LACMA film series: begins next week

Director Series: In the Realm of Oshima

May 8 - May 23

"I am not interested in making films that can be understood in fifteen minutes."—Nagisa Oshima.

LACMA and the American Cinematheque are the exclusive Los Angeles venues for this two-part retrospective of Japanese filmmaker Nagisa Oshima that premiered at the 2008 New York Film Festival. The retrospective features new 35mm prints, titles never before screened in Los Angeles, and two screenings of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Oshima's only film in English, long unavailable for theatrical presentation. The series's curator, James Quandt, senior programmer of the Cinematheque Ontario, writes: "Oshima's works exhibit wit, beauty, furious invention, profound feeling… (and) a desperate intelligence. Oshima made films as if they were a matter of life and death."

Born in 1932 into a Kyoto family with samurai ancestry, Oshima lost his father at age six and was raised by an impoverished mother. Entering the Japanese film industry after college, Oshima began directing features in 1959, the banner year for France's Nouvelle Vague. Though his polemical, prolific, and combatively inventive 1960s output, which regularly rankled studio heads, landed Oshima on the forefront of Japan's own New Wave, he diligently sought to stand apart. In a recent profile of the director in Film Comment, Tony Rayns explains, "[Oshima] sees himself as being in Japan but not of it; he always chooses to distance himself from the national consensus, whatever it is… Oshima spent his most active years as a director compulsively worrying away at specifically Japanese issues: responsibility for the war, racial prejudice against Koreans and other foreigners, colonial attitudes toward Okinawa, and what he identified as the series of political wrong turns in Japan's postwar history. The films were full-frontally designed to challenge and enrage the Japanese audience. The increasing level of interest he attracted in other countries was a fringe benefit, and had a lot to do with his perceived engagement with the political mood of the late Sixties. It was not until he effectively turned his back in disgust on contemporary culture and politics in the Seventies that he began to think of 'remaking' himself as an international filmmaker."

New 35mm prints courtesy of Oshima Productions, Kawakita Institute, the Japan Foundation, and Janus Films.

All notes adapted from text by James Quandt.

Read Dennis Lim's recent New York Times article on Oshima here.

Read series programmer James Quandt's complete introductory essay, plus "Essential Oshima" selections by scholars and admires of Oshima's work here.