Nagisa Oshima

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tojoed
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Re: Nagisa Oshima

#101 Post by tojoed » Fri Jun 10, 2011 4:05 am

You forgot to add " Must do better next term".

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puxzkkx
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Re: Nagisa Oshima

#102 Post by puxzkkx » Fri Jun 10, 2011 5:12 am

Lol, I'll try.

Any opinions on Band of Ninja?

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Brian C
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Re: Nagisa Oshima

#103 Post by Brian C » Fri Jun 10, 2011 12:45 pm

puxzkkx wrote:Hoping that another Oshima A+ will come soon!
It's my understanding that afteraffects from multiple strokes prevents him from working, and that he's quite unlikely to make another film.

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puxzkkx
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Re: Nagisa Oshima

#104 Post by puxzkkx » Fri Jun 10, 2011 8:19 pm

...in my exploration of his early work. ;)

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puxzkkx
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Re: Nagisa Oshima

#105 Post by puxzkkx » Mon Oct 24, 2011 4:04 am

I've finally been getting back into my chronological Oshima marathon for a school paper where I am examining the parallels and disjunctions in the approaches of Ozu and Oshima to post-war value changes in Japan. If I had a treat with the first half of his 60s output his latter-half films are twice as fun to explore and analyse. I just finished Diary of a Shinjuku Thief which may be his most formally shattered yet - as if someone took the jigsaw-puzzle editing structure of Violence at Noon and shuffled it. Knowing Oshima that was his intention, and it is interesting to see him deconstruct a film in the process of constructing it. I haven't had time to mull this one over yet but to me it seems almost like a feminist response to the shallow, uncritical Godardian "girl and a gun" mantra of the French New Wave which I'm sure had reached Japan by this time. However the themes here aren't as cleanly symbolised as they are in, say, Death by Hanging, so I'll have to give it some more thought.

Not including Diary seeing as I only just finished watching it, here's my ranking of the Oshima I've seen so far:

1. Death by Hanging
2. Japanese Summer: Double Suicide
3. The Ceremony
4. The Sun's Burial
5. Three Resurrected Drunkards
6. The Christian Revolt
7. Cruel Story of Youth
8. Violence at Noon
9. Night and Fog in Japan
10. Pleasures of the Flesh
11. Band of Ninja
12. Taboo
13. A Street of Love and Hope

And even #13 is a rewarding work, although I really would like to know what happened to Oshima in the year between making that and Cruel Story, as the formal confidence of that film is a shocking leap forward.

I saw Death..., Taboo and The Ceremony out of order and I haven't been able to obtain The Catch or A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs yet.

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knives
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Re: Nagisa Oshima

#106 Post by knives » Mon Oct 24, 2011 4:07 am

The later is in the Criterion set, under a different name, if worse comes to worse.

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tarpilot
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Re: Nagisa Oshima

#107 Post by tarpilot » Mon Oct 24, 2011 4:14 am

The Catch is good, and anticipates much of Death by Hanging. You still have my favourite ahead of you (Boy).

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puxzkkx
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Re: Nagisa Oshima

#108 Post by puxzkkx » Mon Oct 24, 2011 4:32 am

I'm very excited for Boy, from what I hear it'll have a lot of material for the essay. But of course this marathon is more than just an academic pleasure. Brushing up on my Ozu has been fun, too.

zedz may be pleased to know that Night and Fog has grown on my quite a bit. Seeing the evolution of Oshima's trademarks sequence-shots since that film have helped me to appreciate his pioneering use of them there.

I'm also curious as to what some people thought of Band of Ninja? On the copy I found the subtitles had been blatantly translated from Japanese to Mandarin to English via BabelFish or some other translation programme, and they were hilariously unreadable. I managed to track down a better set but they were incredibly out-of-sync and fixing it was too much of a chore - the story was convoluted enough and watching subs at the same time as trying to decode the rapidly-edited ink-on-paper images was difficult so I decided to watch it without subtitles and then read the text file afterwards.

