Nagisa Ōshima
Works commemorating the 70th anniversary of the founding of Japan mapping Supervision Association
Devotion investigates the extremely complex and heirarchical relationships among a committed group of Japanese filmmakers who dedicated up to 30 years of their lives making films for one man-Ogawa Shinsuke. Members of Ogawa Pro filmed the student movement of the late 60's; the fight by farmers to save their land from government confiscaton for the Narita airport at Sanrizuka; and the village life of a small farming community, Magino Village, in northern Japan. These heartbreaking and sometimes funny stories have never been told on film before. Rare footage, stills, and diaries with interviews with Oshima Nagisa, Hara Kazuo and Robert Kramer make this historical inquiry visually exciting as well as valuable.
First major English-language documentary profile of the cult Japanese actor/director, Takeshi Kitano. Featuring interviews with many of his regular contributors and colleagues, the film explores Kitano's rise from working-class poverty to superstar of Japanese radio, TV, comedy and journalism, and follows the making of his US-Japanese gangster film, 'Brother'.
Set during Japan's Shogun era, this film looks at life in a samurai compound where young warriors are trained in swordfighting. A number of interpersonal conflicts are brewing in the training room, all centering around a handsome young samurai named Sozaburo Kano. The school's stern master can choose to intervene, or to let Kano decide his own path.
The French computer programmer Laura inherits the task of making a computer game of the Battle of Okinawa in Japan during World War 2. She searches the Internet for information on the battle, and interviews Japanese experts and witnesses. The extraordinary circumstances of the Battle of Okinawa lead Laura to reflect deeply on her own life and humanity in general, particularly the influence of history and memories.
A documentary on the first century of Japanese cinema from the point of view of the controversial Japanese filmmaker Nagisa Ōshima.
Nagisa Oshima interviews Akira Kurosawa, leading him to share his thoughts about filmmaking, his life and works, and numerous anecdotes relating to his films and his various film activities.
Story of Kyoto: its history, culture, as well as the role it has played in the director's life and the life of his mother.
A BBC television documentary on the life of Yukio Mishima that highlights the many known major aspects of his life and personality.
Island of Java, 1942, during World War II. British Major Jack Celliers arrives at a Japanese prison camp, run by the strict Captain Yonoi. Colonel John Lawrence, who has a profound knowledge of Japanese culture, and Sergeant Hara, brutal and simpleton, will witness the struggle of wills between two men from very different backgrounds who are tragically destined to clash.
Documentary about the making of Nagisa Oshima's 1983 film MERRY CHRISTMAS MR. LAWRENCE.
documentary about Nagisa Oshima It includes interviews with Oshima, Donald Richie, Roger Pulvers and Paul Mayersberg
A Visit to Ogawa Productions offers a rare insight into the social and cinematic philosophy of one of Japan's best-known documentary film collectives. As the film reveals, Ogawa Productions' in-depth portraits of Japanese society - whether of protest movements or traditional agricultural life - grew out of an unusual commitment to integrate themselves with the communities they filmed, to the extent that their film-making literally became an alternative lifestyle.
A young man has an affair with an older woman. He is very jealous of her husband and decides that they should kill him. One night, after the husband had plenty of sake to drink and was in bed, they strangle him and dump his body down a well. To avert any suspicions, she pretends her husband has gone off to Tokyo to work. For three years the wife and her lover secretly see each other. Finally, suspicions become very strong and people begin to gossip. To make matters worse, her husband's ghost begins to haunt her and the law arrives to investigate her husband's disappearance.
Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.
Based on a true story set in pre-war Japan, a man and one of his servants begin a torrid affair. Their desire becomes a sexual obsession so strong that to intensify their ardor, they forsake all, even life itself.
A police investigator cracks down on yakuza business, but once he realizes the police are in negotiations with certain factions, he sides with his own syndicate of choice.
Sunaoko come to Okinawa to find his brother Tsuruo. Her searching is not very painless because it tears up old wounds in complicated relationships, some of which date back to the horrors of war.
"Goze" drawn by painter Shinichi Saito. One of the few remaining blind women in the snowy Niigata region, a traveling entertainer who played the shamisen and sang, visited villages and left a record of living on the mercy of others.
The program investigates the secrets behind the success of Japan’s most famous baseball team, the Tokyo Yomiuri Kyojin-gun, affectionately known as the Giants. An interview with Kawakami, the coach at the time, retraces the glorious history of this team, which was Japan’s baseball champion for seven consecutive years, until 1971.
Oshima’s magisterial epic, centering on the ambivalent surviving heir of the Sakurada clan, uses ritual and the microcosm of the traditional family to trace the rise and fall of militaristic Japan across several decades.
A metaphysical mystery involving a university student's camera getting stolen, and the thief then committing suicide. Looking back upon the event, the situation comes to be questioned if it happened at all.
A family of four lives off of scams in which they pretend to be injured by automobiles. After suffering an injury during the war, the father believes he is an invalid. He and his wife have a 10-year-old boy and another, younger boy. The adults pretend to be injured by autos in crowded traffic, blackmailing the fearful motorists with threats to call in the police.
Bored by the emptiness of everyday life, four students gather to play dangerous games in an apartment.
