All night Sasori at the Rio in Dalston on 24 Sept

There’s been a whole load of film-related news in our buzzing capital these past few days. Admittedly, the announcement of the London Film Festival programme yesterday slightly overshadowed my own announcement of the dates for Zipangu Fest (18-24 November at the ICA, if you can’t be bothered to scroll down a bit). Of course, we haven’t actually made  public any of our programming choices yet, which we’re keeping a closely guarded secret until nearer the time, but you might hear me let a few things slip out if you’re at the Female Prisoner #701 Triple Bill at the Rio Cinema in Dalston on 24 September. The event starts at 11pm and carries on through to daybreak, and I’ve been kindly asked by the organisers, Cigarette Burns Cinema, to stand up between screenings and deliver some patter about Meiko Kaji, Toei Pinky Violence, and other related topics. Perhaps I’ll crack under the pressure of sleep deprivation and end up revealing the whole programme…

The cool iconic beauty of Meiko Kaji, as Sasori

Anyway, my presence aside, this is going to be a wonderful night. If you’ve not seen any of the Female Prisoner #701 films (or Female Convict Scorpion, or whatever other titles you like to refer to them under), then you’re in for a rare treat – these aren’t your average Woman in Prison bits of exploitation fluff, but hypnotic, frequently surreal and dreamlike action titles with a logical progression between each of the various instalments and a captivating performance by the cool iconic beauty Meiko Kaji. I’ve not seen them for a while myself, and it’s going to be fab watching them on the big screen all at once.

The hypnotic Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972)

The films are being presented in association with the Scala Forever season currently running across a number of venues this Summer (although chiefly The Roxy Bar and Screen) in memory of the legendary repertory cinema up in Kings Cross in which so many of us had our viewing habits formed. In fact, I’m just looking at the programme and I notice that the ICA are showing my favourite Imamura film, The Ballad of Narayama, on the 28th and 29th of this month, which, as I wrote in the intro to Behind the Pink Curtain, proved a seminal experience when I first saw it on a Double Bill at the Scala with Koji Wakamatsu’s Violated Angels back in 1990.

Check out the Female Prisoner all-nighter Facebook page here and more info on this and Cigarette Burns’ other activites can be found here.

The kind of images Blu-Ray was invented for - a shot from Kenneth Anger's 1954 film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

Well my mind was certainly changed over the past year. I’ve recently been savouring a number of UK released disks that really benefit from the bright colours and sharp images the format permits – so much so that I’m wondering if I could ever go back to DVD again. The first of these was the BFI’s wonderful release of The Magick Lantern Cycle, the complete works of experimental filmmaker and Aleister Crowley nut Kenneth Anger. Anger might be best known to many for his two wonderful Hollywood Babylon books, which dig the dirt on the various scandals that beset Tinseltown in its early years, but if you’ve never seen such films as The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Scorpio Rising (1963) or Lucifer Rising (1972) then, boy, I suggest you get your hands on this while you can. The RRP is £36.99, but I got mine from Amazon UK for £12.99, and its currently listed at £9.19. These luridly bizarre 16mm occult workouts look startling on Blu-Ray – you can see the very grain and texture of the film stock, its the closest one will ever get to seeing these films as they were meant to be seen, projected from film. Moreover, you also get a nice thick booklet about Anger and his films, and a fascinating feature-length documentary Anger Me (2006) about his fascinating life following in the path of the Beast, working at the Cinémathèque Française during the 1950s, and hobnobbing with such luminaries as Mick Jagger.

Kenneth Anger's homage to Aleister Crowley, Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) - the title alone should be enough to make you want to see this!

It seems to me, as DVD once did, that Blu-Ray is really best suited to experimental film, and top of my want list now is a UK release of the films of Stan Brakhage. Criterion put out their 687 minute release By Brakhage: Anthology 1 & 2, but I assume this must be region 1 coded, so no good for my current set up. Oh well, we can live in hope that the BFI will look into getting this out on the market before the coalition government’s cuts debilitate this hallowed institution too much.

Rage Net (1988), by Stan Brakhage - if anyone wants to put out a Region 2 Blu-Ray of Brakhage's films, I'm with you all the way

In the meantime, I’ll point you to another great BFI release that might have passed you by, which looks similarly impressive on Blu-Ray, which is Winstanley, a real oddity from 1975 co-directed by revered British film historian Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo. Based on an obscure episode in English history shortly after the Civil War, it portrays a renegade group of known as the Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, and their attempts to leave the system by claiming a patch of common land to live on and cultivate for themselves – Britain’s earliest Communists, as you might, whose Reclaim-the-Streets / Grow-Your-Own ethos seems particularly appealing in these times of inflated banker’s bonuses, VAT hikes and public sector layoffs. Brownlow and Mollo also made It Happened Here (1964), about a hypothetical Nazi Occupation of England during the war, although this is only available on DVD. My advice though, to film fans and especially filmmakers, Go Watch Winstanley! This is the perfect example of what independent filmmaking should be. The film is an aesthetic masterpiece, with some beautiful English landscapes shot in wonderful high-contrast 16mm monochrome, demonstrating that just because you’ve got no money, it doesn’t mean you can’t make a gorgeous looking film. Secondly, something so many independent filmmakers seem to forget nowadays – this film is actually ABOUT something. It was made because it says something its makers thought needed saying, not because they just wanted to make a film for the sake of making a film, which seems to be the predominant attitude with most wannabe filmmakers at the moment.