It is a very interesting experiment - one that I see as something of a flipside to Violence at Noon. Where that film employed a comic book-y editing style (especially in regards to its simulation of camera movement it had a lot in common with manga paneling) this film uses highly cinematic editing in service of an actual comic book - Oshima pans, zooms and tilts across pages, treating the drawn images as footage. As he didn't draw the manga it becomes a bit difficult to evaluate this film, and I guess you can only really judge it on the strength of its experimentation which is surprisingly entertaining and successful, even if the story itself is hard to follow even if you can understand the language. There is, however, a theme in common with his early 60s work, that of a people disenfranchised by war fighting to recover some sense of stability of society and identity. He bridges a gap with this, between the more stylistically classical and broadly political, 'open' metaphors of his early 60s work to the formally cracked, in-depth treatments of specific political topics in his later 60s catalogue. There's some really fantastic sound design in this, as well, and with both Japanese Summer and Three Resurrected Drunkards made around the same time you can see him becoming more and more adventurous in that regard.

OnOnt
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Re: Nagisa Oshima

#109 Post by OnOnt » Thu Feb 28, 2013 8:11 pm

Is there anyone here who can deliver some insight into this 13 part TV series Oshima made?

Stefan Andersson
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Re: Nagisa Oshima

#110 Post by Stefan Andersson » Wed Apr 30, 2014 2:51 pm

Cruel Story of Youth restored: http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/article/60568.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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mizo
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Re: Nagisa Oshima

#111 Post by mizo » Wed Jun 17, 2015 11:37 pm

I just watched Diary of a Shinjuku Thief for the second time (after my first viewing several months ago left me more than a little disoriented) and I'm still pretty overwhelmed by the array of ideas and symbols on display - too many, really, to go over without diving deeply into serious analysis. So here I want to focus instead on the film's structure.

It's the only Oshima I've seen so far that largely forgoes dramatic tension and momentum. All the others have been explosively dramatic experiences, so the more episodic - and even then, pronouncedly discursive - progression of this film is a striking change. I don't think I'm the first to compare the impression that the film imparts to a collage, but the apparently haphazard confluence of seemingly disparate elements begs the analogy. However (as the overabundance of qualifying adverbs in the previous sentence would suggest) I find these appearances to be deceiving. While the possibility of dramatic momentum is largely eliminated by the film's rampant stylistic eclecticism, I do see a plot behind it all, and one that can broadly be separated into three acts. (Spoilers follow, of course.)

The first act is somewhat preliminary and it comprises the courtship - if it could be so called - of Birdman and Umeko. Here, Oshima comments generally on the mores of their social group, while also giving a sense of the hostilities therein (such as in the scene where poor Umeko lashes out at wealthy Birdman for stealing books he could have paid for.) We also get a strong sense of the socially-engendered gap between the two based on gender, evident in the profound chilliness in the post-coital scene that leads into an enraged Umeko destroying a trendy dancehall, apparently lashing out at backward or oppressive views of women, still overwhelmingly popular among youth. So far, these insights have hardly been earth-shattering, and Oshima is providing foundation for his arguments.

Act two is much longer and comes closest of the four to assuming a sense of real dramatic progression. It takes off from the point when the bookstore owner tries to be something of a matchmaker and it forwards a damning critique of contemporary Japanese progressive ideals about sex. This critique is first evident, albeit subtly, in the gentle and rather good-natured tone of absurdity with which the session with the sex therapist is presented, offering ridiculous nuggets of wisdom such as the immediate conclusion that Umeko has strong homosexual feelings based on her interest in a pornographic print. It becomes an attack when an informal debate among a group of Oshima's stock players, in which many of the prevailing ideas are rather reminiscent of a fraternity, leads into extended (and thoroughly dramatized) anecdotes of exploiting or otherwise abusing women. From here, the film leads to the natural (if somewhat extreme) conclusion, of Umeko being raped, first by Birdman who, like her, passively accepted the abusive ideals expounded a moment ago, and then, more damningly, by the system itself, as Kei Sato and Fumio Watanabe overtake Birdman and proceed to rape her themselves. After this catastrophe, the protagonists return to the book shop, where Umeko seeks understanding, presumably of a woman's true rights and role in society, in the literature that surrounds her. Instead of understanding, however, all she attains is thorough confusion about the basic distinctions between men and women. She and Birdman then confront the bookstore owner, displaying the faultiness of the latter's ideas by having Birdman "sell" her to the owner who is repulsed and continues to cling pathetically to his ideas (he even says, while they are defiling the books, "Those books are me").

