Nagisa Ôshima, Kyoto-born screenwriter and director of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and the highly controversial In The Realm Of The Senses, has died. He was 80. As a young director, Ôshima rebelled against what he saw as conventional Japanese filmmaking. He left university in his hometown of Kyoto for the esteemed Shochiku production house in Ofuna, outside Toyko. There he shrugged off the influence of the studio's roster of fêted directors - Yasujirô Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa among them - to spearhead a new wave in Japanese filmmaking with films like A Town Of Love And Hope, his 1959 feature debut, The Sun's Burial and Night And Fog In Japan.The latter showed the limits of the so-called Shochiku-Ofuna New Wave, with the studio pulling it from cinemas a mere three days after release when it was linked with the assassination of a socialist politician. Railing against the censorship, Ôshima claimed,...
- 1/15/2013
- EmpireOnline
Mt. Fuji in the background is House of Bamboo's introductory image, snow-capped and serene, a travelogue shot; then, a few moments later, the same mountain is viewed from the vantage point of the scene of a crime by a ground-level camera, framed through the outstretched feet of a murdered soldier: Samuel Fuller in Japan, like tabloid ink sprayed on kakejiku scrolls. Tokyo in 1955 is noticeably the same one filmed concurrently by Ozu and Naruse, but it's also something of an open city, the war a fresh memory and the American Occupation fresher still, with glimpses of the wharfside shanties—anxious worlds barely afloat—Nagisa Oshima would explore in The Sun's Burial. Into it stomps agent of mystery Robert Stack, who's such a truculent Yank that, rather than taking in the rooftop rehearsal of a Noh troupe or the awe-inspiring tracking shot that captures the CinemaScope sprawl brimming with movement,...
- 8/27/2011
- MUBI
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