(白昼の通り魔) (1966)
• Tales of the Ninja(忍者武芸帖) (1967)
• Sing a Song of Sex(日本春歌考) (1967)
• Japanese Summer: Double Suicide(無理心中 日本の夏) (1967)
• Diary of a Shinjuku Burglar(新宿泥棒日記) (1968)
• Death By Hanging(絞死刑) (1968)
• Three Resurrected Drunkards(帰ってきたヨッパライ) (1968)
• Boy(少年) (1969)
• Man Who Left His Will on Film(東京戦争戦後秘話) (1970)
• The Ceremony(儀式) (1971)
• Dear Summer Sister(夏の妹) (1972)
• The Battle of Tsushima (1975)
• In the Realm of the Senses(愛のコリーダ) (1976)
• Empire of Passion(愛の亡霊) (1978)
• Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence(戦場のメリークリスマス) (1983) - based in part on the war experiences of Laurens van der Post.
• Max, Mon Amour(マックス、モン・アムール) (1986)
• Kyoto, My Mother's Place (1991)
• Taboo(御法度) (1999)

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