Rassegna stampa di Nagisa Ôshima

THE art houses of the 1970s were filled with images of sexual transgression, gradually increasing in intensity: Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris” (1972), Dusan Makavejev’s “Sweet Movie” (1974), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” (1975). The end point, perhaps, was reached by Nagisa Oshima’s 1976 film, “In the Realm of the Senses,” a handsomely designed period piece that featured both hard-core sex and graphic violence, observed with an imperturbable objectivity.
Still banned in its native Japan in its uncut form, “In the Realm of the Senses” is being released in both Blu-ray and standard-definition DVDs this week by the Criterion Collection, along with its 1978 companion piece (and partial contradiction), “Empire of Passion” (available only on standard DVD). Thirty-three years on, “In the Realm of the Senses” has lost much of its shock value but remains a richly discomfiting piece of work. Its power no longer comes from daring to show the unshowable (hardly a novelty in the Internet age), but from its restraint and precision. This profoundly anarchic film is as tightly controlled and precisely calibrated as a tea ceremony.

The story is based on a true incident from 1936. A woman named Sada Abe, a former prostitute working as a maid in a Tokyo hotel strangled her lover (who was also her employer) during a transport of passion then cut off his penis with a carving knife. She carried this souvenir with her for several days, until she was arrested and put on trial, becoming an unlikely folk hero in the increasingly militaristic and conformist Japanese society of that era.
For Mr. Oshima, the complacently consumerist Japanese society of the 1970s offered clear parallels; as in the 1930s an irrational, erotic revolt was necessary to stir things up. A founding figure in the movement that came to be known as the Japanese New Wave, Mr. Oshima began making realist films about poverty (“A Street of Love and Hope,” 1959) and juvenile delinquency (“Cruel Story of Youth,” 1960), pointing out the gaps and contradictions within the prosperous new Japan created out of the American occupation.
But his work became more explicitly political and formally experimental as the cultural upheavals of the ’60s played out. He seldom repeated himself: in “The Revolutionary” (1962), the story of a suppressed revolt by Japanese Christians, the camera is distant and the drama collective; in “Violence at Noon” (1966) and “Death by Hanging” (1968), jump cuts and scrambled time frames, apparently influenced by French filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, plunge the viewer into a subjective world of memories, fantasies and self-reflection, emphasizing the individual’s role in building (or resisting) his own reality.
By the time of “In the Realm of the Senses” Mr. Oshima had arrived at a studied neutrality. The movie proceeds chronologically, and although there are large gaps in the story line, the viewer has no trouble filling them in. The action is largely confined to a few minimally decorated interior sets, aspiring neither to documentary realism nor the theatrical stylization of a film like “The Ceremony” (1971). The compositions are symmetrical and a bit stolid, and the camera seldom moves. The lighting is bright and even, unlike most of the soft-focus erotica of the soft-core sex films flooding Japan at the time. The look is almost clinical, appropriate to a film that often seems less about personalities than disassociated body parts.
As the film scholar Donald Ritchie points out in his notes for the Criterion edition, the script owes much to the surrealist notion of “l’amour fou” — the consuming passion that makes the rules and responsibilities of the social world melt away, into a tangle of sensation and desire. (The lovers who disrupt the garden party in Buñuel’s “Age d’Or” are a classic example.) But Mr. Oshima’s film is unusual in that the expressed desire is largely feminine. The adventure begins with a moment of female voyeurism, as Sada (Eiko Matsuda) watches Kichizo (Tatsuya Fuji) make love to his wife through a partially opened door panel, an inversion of the male peeping that usually motivates Western sex films.
Sada is the insatiable partner who can’t stop ministering to her lover even when their rented rooms are full of servants and musicians. Here sex is an exhibition, staged for an audience (often an appreciative one: an elderly geisha, invited to play the samisen while the couple go at it, is moved to tears as she watches).
As a contrast to Sada’s intimate performances Mr. Oshima offers the theater of the streets, with its more ominous, male-dominated spectacle. A single sequence is enough for Mr. Oshima to establish the political context and the lovers’ position within it. As troops of imperial soldiers march through a narrow street, Kichizo heads in the opposite direction, hurrying back to his lover, not seeming to notice that other forces are loose in the land.
Mr. Oshima was still involved in censorship trials over “In the Realm of the Senses” when he filmed “Empire of Passion,” a film that in many ways seems a pessimistic rebuke to “Realm.” Yet another variation on “The Postman Always Rings Twice” plot, “Passion” imagines a pair of village lovers (Mr. Fuji, returning from “Senses,” and Kazuko Yoshiyuki) who murder her inconvenient older husband, a rickshaw driver (Takahiro Tamura), and dump his body down a deep well.
Explaining that the old man has gone to Tokyo for work, the lovers enjoy three diminishingly blissful years together, until the forces of order belatedly show up in the figure of a goofy, accident-prone inspector from the city (Takuzo Kawatani). He suspects the truth and proceeds to uncover it through up-to-date methods of eavesdropping and torture.
The adulterous sex in “Passion” is joyless and perfunctory, but it is enough to rouse the subconscious resentment of society, a force that materializes in the form of the murdered husband’s mournful ghost. This pale figure is a rare, if not unique, manifestation of the supernatural in the very modern work of Mr. Oshima. The dead hand of the past, the ghost reaches out to tap the shoulder of those who challenge the status quo — a touch Mr. Oshima surely recognized. (The Criterion Collection, “In the Realm of the Senses” $39.95, “Empire of Passion” $29.95, not rated)
Da The New York Times 26 aprile 2009

