NYFF. More on Oshima.

To follow up on the first entry on the New York Film Festival program In the Realm of Oshima, we turn again to the ongoing series at Moving Image Source, launched last week with Chris Fujiwara's piece.

"And then there's 100 Years of Japanese Cinema - Oshima's Histoire(s) du cinéma at one-fourth the length," writes Rob Nelson. "'My hatred for Japanese cinema includes absolutely all of it,' the director famously told an admirer of Mizoguchi and Kurosawa. Who better, then, to subvert the very notion of a You Must Remember This doc - of a Japanese Cinema if not Japanese cinema? The BFI's bold commissioning of Oshima to make this portion of its 1994 Century of Cinema series - allowing final cut, presumably - stands among the greatest tributes to the director within what will likely remain his final decade of work. And the film, precisely for its irreverence, earns that honor in full."

Updated through 10/9.

"Released in 1966, Violence at Noon remains an incendiary work, the story of a serial rapist and murderer - and the two women who won't turn him in," writes Joshua Land. "From the vantage of the post-feminist present, the women's attraction to their attacker is undeniably hard to take, but ultimately the women of Violence at Noon are neither independent agents nor hapless victims; they are conflicted spectators, transfixed by Eisuke's unrepressed id.... Death by Hanging goes even further, explicitly taking the side of the criminal against society (and, in its final scene, against the spectator)."

Michael Atkinson on In the Realm of the Senses: "It might just be the most lucid and uncompromised film about gender politics ever made by a major Asian director. Given that Oshima was hurtling down the tracks laid by Mizoguchi and Ozu, and by the courtesan tragedies of the Edo period, that's saying a great deal."

"Perhaps you've seen 1976's In the Realm of the Senses, 1960's Cruel Story of Youth, or his 1969 masterpiece Boy, but the odds are that In the Realm of Oshima - a rare, near-complete retrospective currently screening as the sidebar to this year's New York Film Festival - will be a revelation to most." Aaron Hillis reviews five highlights for the Voice.

And the L Magazine's Mark Asch seconds Aaron's and his own endorsement: "I've rhapsodized Boy in this space before, and Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence is an intensely detached drama of martial idiocy and repressed homosexuality, co-starring, yes, David Bowie, as a Pacific Theater prison-of-war. The dramatically jigsawed and visually seamless Night and Fog in Japan has come and gone, but along with much of the director's early, New Wave-y drama it's available at Kim's. Really, look into him."

Update, 10/6: "Often paired as twin avatars of the Japanese New Wave, a term Oshima (born in Kyoto, 1932) took every opportunity to spurn and disparage, [Oshima and Shohei Imamura] fit uncomfortably in that 'movement' and with each other," writes James Quandt for the Cinematheque Ontario. "Sharing formal and social audacity, a brilliant ability to exploit the widescreen format, a rejection of the refined and self-sacrificing tenor of traditional Japanese cinema, a propensity for mixing fiction and reality, and certain key themes - sex and criminality, the abuse and resilience of women, incest, the social fissures of postwar Japan, the aggravated acts of outcasts in a tightly battened monoculture - Imamura and Oshima nevertheless can be construed as contraries, if not opposites."

Update, 10/7: "Film scholars Annette Michelson, Aaron Gerow and David Desser joined Film Society's Richard Peña for an extended discussion of the life and work of postwar Japan's ultimate outsider, Nagisa Oshima," reports Film Comment's Paul Brunwick. "The discussion was free ranging, segueing from political history to aesthetics and back again, but one thematic through-line connected the panelists' distinct perspectives: the across-the-board consensus that Oshima can be productively described as a modernist. What each meant by the term, of course, was markedly unique."

Update, 10/9: "Nagisa Oshima had something in The Sun's Burial (1960); it wasn't just one of the most throat-gripping titles in English, and it wasn't even the Shochiku-budget enabled, comic book energy zeitgeist of the so-called Japanese New Wave of the time. It was Kayoko Honoo." Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook.

Posted by dwhudson at October 3, 2008 3:55 PM