The true independent spirit - Winstanley (1975)

Another film that looks absolutely beautiful on Blu-Ray is Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007), one of those films that was widely praised by critics when it came out, but now seems to have faded into memory, and it’s only 4 years old – Amazon have also got this at a knockdown price at the moment, at only £7.99. For the record, I think this portrayal of a young man’s attempt to sever himself from the ties of society and completely absorb himself in nature is one of the best films of the past decade. It’s beautifully acted, but the cinematography is the real star here, with the American landscape from the deserts of Arizona to the wilderness of Alaska shot so beautifully they become essentially the main characters in the film. I could happily keep this disk on all the time in my living room, as moving wallpaper.

Sean Penn's astonishing Into The Wild (2007), one of my favourite films of the last decade looking beautiful on Blu-Ray

This film would make an ideal companion piece to Werner Herzog’s masterful documentary, Grizzly Man (2005), one of the five films included on the Encounters in the Natural World Blu-Ray Boxset, alongside the surreal Antarctic antics of the 2007 title film and one of the directors most hypnotically bizarre, White Diamond (2004). Amazon currently have this down from £54.99 to £16.39, and christ, this was easily the best purchase I made last year. Utterly compelling.

Antartica from underneath - one of the least bizarre scenes from Werner Herzog's jaw-dropping Encounters in the Natural World (2007)

Moving on into more whimsical territory, a quick heads-up on a forthcoming Blu-Ray release which you might be interested in, Third Window Film’s upcoming upgrade of Tetsuya Nakashima’s much-loved Memories of Matsuko (2006), one of the best Japanese releases of the last ten years and a film whose eye-popping colours are sure to be well-serviced by the Blu-Ray format. The extra disk space hasn’t been wasted either – one of the special features is me interviewing the composer Gabriele Roberto, in which you can find out how an Italian musician came to be in Tokyo writing soundtracks for Japanese films.

Third Window Films enters the Blu-Ray market, with the upcoming release of Memories of Matsuko, featuring an interview with composer Gabriele Roberto by me

And this takes me finally to a batch of films put out by Eureka last year. I’ve said it many times before, and I’ll say it again, but the Masters of Cinema Blu-Ray-only release of Shohei Imamura’s Profound Desires of the Gods was the home-viewing highpoint of 2010, and probably the previous couple of years too. You can read my review of the film on Midnight Eye for why I think this is, but for I wanted to say that for those who felt left out by this Blu-Ray exclusive, 2011 offers some great news – it’s also coming out on DVD in a couple of weeks.

I can't praise this film enough. Shohei Imamura's Profound Desires of the Gods, on BluRay only last year, now coming to 2010

This is the same story for a number of other Eureka releases too, some of which I will cover in due course either on Midnight Eye or this website. Basically, the Blu-Rays of Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp, FW Murnau’s City Girl, Frank Tashlin’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow are all coming out on DVD very soon, so if you don’t have a Blu-Ray player yet, you’ll still get a chance to watch them, and if you do – well, take advantage while they’re going cheap on Amazon!

Murnau's City Girl (1930), one of the Nosferatu/Faust/Sunrise/Tabu director's best, according to many of those in the know

By the way, I’d like this site to be as much a forum for discussion about films as me thrusting my own views, opinions and tastes upon you, so if you’ve any DVD or Blu-Ray recommendations of your own, don’t be afraid to chime in.

Imamura's Profound Desires of the Gods from Eureka

Just back at home a few days from a 10-day break in Kenya en route to my next stop on a work/research trip to Japan, and while I should be busy unpacking my shorts, swimming trucks and suntan lotion in exchange for clothing more suitable for the icy climbs of Hokkaido where I’ll be heading on Wednesday for Yubari film festival, I just couldn’t contain myself at the news, which reached me via the Wildgrounds website, that UK label Eureka are to release Shohei Imamura’s Profound Desires of the Gods on Blu-Ray in May as part of their Masters of Cinema series.

