Nagisa Oshima

[Murdoch]

Cruel Story of Youth was on Comcast on Demand several months ago. A great portrayal of the disconnect between youth and adulthood, and the ending hit me so hard, the grim images are stuck in my head

SpoilerShow

Although I agree with you, knives, since I found the ending to be almost perverse in its violence, especially how Kiyoshi's head was crushed by the boot of the criminal. I guess Oshima didn't call it "Cruel Story" for nothing!

I've only seen two by Oshima - the other is Realm of the Senses - and I am most struck by how well he employs the close-up, and he maintains the Japanese New Wave tradition of expertly utilizing the 2.35:1 frame.

[justeleblanc]

This first time I saw this I was disappointed. Aside from a few gorgeous moments the film is very dark (perhaps so was my print) and it made the whole aesthetic experience unpleasant. Watching it a second time in better circumstances, you can catch a lot of the play with color and composition that he continued to develop in films like SING A SONG OF SEX or REALM OF THE SENSES. It's worth watching for sure, but it's visual style and unlikable characters almost dare you to enjoy it (as silly as that sounds).

Criterion is definitely releases this at some point, yes?

[jsteffe]

CRUEL STORY OF YOUTH is definitely owned by Janus Films/Criterion; more than likely it will be a mainline Criterion release rather than an Eclipse title. I believe earlier in the thread there is a full list of titles owned by Janus.

I saw it on VHS first years ago and liked it a lot, but I was fully blown away by it when I saw a new 35mm print some ten years ago. Yes, the film tends to be dark, but it develops a powerful atmosphere. In the theater I was also struck by Oshima's use of sound, especially the persistent construction/industrial noises in the background. It's a fascinating combination of youth gang genre film and art house experimentation, and to me it's definitely a major work in its own right even if it reflects Oshima as a still-developing artist.

The transfer on TCM looks fine, so if you're at all curious don't hesitate to record it.

As soon as Criterion announces this title on DVD/Blu-ray, whenever that is, I'm pre-ordering it! A Blu-ray would be especially nice.

[AALFW]

Has anybody here seen this interview? it looks fairly recent

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Aoh9eXNWuA" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[jojo]

I think Cruel Story of Youth was meant to be a genre film, so it tends to follow the template of many "rebellious Japanese youth" films that often end in somewhat ridiculously/needlessly dark or violent manner.

I personally didn't feel it was THAT out of left field, but it does have a feeling of "These irredeemable youths must die a brutal end!" kind of attitude.

[AALFW]

Finally got around to watching the last part of the interview I posted a while ago. Oshima talks about shooting a new project in LA. [from about 3:10]

Again it seems recent as mention is made of shooting (or as the case may be NOT shooting) in HD.

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

Thank you AALFW for the interview! It must be recent if he's asking about HD. Hopefully this project comes to fruition and he actually films it in Los Angeles. If Taboo is any indication, Oshima still has it in him in his post stroke years. It's still as angry with contempt of traditional values than any of his sixties films, albeit less radical that anything out of his ATG period. I wonder who would be producing the production?

[Peacock]

But then again Gil died in 2008. I looked online but couldn't find any non video/torrent which mentioned this interview.
Still it's good to see Oshima looking well presumedly a few years after Taboo, and seemingly not paralyzed like I had presumed.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

This is the poster for the 2006 film Cut! The Rights of Japanese Film Directors. Oshima's right hand seems paralysed. Compare this with the interview where his right hand seems normal. This makes me think that the interview was done before his second stroke.

[puxzkkx]

I've been working through this guy chronologically. I'd already seen Death by Hanging, Taboo and The Ceremony out of order, and since starting the project I've seen A Street of Love and Hope, Cruel Story of Youth and The Sun's Burial. Wish me luck! I'm sure it won't be a chore... I love this guy!