The third and final act shows the alternative to these false "progressive" views, in the form of a figure who has haunted the film from the beginning, the singer and actor Kara Juro (IIRC), who offers a head-first dive into Japanese culture, where it is soon discovered that misogyny is just as ingrained. It is worth noting that Oshima casts the middle-aged or older as his progressives, while the younger castmembers are the ones hearkening back to their heritage.

There is another division of great importance to the film's structure, and it comes after Umeko is raped, when we are treated to an expressionistic scene wherein Umeko and Birdman are initially scene as Antonioniesque figures, isolated from each other beneath hopelessly oppressive architecture, and then Umeko, formerly an apprehensive virgin, is overtaken with boldness and initiates sex for the first time. From this point on, Umeko's rebellion against socially engrained sexism is less confused and impotent and comes across as strong and potent. Meanwhile, Birdman becomes more confused about his sexual identity (he at one point admits to wanting to be a girl but doesn't think Umeko wants to be a boy) and goes so far as to don make-up and act in a play, while Oshima reminds us of the Japanese folk burlesque tradition of transvestitism. Umeko's acts of rebellion also become bolder, culminating in her spreading menstrual blood over her stomach.

The film's final images are of protesters descending on a police station. I can only rationalize this by suggesting that Oshima is reinforcing his theme of youth revolt by ending his film with images of violent radicalism.

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mizo
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Re: Nagisa Oshima

#112 Post by mizo » Thu Aug 06, 2015 9:33 pm

Has anybody actually managed to see and can comment on Dear Summer Sister? I've seen nothing but a few stray references here and rather lukewarm (but somehow still tantalizing) reviews elsewhere. It seems amazing to me that, until tonight, one of my favorite directors had a film I'd never heard of.

jessee
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Re: Nagisa Oshima

#113 Post by jessee » Thu Aug 06, 2015 11:47 pm

mizoguchi5354 wrote:Has anybody actually managed to see and can comment on Dear Summer Sister? I've seen nothing but a few stray references here and rather lukewarm (but somehow still tantalizing) reviews elsewhere. It seems amazing to me that, until tonight, one of my favorite directors had a film I'd never heard of.
Forgive me, as it's been six years since I've seen the film and my recollections are not the strongest. The film thematically deals with Okinawa and it's relationship with Japan. As may have heard, it's shot during the changeover from the US to Japan. However, Japan itself has dubious claims to Okinawa as it didn't become a part of Japan willingly when Japan began to identify itself as an imperialistic nation-state. Their relationship is quite complex and there is a good deal of information about it in this book http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/searc ... APJAC.html.

The films narrative mirrors this relationship as a woman comes to Okinawa seeking her half-brother. Most of the characters have hidden/unknown relationships and they slowly reveal themselves as the film progresses. Oshima plays nice here most of the time and the film is actually a little positive when compared to it's predecessor, The Ceremony.

Formally, it looks like a travelogue with a lot of hand-held camerawork and I believe it is in 4:3. The tone of the film is very well captured by Toru Takemitsu's score https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2yFQGEr1ak. I recall feeling that the film wasn't wholly successful, but I did admire Oshima for trying something completely different.