For many critics and cinephiles who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s, Nagisa Oshima, now 76, has long held the mantle of Japan’s greatest living filmmaker. Younger viewers, for the most part, have had to take them at their word since his films are scarcely available on home video and rarely revived for repertory screenings.
With this once-towering figure almost in eclipse, it is hard to overstate the significance of “In the Realm of Oshima,” his first major retrospective in the United States in more than 20 years. The series, which runs from Saturday through Oct. 14 as part of the New York Film Festival, includes all 23 of his fiction features. Its title alludes to “In the Realm of the Senses,” a 1976 hard-core provocation and the one Oshima film whose notoriety survives.
The retrospective, which will travel to about a dozen other North American cities, is a labor of love for its curator, James Quandt of the Cinematheque Ontario, who has worked on it for 10 years, tracking down obscure print sources and negotiating a tangle of rights problems. In the context of an amnesiac film culture, it is also a heroic intervention, a bid to safeguard a master’s place in the canon.

Richard Peña, the program director at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which organized the show jointly with the Cinematheque Ontario, said he realized that a retrospective was long overdue when he taught a seminar at Columbia University a few years ago on “Cruel Story of Youth,” Mr. Oshima’s breakthrough second feature, from 1960, and found that none of his students had heard of the filmmaker.
He added that Mr. Oshima’s reputation had suffered from the increasing timidity of art-house tastes: “For a while there was a kind of hostility to the radical experiments in form that Oshima came to incarnate.”
If Mr. Oshima’s legacy now seems a bit murky, it is partly because he was, by design, a tough filmmaker to pin down. Several thematic threads run through his movies — sex, crime, an alertness to the social and political dimensions of his characters’ transgressions — but there is no stylistic signature. Mr. Oshima swerved between extremes, reshaping familiar genres (family epics, youth films) and inventing new ones (freely mixing modes like documentary realism and avant-garde surrealism), always searching for radical forms to match radical content.
Born into a family with samurai ancestry and socialist leanings, Mr. Oshima studied law at Kyoto University, where he became active in the left-wing student movement. His youthful ideals extended into his film career, and his interest in cinema as a revolutionary tool — along with his gift for acid polemics and his pop touch with political material — earned him repeated comparisons to another ’60s titan, Jean-Luc Godard. (Tired of being called Japan’s answer to Mr. Godard, Mr. Oshima suggested that Mr. Godard be considered the Oshima of France.)
Like all iconoclasts, Mr. Oshima has a patricidal aspect to his career. “My hatred for Japanese cinema includes absolutely all of it,” he declared. When he made a television documentary on Japanese cinema in 1995, he included only one clip each from older masters like Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi. (Four of his own films made it in.) Where others saw refinement, Mr. Oshima saw meek politesse and ossified ideals of beauty. This is a filmmaker who once wrote an essay titled “Banish Green” and excised the color from his movies because he thought it too soothing.
It was not just Japanese aesthetics but a whole system of Japanese thought that Mr. Oshima sought to probe and overthrow. He picked at the scabby flipside of his country’s postwar economic miracle, exposing the tyranny of tradition and the failure of dogma, scotching the sentimental myths of the land of the rising sun. His third feature, “The Sun’s Burial” (1960), includes numerous shots of the sun, its glow turned seemingly radioactive, setting over an infernal Osaka slum.
Mr. Oshima threw in his lot with the underclass. His protagonists tend to be rebels, outcasts and criminals. Many of his plots pivot on scams, executed with either casual or desperate cruelty and typically doomed to backfire.
At the peak of his powers, Mr. Oshima had a particular talent for transmuting tabloid scenarios into excoriating social parables. Many of his greatest films are inspired by true stories, including “Violence at Noon” (1966), a fractured portrait of a serial rapist and the two women who love him; “Death by Hanging” (1968), a Brechtian screed against capital punishment and Japanese xenophobia; and “Boy” (1969), a coming-of-age tale about a family that forces its eldest son to fake traffic injuries.
Mr. Quandt believes that these movies, which he called “total eviscerations of Japan Inc.,” are ripe for reappraisal. “The line on Oshima is that the films are highly cerebral or conceptual,” he said. “That’s true to a degree, but I also find the films incredibly moving. Unlike almost anything in contemporary cinema, they feel like they’re ripped out of his being.”
In the second, more leisurely half of Mr. Oshima’s career (he has made only five fiction features in the last 35 years, after racking up 18 between 1959 and 1972), he has developed a parallel persona as a talk show host. He ventured out of Japan for the prisoner-of-war melodrama “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” (1983), starring David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto, and “Max Mon Amour” (1986), a sex farce that pairs Charlotte Rampling with a chimpanzee. After suffering a stroke in the mid-’90s, he recovered for one presumably final subversion, the gay samurai drama “Taboo” (2000).
There was an obvious correspondence between the political weather and Mr. Oshima’s productivity. He released three films in 1960, amid escalating protests over the renewal of Japan’s security treaty with the United States, and matched that number in 1968, a year of global revolt. His ’60s bookends — “Night and Fog in Japan” (1960), a flashback-filled account of the vicious in-fighting between two generations of student radicals, and “The Man Who Left His Will on Film” (1970), a playful yet infinitely sad epitaph for the very idea of political filmmaking — are among the most clear-eyed documents of that mythologized decade.
To call these films products of their times does nothing to diminish their freshness. It is precisely because Mr. Oshima was so furiously engaged with his moment that his movies still have so much to say to ours.
Da The New York Times, 26 settembre 2008