[puxzkkx]

I just saw THE CHRISTIAN REVOLT / THE REBEL / THE REVOLUTIONARY / millions of other English titles, and I disagree with zedz here. I feel like the whole "Oshima does jidaigeki" novelty automatically invites comparisons to directors who did more of those films throughout their careers, like Mizoguchi and Kurosawa, and while there are definitely touches of those two directors (esp. Mizoguchi) here I think this showed that Oshima and his sharp political eye could be at home in period as well as contemporary subjects. This is a very original period piece with startling vitality and a truly organic feel. There's a rather typical historical drama plot here - subjugated group rises up under the leadership of a single freedom fighter - but Oshima seems insistent to let the events play out and not take sides (in a lot of scenes with both the Christians and their oppressors they are in long, long shot or obscured by shadow, one can hardly tell the characters apart physically, and the blurb at the end is cruelly glib!). His plans-séquences here are his most sophisticated yet at this point in his career, imo, with some really bravura camerawork and a standard of acting and visuals that probably speaks for the studio support he had for this project. The final 15 minutes or so are just wonderful, with one scene employing multiple hidden dissolves to marvelous, dreamlike and sensuous effect.

I have to commed Rentaro Mikuni for his performance here, as well. The ensemble is one of the strongest for Oshima thus far but his acting here is like watching a strung nerve shuddering in spiritual agony. He isn't in the film much but his scenes are some of the highlights.

I'm halfway through Pleasures of the Flesh, going to finish it tomorrow!

So far, I've seen A Street of Love and Hope, Cruel Story of Youth, The Sun's Burial, Night and Fog in Japan and The Christian Revolt in chronological order, and Death by Hanging, The Ceremony and Taboo out of chronological order. I've had to skip over The Catch for the meantime as I can't get ahold of it.

1. Death by Hanging (A+)
2. The Ceremony (A)
3. The Sun's Burial (A-)
4. The Christian Revolt (A-)
5. Cruel Story of Youth (A-)
6. Night and Fog in Japan (B+)*
7. Taboo (B)
8. A Street of Love and Hope (B)

Already this guy has perhaps the highest median grade of any director of whom I have seen more than 5 films.

*sorry zedz, can't meet you completely on this one! Your remarks about his form are dead-on but for me the narrative just becomes a total dead weight.

[Yojimbo]

6. Night and Fog in Japan (B+)*


*sorry zedz, can't meet you completely on this one! Your remarks about his form are dead-on but for me the narrative just becomes a total dead weight.

I don't recall whether I've seen 'zedz' review but it sounds like I'd be more inclined to his take than yours; its certainly slow, and tough, going, but it packs a wallop.

[Peacock]

Yeah Night and Fog in Japan is slower than other Oshimas, but it really grows in your mind over time, i've only seen it once but I can't wait for the eventual Criterion (and pray they'll put this one out in HD as it really deserves it!). Glad you rate Oshima so highly, in the early and especially mid portion of his career he truly is astounding. Yojimbo, zedz et co, is Yoshida similar to Oshima? I've read a lot of books which place them together, but I wonder what the connection is?

[Yojimbo]

Yeah Night and Fog in Japan is slower than other Oshimas, but it really grows in your mind over time, i've only seen it once but I can't wait for the eventual Criterion (and pray they'll put this one out in HD as it really deserves it!). Glad you rate Oshima so highly, in the early and especially mid portion of his career he truly is astounding. Yojimbo, zedz et co, is Yoshida similar to Oshima? I've read a lot of books which place them together, but I wonder what the connection is?

I wouldn't compare Yoshida with Oshima so much, apart from the fact that they were both part of the New Wave, and that they showed great versatility in styles and themes.
Yoshida, in his best films, is dispassionate in his approach, and maintains a cool distance from his subjects, whereas Oshima, for the most part, is passionate, politically motivated, and even angry.
Perhaps the single greatest aspect of Yoshida for me is the beauty of his compositions, his use and movement of the camera, and his optimal use of perspectives.
Oshima isn't so much interested in visual beauty, or style, other than for functional reasons

[puxzkkx]

I can respect Night and Fog... more than I can truly like it. Everything Oshima does in service of his story is genius, but the story just achieved a sort of pneumatic-drill dullness, for me at least. I think it shows many hallmarks of being a rush job, which does hurt it, but it is nevertheless gonzo impressive that this "rush job" is such an accomplished feat of filmmaking.

[Yojimbo]

I can respect Night and Fog... more than I can truly like it. Everything Oshima does in service of his story is genius, but the story just achieved a sort of pneumatic-drill dullness, for me at least. I think it shows many hallmarks of being a rush job, which does hurt it, but it is nevertheless gonzo impressive that this "rush job" is such an accomplished feat of filmmaking.

