Towards the end of the Second World War, a downed U.S. pilot is captured and imprisoned by rural Japanese villagers, who await official instructions as to how to proceed with their “catch.” The villagers constantly refer to the soldier, who is black, as “the nigger,” and the fascination he draws—although there are those who are […]
Tag Archives: Oshima
We recall the image; after 40 years, some remain haunted by it. At the time, it shattered us—and, as a U.S. American, it disgusted me that my nation supported the one who was doing the shooting. During the Vietnam War, in the Tet Offensive, on a street in Saigon, the South Vietnamese national police chief, […]
Nagisa Oshima, surpassed in Japanese cinema only by Yasujiro Ozu, tends to make movies that are exceptionally harsh and violent; even so, one is not prepared for the cruelty on display in Merry Christmas[,] Mr. Lawrence, Oshima’s adaptation of Afrikaner novelist Laurens Van der Post’s The Seed and the Sower, about cultural and other collisions […]
Songs: their singing both expresses and partially numbs bad feelings. This paradox of humanity correlates to the appearance of Nagisa Oshima’s brilliant, largely improvised Nihon shunka-kô, sometimes translated as Sing a Song of Sex, where color often translates into black and white, in particular, a palette of soft, melancholy grays. Uttered on a college campus […]
What a striking image: in deep darkness, a streak of light that materializes into a young bride in her wedding gown diagonally fleeing across the screen. Apart from the dreamlike quality of the image itself, three things about writer-director Nagisa Oshima’s Etsuraku, adapted from Futaro Yamada’s 1962 novel Kan no Naka no Etsuraku, suggest we […]
Dennis Grunes 