Nagisa Oshima
| Nagisa Oshima | |
|---|---|
Oshima in 2000
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| Native name | 大島 渚 (Ōshima Nagisa?) |
| Born |
March 31, 1932 Tamano, Okayama, Japan |
| Died | January 15, 2013 (aged 80) Fujisawa, Kanagawa, Japan |
| Occupation | Film director Screenwriter |
| Years active | 1953–1999 |
| Spouse(s) | Akiko Koyama (1960-2013; his death) |
| Awards |
Cannes Film Festival 1978 Empire of Passion – Best Director (Prix de la mise en scène) |
Nagisa Oshima (大島 渚 Ōshima Nagisa?, March 31, 1932 – January 15, 2013) was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. His films include In the Realm of the Senses (1976) and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983).
After graduating from Kyoto University, where he studied political history, Oshima was hired by film production company Shochiku Ltd. and quickly progressed to directing his own movies, making his debut feature A Town of Love and Hope in 1959.
Oshima's cinematic career and influence developed very swiftly, and such films as Cruel Story of Youth and Night and Fog in Japan followed in 1960. The last of these 1960 films explored Oshima's disillusionment with the traditional political left, and his frustrations with the right, and Shochiku withdrew the film from circulation after less than a week, claiming that, following the recent assassination of the Socialist Party leader Inejiro Asanuma by the ultranationalist Otoya Yamaguchi, there was a risk of "unrest". Oshima left the studio in response, and launched his own independent production company. Despite the controversy, Night And Fog In Japan was placed tenth in that year's Kinema Jumpo's best-films poll of Japanese critics, and it has subsequently amassed considerable acclaim abroad.
In 1961 Oshima directed The Catch, based on a novella by Kenzaburō Ōe about the relationship between a wartime Japanese village and a captured African American serviceman. The Catch has not traditionally been viewed as one of Oshima's major works, though it did notably introduce a thematic exploration of bigotry and xenophobia, themes which would be explored in greater depth in the later documentary Diary of Yunbogi, and feature films Death by Hanging and Three Resurrected Drunkards. He embarked upon a period of work in television, producing a series of documentaries; notably among them 1965's Diary Of Yunbogi. Based upon an examination of the lives of street children in Seoul, it was made by Oshima after a trip to South Korea.
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