Who is he?
Japanese film director and scenarist who has directed over 50 feature and short length fictional films, documentaries and works for television between the late fifties and the late nineties. Oshima was one of the spearheads of the Japanese New Wave movement of the sixties that ushered in a new kind of national cinema. His 1978 film, Empire of Passion , won the Best Director prize at the Cannes film festival.
What are his films about?
Themes
Oshima’s films, along with the other works of the New Wave, rejected classical themes and milieus linked to traditional moral codes that marked the existent Japanese cinema. These films, on the other hand, embody a new post-war consciousness, treating more contemporary questions such as the generational disconnect begotten by the war, the American occupation, the accumulation of slums, racism and the corruption of traditional societal structures. Besides shifting focus from the middle class to fringe groups and youth, they broke representational taboos in portraying violence and sex explicitly on screen.
Style
Along with the repudiation of traditional themes, Oshima’s highly modernist movies broke away from classical Japanese film aesthetics founded on compositional balance, long shots, measured edits and expressive acting style. Skewed, asymmetric compositions, jarring and rapid cuts that juxtapose diverse elements, elaborate camera movements, non-emotive actors sometimes addressing the camera directly and blending of disparate generic elements are some of the stylistic characteristics of Oshima’s films.
WHY is he of interest?
Oshima’s pulsating films refract through them the spirit of the youth revolts that took place in Japan during the 1960s. Like the works of Jean-Luc Godard, they capture an entire zeitgeist while always finding newer ways of expression and pushing the boundaries of the narrative form. Oshima never let himself be pigeonholed into specific subjects or filmmaking style and his films testify that he was as at home with traditional narratives as with more radical ones.
WHERE to discover him?
Death by Hanging (1968), arguably Oshima’s finest work, revolves around the failed execution of a Korean prisoner in a Japanese facility and the Kafkaesque confusion that ensues amidst the prison authorities. Acrid, morbidly funny, and seething with anger, the film mixes documentary and fictional modes of address in order to expose the xenophobia and sexual repression that lurks beneath the surface of social and legal establishments.