I think perhaps it may have been a topic close to his heart, being a former student radical.
But still and all I thought the cumulative impact was very effective, however tedious at often is to the uninitiated.

[zedz]

Oshima and Yoshida are about as different as Oshima and Imamura (or, probably, any two other randomly compared major Japanese New Wave directors). For me, Oshima's hallmark is his intellectual and stylistic restlessness, effectively reinventing his cinematic approach from film to film while tackling the same set of preoccupations from every direction he could find.

Yoshida's directorial personality seems to me much more stylistically led, and over the course of the sixties he develops one of the most astonishing and radical visual styles cinema has ever seen. But again, like so many of the Japanese New Wave directors, his films are not just surface flash but thematically adventurous and intellectually rigorous explorations of the director's core concerns. In terms of available, English-subbed films, Shinoda's Double Suicide might give the best approximation of Yoshida's visual punch, though Shinoda is punchy in a quite different way.

[puxzkkx]

I think perhaps it may have been a topic close to his heart, being a former student radical.
But still and all I thought the cumulative impact was very effective, however tedious at often is to the uninitiated.

Yeah, that was kind of the problem... it was just too insular. You really need to have a background knowledge of the student protests of both decades to really be drawn in to the narrative.

[knives]

...Or any decade really. The overall politics of how to do it haven't changed too much over the years or between cultures if my experience means anything.

[Wu.Qinghua]

...Or any decade really. The overall politics of how to do it haven't changed too much over the years or between cultures if my experience means anything.

I doubt that, tbh. I mean 'Night and Fog' is not just describing a student protest movement, but is grappling with (you may also say: denouncing) the political tradition and praxis of the Japanese communist party in postwar Japan. It's a cinematic breakaway, a New Left manifesto on celluloid, that is the more you know about this particular conjuncture, the better ...

[knives]

I didn't mean to suggest otherwise (though I see how I was being overly vague) but that certain behaviors amongst the protesters he's railing against are mostly universal to those who've dealt with that crap. My statement was intended as an addition to this bit:

You really need to have a background knowledge of the student protests of both decades to really be drawn in to the narrative.

[puxzkkx]

Well, if you're referring to the actual act of protesting then I think most people have a background knowledge... I think what is essential here is knowing the history of the student movement, knowing the actual events that took place and having a familiarity with the views and the causes célèbres that sparked the activity of these leftist groups. Whereas I felt that the density of Death by Hanging's narrative held mystery, this one just felt closed to me. That isn't to deny that it is a great film - I do give it a B+, the filmmaking here is bravura - but Oshima seems to be preaching to the choir here with his narrative; the plot is hardly accessible to those who do not already have some idea of the events.

Just finished Pleasures of the Flesh! Probably another B+. Agree with zedz completely here (except for the bit that disses The Christian Revolt ).

Zedz, have you seen Japanese Summer: Double Suicide or A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Song? I've got the former but can't get the latter presently.

[knives]

I'm not referring to the act, but the stuff it takes to get there. The behind the scenes stuff if you will. All that bickering and nonsense that Oshima despises. A lot of these movements got started with the same good intentions ruined by personal politics and other similar things that I believe the original comment was referring to.

[zedz]

Zedz, have you seen Japanese Summer: Double Suicide or A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Song? I've got the former but can't get the latter presently.

Yes, in the Eclipse box, but I got that after I wrote up the other films. I think I commented on them somewhere, so I'll see if I can track the comments down.

Here you go:

Sing a Song of Sex

This was my first time seeing this film, and it does seem like a transitional work (but aren’t they all? I don’t think Oshima ever stood still as a filmmaker, even when I didn’t much like where he went). He’s really starting to move away from naturalistic narrative in earnest, and you can see the seeds for Death by Hanging in certain scenes – particularly when the boy and girl re-enact his discovery of the teacher’s body (his “crime”). Over all, it seems an awful lot like a dry run for Diary of a Shinjuku Thief – the songs, the sex, the layers of artificiality, the night walks, the slippage into ‘documentary’ – albeit one that’s straighter and a lot less ambitious.

I’ll need to see it a few more times before I have a better idea of just what Oshima’s trying to do (for instance, whether I’m projecting my own general annoyance at the smugness of the 60s protest song movement onto the film, or if Oshima’s also skewering the protestors’ thoroughly colonised, sanitised hollowness), but I have to say I loved the audacity of the opening sequence.

