In the Realm of Oshima September 27 – October 14, 2008
46th New York Film Festival Sidebar
Tickets on sale at the Walter Reade Theater box office and online.
The sidebar to the 46th New York Film Festival is a near-complete retrospective of one of the essential figures of modern cinema: Nagisa Oshima. Born in Kyoto in 1932, Oshima studied law at Kyoto University, but he followed a friend’s tip soon after graduating and applied to work at Shochiku Studios, one of Japan’s biggest film producers. After assisting a wide variety of filmmakers, writing screenplays and the occasional theoretical piece on cinema and culture, he was tapped to help develop a line of youth-oriented films. The result, the remarkable Cruel Story of Youth (1960), launched what became the Japanese New Wave and announced the arrival of the most important film talent since the emergence of Akira Kurosawa a decade earlier.
Having come of age in the immediate postwar period, Oshima saw many of the hopes of his generation for fundamental change in Japan dashed as traditional Japanese power structures were maintained and the country became firmly locked in the Cold War orbit of the United States. Oshima’s films exhibit an almost instinctual distrust of authority, always shown to be corrupt and hypocritical. Yet as the ’60s wore on he also became aware of the growing gap between his generation of “critical dissidents” and the much more radicalized militant groups that increasingly played their politics out in street clashes with the police. Several of his finest films — Night and Fog in Japan, Death by Hanging, The Man Who Left His Will on Film — chart the contours of these different political approaches.
Formally, Oshima experimented with a wide variety of styles and techniques—from the 40 shots of Night and Fog in Japan to the over 1,000 shots of Violence at Noon, from avant-garde theater in Diary of a Shinjuku Thief to diary-like travelogue in Dear Summer Sister. Like that other intrepid cinematic explorer to whom he’s most often compared, Jean-Luc Godard, a visceral restlessness dominates Oshima’s films. They seemingly grow out of each other, taking up questions previously posed in earlier works while employing totally different cinematic approaches.
A free panel discussion on Oshima's body of work will take place on Wed. Oct 1st at 6:30 p.m.
Click on Program Overview for a listing of the films in In the Realm of Oshima.
In the Realm of Oshima is co-organized by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Cinematheque Ontario and curated by James Quandt.
