Nagisa Ōshima
4 titles · japanese contemporary
Two students run a badge scam on middle-aged men in Cruel Story of Youth, and the film has no interest in redeeming either of them. Postwar Japanese institutions are the target throughout: the state kills a Korean prisoner in Death by Hanging and he fails to die, so the officials re-enact the crime to remind him who he is. In the Realm of the Senses takes an obsessive affair to its documented end and was prosecuted for it.
Signature
- Direct assault on Japanese institutions and postwar consensus.
- Formal disruption: staged re-enactment, Brechtian distance, flat colour.
- Sexuality as political material.
- Protagonists the film declines to make sympathetic.
fit
Lineage
Earlier films these works draw on, and the films they went on to shape — each link checked to name a film that actually came first.