“If my father had lived, of course he would have loved me, but he would also have oppressed me. Without a father, I had no one to fight. I think that’s why I’ve always fought against all kinds of authority, because I had no direct authority to fight against.”
— Nagisa Ōshima[1]

Nagasi Ōshima’s pulsating films have within them an agonising sense of sedition against Japan and the Japanese. The figure of the father, with all of its symbolic and national weight, is subject to heavy scrutiny and treatment. We witness this, unremittingly, in the wandering, labyrinthine narrative of The Man who Left his Will on Film (1970), as well as in the director’s other early, explosive seishun-eiga[2]: after all, who needs parents (or patriotism) when the lens is trained on young people in the process of intellectual, political and sexual discovery, influenced by their historical origins, of course, but behaving like an ex nihilo generation, moving inexorably towards the scenic desert of the real? In the diptych of Boy (1969) and Yunbogi’s Diary (1965) “the common element is the absence of the father or the presence of a father unable to fulfil his functions as head of the family”, (functions which) “have to be performed by the man-son, precociously in charge.”[3]

Equally, on examining the complicated family tree of the Sakurada family in The Ceremony (1971), we conclude that the father’s early (off screen) demise is the true cause of Masuo’s psychological insecurity and uncertainty, the son overshadowed by his father’s fearsome substitute: the dominant, Mephistophelean, totalitarian, omnipresent grandfather. Furthermore, we recall A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs (1967), where the pater familias, recently deceased and projected into a different authority figure, ends up being mocked by a nihilistic student who, taking the place of the late schoolteacher, begins to “obsessively sing his bawdy song, and tries to seduce his mistress. As such, he tries to fulfil the Oedipus myth of murdering his father and marrying his mother.”[4]

The ensemble films Night and Fog in Japan (1960) and The Catch (1961) — claustrophobic, yet characterised by impressively fluid cinematography — do not contain this explicit attack on the family unit. Nevertheless, we find in them the veiled accusation that, in Japan, both vanguard political groups (Night and Fog) and rural, undeveloped communities (The Catch) are hostage to personalities who embody, to use the words of Noël Burch, “feudal thought, submission, collective self-castration and the negation of the individual.”[5] These are the same qualities that the patriarch of The Ceremony imposes on members of his clan to preserve his enclosed world, trapping them in the domestic sphere.

In the first of those two films, Ōshima takes a scalpel to generational conflicts between communists, on one side, and the New Left, on the other, in the aftermath of the recently quelled protests against the 1960 US-Japan Security Treaty (also known as the ANPO treaty), which permitted ongoing US military presence on Japanese soil. In this tense and highly theatrical exercise, consisting of no more than 46 shots, and which the critic Tadao Satō correctly called diskasshon-dorama (discussion-drama)[6], the more orthodox, backward and shadowy authorities within the movement are brought to the court of reason. A wedding ceremony between opposing members of the leftist barricade is interrupted by a “revolutionary critique of the revolutionary movement”[7] (Ōshima’s own words), which will never forget the shadows, nor the “fog of treason and uncertainty”[8] of the pernicious “parents” who disguise themselves as progressive agents.

In The Catch, by contrast, patriarchal dominance is underscored from the start, in the form of the village chief who captures a Black American pilot fallen from the skies in the closing days of the Second World War, imprisoning him as if he were a beast — the Japanese title of Kenzaburo Ōe’s novel, shared by the film adaptation, could be translated as “feeding a wild animal”. As a true microcosm of fascist Japanese mentality, this bloodthirsty, racist community, led by an equally inhuman “father”, proves, once and for all, that within this country’s complex paternally ordered hierarchy (starting with its politicians, passing through its army officers and ending with the Emperor), victimhood in face of defeat is unthinkable, and everyone shares the burden of responsibility. From the most fervent nationalists to apparently blameless citizens, all are guilty — and the latter group are capable of barbarity too. It is worth mentioning that both films end with the steady observation of fog or smoke from a cremation, as if this inconsistent, paralysing gaze were that of Japan throughout time. It is this ominous image that we are struggling against, and that forms the starting point for this filmmaker’s political project.