Regista maledetto, contestatore, emarginato per vocazione. Del suo paese e della sua famiglia (è il figlio di un alto funzionario statale che muore quando ha 6 anni) rifiuta tutto: l'ordine, la morale, i riti, l'ottusità mentale e politica. All'università di Kyoto, dove si laurea in legge, partecipa al movimento studentesco. Assunto dalla società Shóchiku, compie il suo scrupoloso tirocinio, e intanto scrive di cinema e fonda una rivista. Esordisce nel 1959, e già l'anno dopo, con Notte e nebbia sul Giappone (boicottato in patria, presentato nei festival all'estero) rivela la sua furente insofferenza per una società che odia. Fonda una casa di produzione, cerca di far propri i moduli linguistici della nouvelle vague. Ma il suo spirito è assai più duro, radicale e inconsciamente rituale (dunque, giapponese nel fondo). Qui è la matrice del suo stile, che si manifesta in piena evidenza nel sarcastico racconto di un coreano punito dalla legge per il solo fatto di essere coreano (L'impiccagione,1968), e che trova la sua espressione compiuta in La cerimonia (1971), storia autobiografica indiretta e spietata biografia di una famiglia e di una nazione nel corso di un quarto di secolo attraverso i riti ripetuti e maniacali che scandiscono le tappe di una incredibile vicenda di emarginazione, di intolleranza e di cinismo.

Il furore di Oshima si manifesta anche sul terreno della sessualità, che per lui è esasperazione e morte, come dimostra passo dopo passo, sadicamente, nel dittico. Ecco l'impero dei sensi (1976) e L'impero della passione (1978). Presentato a Cannes, il primo dei due film provoca scandalo, e diffonde subito nel mondo la fama di un regista che vive di eccessi e di intollerabili provocazioni. Altrettanto provocatorio è l'amore che lega perversamente il comandante giapponese del campo di concentramento e un prigioniero inglese (siamo in Nuova Zelanda, durante la seconda guerra mondiale), scatenando una sadica persecuzione che giunge sino all'assassinio. Non c'è remissione, in Furyo (1982). Né pietà. Né quella maligna ironia che Oshima rivelerà in Max, amore mio (1986), in cui si celebra l'amore fra una donna (Charlotte Rampling) e uno scimpanzè. Eccessi, ovunque.
Fernaldo di Giammatteo, Dizionario del cinema. Cento grandi registi, Roma, Newton Compton, 1995