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mizo
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Re: Nagisa Oshima

#114 Post by mizo » Fri Aug 07, 2015 12:23 am

Thanks for the overview, and that last comment, that it's interesting but not great, corresponds pretty well with the other assessments I've seen. What perplexes me is the film's apparent obscurity, combined with the fact that it comes at the tail end of what might be my favorite run of a single filmmaker in history - Oshima's ATG films. The others I was able to watch on Hulu. What accounts for this one's absence? I know the ATG films are kept from home video release by a rights dispute, but that hasn't relegated them to total obscurity, as it seems to have in this case. Perhaps I'm being overly solipsistic and I'm really the strange one for being in the dark about this film. Still, it seems strange to me that zedz, for example, never came to it and never mentioned it in his series of Oshima write-ups.

Hmm...something is rotten in the state of amateur Oshima scholarship.

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zedz
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Re: Nagisa Oshima

#115 Post by zedz » Fri Aug 07, 2015 12:46 am

mizoguchi5354 wrote:Thanks for the overview, and that last comment, that it's interesting but not great, corresponds pretty well with the other assessments I've seen. What perplexes me is the film's apparent obscurity, combined with the fact that it comes at the tail end of what might be my favorite run of a single filmmaker in history - Oshima's ATG films. The others I was able to watch on Hulu. What accounts for this one's absence? I know the ATG films are kept from home video release by a rights dispute, but that hasn't relegated them to total obscurity, as it seems to have in this case. Perhaps I'm being overly solipsistic and I'm really the strange one for being in the dark about this film. Still, it seems strange to me that zedz, for example, never came to it and never mentioned it in his series of Oshima write-ups.

Hmm...something is rotten in the state of amateur Oshima scholarship.
It's one of the few Oshimas I haven't seen yet. I keep hoping that when somebody finally gets around to doing the ATG films properly I'll see it, and I sort of like having a 'lost' film to look forward to. I also had to forcibly skip his mid-60s TV work, which is by all accounts fairly significant but even less likely to ever get a proper release.

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feihong
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Re: Nagisa Oshima

#116 Post by feihong » Fri Aug 07, 2015 2:07 am

I have seen the film as well, about 2 years ago, I think. I enjoyed it very much, from beginning to end. I don't see it as substantially less great than the other Oshima films I've fallen in love with over the past couple of years. I think it's as interesting, say, as Diary of a Shinjuku Thief. Maybe not quite as winning as Diary, but pretty close. I remember very vividly the intense blues of the Okinawa sky and sea, the very sharp performances of the supporting players, and the feckless youth of the two leads. The film seems almost stunned by their youthful vigor, which is at times destructive and at other times constructive. There was some nice, mellow music.

I've read the criticism that the film is an allegory without a center, but I am not convinced the film is so deeply allegorical to begin with. Incest is used in a similar way to the method Oshima uses in The Ceremony, but the adult characters in this story are much less authoritarian than the father figure in The Ceremony. So I suppose some allegorical context is present, about Okinawa and it's relationship with the mainland. Most of the WWII history of that relationship is treated as context, though, rather than subtext. It comes across less as allegory than as remembered history. And the film is pretty deeply interested in reconstructing the messy history of the characters and of their interactions upon the island. But I think the atmosphere of Okinawa is almost an actor in the film, urging the characters to take it easy, and in the process turning the film into more of a Rohmer-like film than any of Oshima's other movies. It feels like a very mellow jam, full of interesting observations and very lovely photography. The actors are appealing and energetic. There are definitely ideas in the movie, and entertainment. I don't really see a reason to complain about this movie. If you appreciate Oshima as a lively, adventurous filmmaker, full of ideas, then I don't think there's anything not to like about this movie. Perhaps in the rush of his ostensibly more "serious," focused work, this movie seemed somewhat inconsequential? But I don't really believe that dismissal holds up today. The film looks too good, and is too engaging to be written off that quickly.

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domino harvey
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Re: Nagisa Oshima

#117 Post by domino harvey » Tue Apr 04, 2017 8:00 pm

Turns out Oshima was a celebrity guest judge on Iron Chef

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