From very early on, in his earliest writings as a young director and herald of the Nūberu bāgu[9] (Japanese New Wave), Ōshima insisted on a new kind of cinema that aimed to shock viewers out of their inertia and routine, thus creating, with this new direction, new audiences[10]. At the same time, most of the fathers of Japanese cinema had to be dispatched along the way, as only with their symbolic death would a younger generation be able to determine a new path without making concessions to tradition. It became necessary, then, to overhaul the concept of cinematographic praxis itself, as well as the role of the “author”, no longer a stagehand or craftsman but someone gifted with “capricious will”[11] (Ōshima’s term is wagamama, which can be translated as “self-centred”, “selfish” or “disobedient”). This figure directs all of their energy towards the most current, heated issues of the times (the Vietnam War, the ANPO protests, discrimination against ethnic minorities in Japan, especially against Koreans), always approaching them with their own virulently critical, transformative signature.

Thus, by obsessively filming absent, dysfunctional or monstruous fathers, Ōshima was also establishing the foundations for a necessary obliteration, to build a new kind of radically transgressive cinema. Wasn’t it he who, time and time again, drew an equivalence between making films and engaging in criminal activity?[12] Parents, when they are present, have to die or be killed, since they are the real essence of Japan, a vast territory with no escape (it is worth revisiting Boy on this point), a “huis clos rotted by the crisis”[13] or even a “declassified land” with its “hinomaru flag, the red sun painted black”[14] — a funereal obsession which, from A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs onwards, Ōshima never fails to include in his set decoration. According to him, and referring to Lúcia Nagib, “Japan has an immutable system, a diabolical chain resistant to the times and to new influences that traps it and its population in an unstoppable vicious circle”[15]. This atavism is meticulously orchestrated, for example, in the pessimistic Ceremony, where the only “authentic, liberatory gesture” (that can break the chain of ceremonies, and the only form of communication for family members suffocated by their murderous, incestuous country) “is ritual suicide”[16]. Ōshima contrasts this with the incessant search for an active subjectivity, one that uses artistic creativity to question authority figures and to plant the liberatory seeds of imagination into the real.

By imagination we mean “not so much that which is unreal or dreamt, but the affirmation of desire, the reconstruction of subjective space-time where whatever happens is rejected by objective reality”[17]. In Boy, Toshio’s childhood fantasies about aliens are his only means of surviving the very real misery and destitution that surround him. In A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs, the promiscuous imagination of this group of provincial students, visiting the capital for their university entry exams, quickly infects the reality of the film’s diegesis, each devouring the other. The bawdy songs, in opposition to the political and military anthems sung by other characters, begin as a representation of the common man’s oppressed sexual desires, but once that desire is nearing consummation, acting directly on the real without morals or consent, Ōshima returns to his discussion-drama, turning the lens on the unfettered libido of the teenagers, these anti-heroes, placing them in Brechtian dialogue with the objects of their fantasies. In this moment, “male violence and impotence contrasts with something we could call self-conscious feminine desire”[18].

This is why this use of imagination should not be confused with basic fetishism: Ōshima was one of the last great surrealists, in the sense that he demands even more reality from dreams than from reality itself. “My wish is to get to a kind of surrealism through realist elements, and vice versa,”[19] he once stated. And what better example of this than The Man who Left his Will on Film, a true Möbius strip on celluloid where even the cinematic image (which the more Bazanian-minded would consider, ontologically, to be the ultimate proof of the real) acquires an inexplicably oneiric character? Articulating the same death instinct developed one year later in Ceremony, with its meditation on the failure of political ambitions in the 1960s and cinema’s role within, The Man who Left his Will on Film is more an immersive experience than a detective story, where only one conjecture is correct. It is also a frustrating ghostly dance, where the filmed images turn against their author. Symbols from a uniform Japan, where the same landscape rules wherever you go, these human-less images, haunting in their rigidity, presaged the defeat of those who wanted to materially change political and social reality. Ōshima, going beyond a strictly Marxist analysis[20], bitterly reaffirms imagination as the only consolation and source of strength.

Nevertheless, it is worth remembering what Audie Bock wrote regarding this filmmaker’s most famous and polemical film, and the novelty it injected into his oeuvre. “When we arrive at In the Realm of the Senses (1976), fantasy has gone, there is only the exercise of desire.”[21] As a result, the torrid affair, based on the real story of Sada Abe and Kichizō Ishida, could be described as a sacrifice at the altar of Eros and Thanatos. Between the four walls of the brothel, out of which the camera rarely moves, there is space only for the consumption of vertiginous erotic energy, directed towards absolute pleasure. These lovers are out of the world (we recall the metaphorical scene in which Ishida walks in the opposite direction to the military parade, cheered by the general public who wave, once again, the funereal hinomaru flag), but they also no longer have to imagine an escape for their oppression. In death and passionate murder, they achieve a freedom that is sovereign, and intransigently real.