This is the story of a bookstore thief named Birdy, who is led through various adventures in Tokyo's Shinjuku district by salesgirl Umeko.
Nagisa Oshima's documentary details the rise of Chairman Mao during the revolution and shows the Communist Party's struggle and cultural upheaval. Made in 1969 for NTV station, this TV documentary also questions Mao's dictator tendency during the cultural revolution.
Three students spend their holidays at the seaside where they are mistaken for Koreans, a minority which is looked down on in Japan. The action develops into a crime story.
A Korean man is sentenced to death in Japan but survives his execution, sending the authorities into a panic about what to do next.
A sex-obsessed young woman, a suicidal young man she meets on the street, a gun-crazy wannabe gangster—these are just three of the irrational, oddball anarchists trapped in an underground hideaway in Oshima’s devilish, absurdist portrait of what he deemed the “death drive” in Japanese youth culture.
A young boy joins a band of ninja during a peasant uprising, all depicted through an experimental form of filming pages from the original manga set to sound.
Four sexually hungry high school students preparing for their university entrance exams meet up with an inebriated teacher singing bawdy drinking songs. This encounter sets them on a less than academic path.
Hakuchu no Torima is the portrayal of a violent rapist as seen through the recollections of his wife and one of his victims. As the film starts, Eisuke (Kei Sato) encounters Shino (Saeda Kawaguchi), who works as a maid in a house. She is a former coworker from a failed collective farm, whose life he once saved -- only to rape her. Soon, Eisuke's criminal pattern of rapes and murders emerges as he goes on assaulting women (Shino being the witness of one of them, as Eisuke tries to violate her employer). When cooperating with the police on making a description of the rapist, Shino withholds her crucial knowledge of his identity. She prefers writing letters to Eisuke's dutiful wife, Matsuko, a schoolteacher (Akiko Koyama -- Mrs Oshima), in order to expose his true nature and perhaps induce her into turning Eisuke over to the police.
This ethereal montage of still images with darkly somber undertones, Yunbogi’s Diary is based on photographs that Oshima took during his two-month research trip to South Korea in 1965 during which he was haunted by his encounters with impoverished street children in Seoul. The voice-over comprises diary entries from a six-year-old Korean boy and Oshima’s own reflections on Japanese-Korean relations, a controversial subject that he revisited in his later films Sing a Song of Sex and Death by Hanging.
A corrupt businessman blackmails the lovelorn reprobate Atsushi into watching over his suitcase full of embezzled cash while he serves a jail sentence. Rather than wait for the man to retrieve his money, however, Atsushi decides to spend it all in one libidinous rush—fully expecting to be tracked down and killed.
A chronicle of the eight-year battle against the construction of the Matsubara dam at Ogunimachi Shimouke, Asogun, district of Kumamoto. Tomoyuki Murahara constructs the “beehive fortress,” the point of reference for the protest movement opposing the decision to expropriate land.
Watashi-wa beretto is a promotional film for the automobile manufacturer Isuzu Jidosha directed by Nagisa Ôshima.
Oshima exposes the fact that many wounded soldiers cannot receive compensation from the Japanese government because of their Korean nationality, while questioning if this is a just way for the Japanese to act. The documentary uses TV to problematize the apathy of the Japanese people. According to Oshima’s 'The Idea of Evil and Cruelty' and Sato Tadao’s 'History of Japanese Documentary Film', the actual situation was much more serious and harsher than the documentary depicts.
In the year 1637 in Shimabara of Tokugawa-era Japan, oppressed peasant Christians revolt against the shogunate with the aid of a charismatic Christian rebel leader Shiro Amakusa.
Nagisa Oshima’s most personal film is a reflection by the director on his own disillusionment with the revolutionary student movement of the 1950s and the failure of political radicalism. Taking its title (as a reference or homage) from Alain Resnais’ pivotal 1956 documentary Nuit et Brouillard, the film has a group of former student revolutionaries who meet again years later at the wedding of one of their classmates. Old feelings, rivalries and grudges gradually erupt to the surface as the one-time friends recall the various treacheries by which their cause was defeated. Cutting between times past and the present, and unfolding the action from each of his characters viewpoints, Oshima creates an abstract and yet engrossing study of passions past and principles eroded. —Yume Pictures
A budding gangster enthralls a freeloading young woman, soon taking advantage of her knack for hitch-hiking to rob middle-class, middle-aged men.
In Osaka's slum, youths without futures engage in pilfering, assault and robbery, prostitution, and the buying and selling of identity cards and of blood. Alliances constantly shift. Tatsu and Takeshi, friends since boyhood, reluctantly join Shin's gang. Shin's an upstart and moves his gang often to avoid the local kingpin. Hanoko is a young woman with ambitions: first she's in the blood business with her father, then she joins forces with Shin. She soon breaks off that partnership, even though she's taken the sensitive Takeshi under her wing. Double crosses multiply. Those with the closest bonds become each others' murderers.
A young man runs a scam selling pigeons that always return to his home. He falls under the wing of Kyoko, an older student whose heart is touched after Masuo sells his pigeons to her. However, after his scam is revealed, can these feelings truly remain the same?
A playful short film made in the style of a trailer for a fictional feature film that seems to be a spoof of films that were popular in Japan at the time.