He starts with a negative parody of the Japanese flag (Oshima loves to play with this icon, from The Sun’s Burial through Boy – and is it The Man Who Left His Will on Film that begins with a reversed flag image?) – a black ink sun on a red ground – then brutally restricts his palette to the three colours of the flag and its parody, white, red and black, for the next ten minutes. It is indeed like Rohmer’s idea for Ma nuit chez Maud, as knives notes, or a White Stripes video. When he finally introduces a fourth colour (yellow) it’s in a shot that reiterates the source of the film’s initial colour scheme, with protestors marching along waving altered Japanese flags (black sun on white ground), and the fourth colour is thematically relevant as well (a ‘corrected’ sun colour). Once we enter the subway, brown appears, and in the next sequence we finally get a full palette, introduced through a particularly garish and self-referential means: a cavalcade of pulpy film posters. Beautiful stuff.

And another word on Violence at Noon, since I watched that as well.

The real revelation of this film is not how many shots Oshima uses, but how he uses them. I find his experiments with montage in this film absolutely exhilarating. He’s not just breaking rules, but forging new ones, creating a dynamic, emotional montage with its own internal logic, not just a disruption of conventional logic. And, as others have noted, the film doesn’t ‘read’ as frantically edited: there are bursts of percussion, but there are also slower, slinkier passages, and you rarely get the sense that Oshima’s cutting just for the sake of it.

A good example of how he’s using montage effects in a creative way is the final scene on the train between the two women, when he intertwines their fates through contrapuntal montage. We start out with static shots of Shino intercut with grazing pans of Matsuko, then partway through the pattern shifts so that grazing pans of Shino are intercut with static shots of Matsuko, then they’re both implicated in the strikingly odd shot format (all the more striking because the film generally avoids flashy camera movement). And after this scene, they’re bound together both figuratively and literally.

Japanese Summer: Double Suicide

It's an interesting film but, again, I’ll need to see it a few more times to get a better idea of what Oshima was going for. I can understand Steven H’s reaction, and the film does seem uncommonly flippant, even for a great iconoclast like Oshima, but the film is so formally striking so often (great images and careful sound design) that I’m definitely giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Initial thoughts:

It seems pretty obvious that Oshima’s toying with unformed protagonists (she gives her age as zero), expressing their desires in stripped-down primal forms (the girl is preoccupied with sex and going to the toilet; the guys are preoccupied with violence): sex and death as disaffected play.

When the girl and the (second) boy finally get to fulfil their respective desires, they’re disappointed. There’s a theme of frustration – an inability to satisfactorlly copulate or excrete or kill, promised narrative events that don’t eventuate, a television being broken and repaired – and this is embodied in the language of the film, with a large number of unanswered questions (particularly those asked by the girl) and non sequiturs.

The visual motif of the shadow forms refers back to Hiroshima, but these can also be seen as potential adoptive identities. The boy and girl start out by lying down in the male and female forms drawn on the ground, then they try to fill out together the much larger human form dug out of the ground.

Given the frustrated nature of the film’s text and the frequent eloquence of its images, I wonder whether Oshima was attempting with this film to express complex ideas about Japanese identity and specifically the plight of contemporary youth trying to come to terms with variant and contradictory models of it (the patriotic rally, the samurai legacy, student protest, gangsters, soldiers) in primarily visual terms. For me, the first section of the film works extremely well in these terms, with some really rich imagery carrying a lot of thematic weight: the girl with the hands-over-her-eyes sunglasses (representing both see-no-evil wilful blindness and shielding oneself from an atomic blast); the couple fitting themselves up for Hiroshima shadows (Hiroshima being perhaps Ground Zero for modern Japanese identity); the gigantic human outline from whose genital region the gangsters excavate a ‘coffin’ containing guns.

The visual invention flags once everybody and everything gets stalled in the ‘bunker’ but livens up again when they get out, so the film seemed a little uneven to me, with a stodgy midsection, and I don’t know if I’d account the ‘experiment’ a success. Maybe it was a necessary preliminary workout for the works that followed, where he’d build image and text together rather than pitting them against one another.

[puxzkkx]

I saw Violence at Noon (A-, probably) and I agree with zedz regarding the striking formality, although I found the film less engaging story-wise than I hoped I would. Hoping that another Oshima A+ will come soon!