All of Ōshima’s later cinema is touched by the oblique, destabilising influences of eroticism. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), Max, Mon Amour (1986) and Taboo (1999) are all successors to In the Realm of the Senses. All replace the fatal female figure of Sada Abe with male presences who shake institutions with their uncontrollable urges: Jack Celliers and the imperialist Second World War army personified in Captain Yonoi; the simian Max and the sterile French bourgeoisie; Kanō Sōzaburō and the Shinsengumi, the feared militia of the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate. In three of these four films, there is also a fundamental gesture repeated at the most crucial moments, giving us reason to see In the Realm of the Senses, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, and Taboo as a trilogy where desire leads to castration. In the first film, the mutilation of Ishida’s penis can “symbolise the end of the phallocentric cult, inherited from the samurai”[22] as much as it can the search for a ceaseless orgasm, which, to paraphrase Georges Bataille, is the approval of life in death. In the second film, the lock of Jack Cellier’s hair cut by the stoic Yonoi, a martyr laden with Christian iconography, reveals repressed homoerotic feelings — Yonoi can only accept his love for Celliers as an idea, but for that Celliers must die and become nothing but a devotional memory. Finally, in the third film, we watch one of the Shinsengumi leaders, Toshizō Hijikata, take his sword to a cherry tree as the intrigue of abuse and homosexual affairs between the other samurai and Sōzaburō is, at last, revealed. In the final shot of Ōshima’s oeuvre, the mysterious slaughter of the sakura tree represents the assumption that no one is free of erotic temptation, which incites, paradoxically and as its direct rejection, the most violent impulses to exterminate. It is as if beauty (like that of Sōzaburō, but not just his, rather all beauty that leads to dysfunction) were too much for this excessively and unsustainably orderly world.

When Nagisa Ōshima left us, the phrase which had been chosen many years earlier for his epitaph could not have been more telling. Written on his grave we can read a poem by Kaijin Akashi: “If you do not burn like those fish dwelling in the depths of the sea, there will be no light anywhere.”[23] Ōshima’s work burns, and the light it spreads cannot be put out. And, indeed, we burn with it.


[1] Nagib, Lúcia. 1995. Nascido das Cinzas: Autor e Sujeito nos Filmes de Nagisa Oshima. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo.

[2] A film by young people with young people and for young people.

[3] Idem

[4] Idem

[5] Burch, Noël. 1979. To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

[6] Turim, Maureem. 1998. The Films of Nagisa Oshima: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast. Berkeley: University of California Press.

[7] Danvers, Louis e Charles Jr. Tatum. 1986. Nagisa Oshima. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma.

[8] Turim, Maureem. 1998. The Films of Nagisa Oshima: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast. Berkeley: University of California Press.

[9] Transliteração fonética japonesa do termo francês Nouvelle Vague.

[10] Leia-se "L’Asthénie des auteurs." In Écrits (1956-1978): Dissolution et jaillissement. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma/ Gallimard, pp. 39.

[11] Tessier, Max. 1979. Le Cinéma Japonais au présent 1959–1979. Cinéma D’Aujourd’hui, n.º 15. Paris: Lherminier.

[12] “Firstly, making films is a criminal act in this world..” Oshima, Nagisa. (1980). "Le Démon et les idées des movements de lutte." In Écrits (1956-1978): Dissolution et jaillissement. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma/Gallimard.

[13] Danvers, Louis e Charles Jr. Tatum. 1986. Nagisa Oshima. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma.

[14] Nagib, Lúcia. 1995. Nascido das Cinzas: Autor e Sujeito nos Filmes de Nagisa Oshima. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo.

[15] Idem

[16] Burch, Noël. 1979. To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

[17] Tessier, Max. 1979. Le Cinéma Japonais au présent 1959–1979. Cinéma D’Aujourd’hui, n.º 15. Paris: Lherminier.

[18] Turim, Maureem. 1998. The Films of Nagisa Oshima: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast. Berkeley: University of California Press.

[19] Danvers, Louis e Charles Jr. Tatum. 1986. Nagisa Oshima. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma.

[20] “I'm not a Marxist. In fact, I consider Marxism and Christianity to be the same thing, something that I think is harmful.”

[21] Bock, Audie. 1985. Japanese Film Directors. Tóquio: Kodansha International Ltd.

[22] Danvers, Louis e Charles Jr. Tatum. 1986. Nagisa Oshima. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma.

[23] The quote can be found on the official website of the PIA Film Festival, which every year awards the Ōshima prize to young, up-and-coming filmmakers. https://pff.jp/en/oshima-prize/