Originally published in the March 2015 issue of The Film Handbook
By Stéphane du Mesnildot
Translation: Beef brisket sheep ears, Yu Qing
Nagisa Oshima was one of the most famous film artists of his time, and for us, the most perverse one is the most difficult to detect, and the vast majority of his works, masterpieces forged in the fires of the sixties, are not seen in France. When Nagisa Oshima died two years ago, the Film Handbook paid tribute to him in a long article [March 2013], regretting that some of his best works had been delayed in Being Available in France. This will change this spring, and we have the privilege of discovering this artist, who is both popular and political, and always unruly. At the beginning of the restoration of the French Film Archive, Carlotta released the Oshima Nagisa DVD set, which contained nine of his films from the 60s and 70s. Among them, "Hanging Death", "Juvenile" and "Ritual" have never been released on DVD and will be re-screened in movie theaters.
In the end, the 4K restored version of Merry Christmas on the Battlefield gave us the opportunity to re-watch this fascinating work on the big screen, and it is also the most popular of Oshima Nagisa's many chaotic hidden works. "Weeks of Love and Death" may be used as a subtitle for the film or to summarize the themes of all his works.
The etiquette and rituals in most of Oshima's works hark Japan back to the cursed past: the Japanese Empire, indoctrination education, suicide rituals, bloodthirsty sects. In other works, which are more difficult to see, mad love, pornography and art have the power to combine immoral stories with confronting death itself.
Japanese Night and Fog (1960)
"Night and Fog in Japan" brought Nagisa Oshima's first grand ceremony to the big screen: a young left-wing activist marrying in a gloomy middle-class house. If the title of the film pays homage to Aaron René, then this eerie Baroque house has become a secular labyrinth, anticipating René's 1961 "Last Year in Marion Bado" What happened during a series of marches against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in Tokyo the previous year? What happened to the fake "spy" imprisoned in College City?
The wedding was held like a silent pact between young activists and bourgeois Communist Party leaders. Realizing that Shochiku had a New Wave folklore conception that placed young rebels in the context of jazz, Nagisa Oshima made a formalist expression that was almost equivalent to suicide.
In the 43 scenes and shots that make up the film, he immerses the setting in darkness, isolates the characters from the shimmer of ghosts, and connects the past and present with continuity. Nagisa Oshima borrowed inspiration from Nobuo Nakagawa, a master fantasy master of the 1950s, "Strange Tales", "Hell"] to borrow inspiration, light experiments, kabuki stunts, and desperate existentialism. Because it's a movie about ghosts: even within the party, when the leader sends the young warriors against the police, the generals of the Empire of Japan come back in the movie. With this real war machine, Nagisa Oshima breaks down the hypocrisy of another marriage between the young guard and the big consortium. After Shochiku Achiko suspended the film's release plans, Nagisa Oshima chose independence, and the Japanese New Wave was born.
The Boy (1969)
With a round face, a school uniform, a yellow duck-tongue hat, and no other identity except for "teenager", it looks like Yasujiro Ozu's "Good Morning" has been released again.
Nagisa Oshima also recreates Ozu's film composition, as he did, solidifying the representation of all Japanese families with his lens.
In "The Boy", there are no kind old people or disobedient children, but monster-like parents exercising the power of cannibalism and cruelty. The teenager's parents forced him to crash into a car in order to extort money from the driver. The father, who was the organizer of the scam, did not go to work under the pretext of war trauma. In these fake accidents, this trauma that we do not know is symbolically transferred to the child, thus transforming into a member of the little kamikaze [Japan's suicide squad during World War II]. Thanks to the little boy's suffering body, the debts owed to him by Japanese society during the war years, as my father himself considered, were repaid. Like those Imperial pilots, the teenager projected himself into nothingness in the process of martyrdom that went back and forth thousands of times, which evolved into a depraved family ritual.
In this situation of sheer terror, the mighty are the king, and Nagisa Oshima tightens the atmosphere of terror [here, the author uses "des tours d'écrou", which is applied to the novel "The Turn of Screw" by the American nineteenth-century writer Henry James, literally "tighten the screws"] In order to have money abortion, the mother (who is actually the teenage stepmother) drives him to replicate more accidents and drags the child into the quagmire of death. The abortion itself reveals that it is a lie, and this time nothingness is swallowed up by another nothingness. The yellow duck-tongue hat, with its innocent color, in a brief period, drew the adolescence and his childhood closer. Gradually, the film became monochromatic and fell into the family's final journey in the northern part of the archipelago. Wandering between inns, the family wandered like a ghost and lost in the snow.
"Boy" is one of the masterpieces of cinema in the 1960s, and it is also a special work of Nagisa Oshima's film career. When the camera is focused on the unfathomable sad face of the teenager facing the sea, Nagisa Oshima's sometimes arrogant rationalism and rejection of humanism dissipate without a trace.
Merry Christmas on the Battlefield (1983)
In front of a group of Japanese soldiers waiting to behead the prisoners, Major Jack embraced Captain Senoi, and the gray-faced Senoi fell at Jack's feet like a severed flower.
Death is transformed into a fatalistic ritual of love. Connected by negative relationships, David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto become dark stars with devastating appeal.
Like R, the Korean in Hanging, Major Jack in this film is like the angel of the end of the Bible, who restores the confinement of the barracks despite the objections of the soldiers, imprisoning them in his own fanaticism, fear and desire. What really crushed Senoi, however, was not only his love for Major Jack, but also the dark side of the latter and the mistreatment of his hunchbacked brother in secondary school in England, which he thought he had forgotten behind, but was punished accordingly in the barracks. We feel as if my brother's disability has returned to Seno and destroyed his fascist moral image. And this reflects the fact that Japan and Britain, two empires that have fallen or are similar, have the same way in the culture of apology in the form of sex and body. Another addition to the must-see nature of Merry Christmas on the Battlefield was the 36-year-old Takeshi Kitano's role as a villain who was not easily detected by Western audiences of the year. The friendship between the original sergeant and Lawrence forms the second layer of the film's narrative, and the international title of the film, "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence", comes from this. At the end of the war, Lawrence visits the former sergeant in his cell and monitors his execution. Takeshi Kitano's intimidating innocent expression shows the loss of man hidden beneath the image of a soldier—a loss shaped by the power of nothingness, as Nagisa Oshima did in another work, Shonen.
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