Profound Desire of the Gods

Yes, it’s slightly annoying that this is only on Blu-Ray, but on a more positive side, this is the first time that I’ve felt the Blu-Ray I’ve had hooked up to the HD TV for the past 9 months has actually been necessary. Imamura’s film is a beautiful-looking work, shot in vibrant colours in verdant, tropical climes, all in expansive widescreen NikkatsuScope. This is a film I’d been waiting to see ever since I first read about it about ten years ago while researching the Imamura chapter of The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film. It’s true, while I was living in Japan, I could quite easily have rented the VHS and watched it without subtitles, but from what I’d read, this film was so close to my own interests and tastes that I wanted my first encounter with it to be a little more special, which is the main reason for getting involved in the Imamura showcase at Bristol’s Arnolfini last October (see my thoughts on the retro), to actually bring a subtitled print across to the UK. Well, the film was everything I’d hoped for and more, from the bizarre opening sequence of a pig being throw into the sea as a sacrifice to be feasted upon by sharks to the coda set on the ludicrous tourist train, and caused much discussion with the other viewers at the Arnolfini after the screening finished. This is an utterly one-off work, and I am trembling in anticipation at seeing it up on a screen again. I can’t emphasize how much I love the films of Shohei Imamura. This is among the best, ranking in my books alongside Pigs and Battleships and The Ballad of Narayama. Imamura is pretty well-represented on region 1 DVD, but I just hope this Eureka release garners enough attention and excitement for further UK releases of his films. These really benefit from being seen as a large a screen in as high resolution as possible.

Profound Desires of the Gods

I do remember suggesting this title to Masters of Cinema quite a few years ago, so whether they took my advice, or were inspired by the Imamura season last year, or already had it under consideration anyway, I don’t know. I’m just ecstatic it’s imminent. Now its time to work on the next campaign to spread the word outside Japan about forgotten or unknown classics from forgotten or unknown filmmakers, and the next candidate is Susumu Hani, a director who I am quite flabbergasted that Western distributors or film curators have not picked up on yet. Following the Tomu Uchida season, Alex Jacoby and I pitched a retrospective of this figure to the British Film Institute, but didn’t get any response at all – the powers-that-be there obviously think it safer to stick with what they know, so we get Ozu and Kurosawa retrospectives again this year. Anyway, keep your eyes fixed on Midnight Eye, as you’ll find out plenty more on Hani there in the coming month or so.

In the meantime, as mentioned, I’m off to Tokyo tomorrow, and to Yubari Film Festival on Wednesday, from which I hope to post updates about the good films on offer there. I also hope to post a bit more on some other Eureka releases which I’ve not had time to write about yet, so I hope to be rather more active on this site than I have been over the past month or so.

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2010/02/eureka-to-release-imamura%e2%80%99s-profound-desires-of-the-gods-on-blu-ray-in-may/feed/ 3 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/10/some-thoughts-on-the-shohei-imamura-retro/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/10/some-thoughts-on-the-shohei-imamura-retro/#comments Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:05:01 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=130

Ballad of Narayama

Back at home after a week dashing round the country for various reasons, not least of which was the Imamura retrospective at the Arnolfini which I had a hand in. After the punishing routine of Raindance, I was rather grateful to be afforded the opportunity just to sit in a cinema over a long weekend and binge on the six wonderful films in the programme in relative peace and quiet. Imamura was the one director who really stood out when I first started exploring Japanese cinema. There was something about his sense of humour and his general world view that struck a chord with me, the notion (some might call it cynical) that humans are essentially animals whose primary motivations are the satiation of basic needs such as food and sex, and their every other action is merely an attempt to rationalise these drives.

But it’s been almost ten years ago since I looked at the director in any depth, and I’d not revisited many of these films since. It was funny, because I thought the basic concept of the season, to reassess Imamura’s legacy, was slightly odd, being as his status as one of the key figures in Japanese cinema, and of the 1960s in particular, hardly needed emphasizing. But it became clear talking to several of the members of the audience that while Imamura’s name might be well known in Japanese film fan circles, the general public in the UK really haven’t had a chance to see many of his films, and by and large they loved them. It occurred to me how little of his work is available on DVD in comparison with other directors such as, say, Seijun Suzuki. It just goes to show how much a director’s currency can change over time. The last retrospectives on Imamura in the UK, I believe, were just after his Palme d’Or win for The Eel, and that was well over ten years ago. Clearly people do need to be reminded of this director after all.

Pigs and Battleships

Watching the films back to back it struck me, while there are certain uniform themes and ideas explored in his films, individually they are all very different in style and tone. I’d never actually seen Pigs and Battleships before, for example, which was one of the standouts of the programme, a more obvious commercial piece which bore some similarities with Sun Tribe films such as Crazed Fruit and Cruel Story of Youth, yet also signalled the direction that Imamura would pursue, with its bawdy humour, really vibrant style, and that wonderfully surreal ending as the pigs stampede through the streets of Yokosuka. Ballad of Narayama I’d not seen for years, but it has a special place in my heart as one of my first encounters with Japanese cinema in a screening at the Scala in the late 1980s (with Wakamatsu’s Violated Angels). Watching it again really spelled out for me what an amazing achievement it is, perhaps the quintessential Imamura film. The film isn’t well-known at all in Britain with modern audiences, but there is a US DVD. But one of the main treats of this program was finally getting to see Profound Desire of the Gods on a big screen, and what a bizarre film it is. If Ballad of Narayama is Imamura’s masterpiece, then this title is his folly, inviting comparisons with Herzog at his most ambitious, or Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain. It has its more digressive moments, it must be said, but the sheer scale and energy behind it really signals this out as an essential piece of cinematic history which will never be repeated. It is simply bewildering that this film is not out there on DVD anywhere, and I can’t work out why, because it’s handled by Nikkatsu, so obtaining the rights shouldn’t be too problematic. Someone rectify this situation, please!

Profound Desire of the Gods

Anyway, the main Arnolfini session is over, though there’s still a double bill of Vengeance is Mine and The Eel on Sunday 8^th November. Those in the UK who couldn’t make it to Bristol will be heartened to here that the films are now up in London and screening at the ICA this very weekend, before moving to the Glasgow Film Theatre next week. Go watch them all. Who knows when you’ll get a chance to see them on the big screen in the UK again.

The Arnolfini’s Pigs, Eels & Insects: Reassessing The Legacy of Shohei Imamura season comes to London.
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Read more about the lineup and screening times here, and visit here for ticket information.

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Profound Desire of the Gods

Some of you may recall my post from a few weeks back regarding the upcoming Shohei Imamura symposium and screenings at the Arnolfini in Bristol in October. These have been organised by Patrick Crogan of the University of the West of England, Alastair Cameron of the Arnolfini and myself.

I know there was some talk a while back between us of taking of advantage of having the prints in the country and getting them shown a little more widely. Well, it seems Alastair has been working his little bit of magic behind the scenes, as most of the films will now also be getting an airing at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London under the banner Carnal Knowledge: The Films of Shohei Imamura. The full line-up is here, and I’m particularly pleased to see that some of the less regularly screened films such as Profound Desire of the Gods are included in the programme (no Vengeance is Mine or The Pornographers, which have screened quite a lot recently in the UK).

This is going to be great news for all Londoners hankering to get their next fix of Japanese New Wave brilliance after the BFI’s Nagisa Oshima season that’s currently running. I’ll be a little partisan here and say that personally I prefer Imamura’s bawdy, messy pokes of fun at Japanese society than Oshima’s more cerebral and academic approach. In fact, he’s one of my favourite Japanese directors, so its great that these films are being brought to a wider audience. I might also add that the ICA also has a better bar than the BFI Southbank – I spent nearly half an hour waiting for a pint of Guinness the other day while three of the Benugo’s staff struggled to make a cocktail for the only other person who was waiting there. You probably couldn’t find a bottle of house red anywhere cheaper in central London than at the ICA, especially if you’re a member, where you get a 10% discount – membership is well worth it if you’re a Japanese film fan, because I know Third Window Films have got a couple of forthcoming releases that will be playing there in the near future.

Anyway, enough of this bar talk and back to Imamura. Now, for all I know, these films may well be playing other venues across the ICA, because I wasn’t really in the loop about the ICA screenings, so I’ll try and find out more, and if I hear of any other screenings, will be sure to post it here.

Shohei Imamura

I promised back in my posting about the BFI’s Oshima season that I had some more news about an upcoming season focused on another New Wave director. Well, this is is – a retrospective and symposium on Shohei Imamura that will be hitting the Arnolfini in Bristol at the end of October. The details aren’t up online yet, though a look at the Arnolfini website will give you an idea of just what a cool venue it is – wish I could make it down for the Aelita: Queen of Mars screening… Bristol sure is an exciting place to be a film fan, I sometimes don’t think they know how lucky they are.

This season was organised with Patrick Crogan of UWE university with some assistance from myself and the Arnolfini’s Al Cameron. I’m enclosing the schedule below from the Arnolfini’s own press release, but I should add the proviso that this info may be subject to change – we’re still working on the guests for the symposium, though you can bet I’ll be there.

Here are the details.

THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA (18)

THU 15 OCT, 7.30pm
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1983, 2h 10m, Subtitled

The Ballad of Narayama

In an isolated mountain region, austere village laws to ensure survival dictate that, despite her good health, matriarch Orin must shortly ascend the sacred summit of Narayama where her soul must be laid to rest like all who turn 70. But before she goes, she has much family business to attend to. One of the greatest Japanese films: a haunting, poignant meditation on human nature, existence and death that won Imamura his first Palme d’Or.

INTENTIONS OF MURDER (CTBA)

FRI 16 OCT, 7.30pm
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1964, 2h 25m, Subtitled

Intentions of Murder

Bold, expansive and intriguing, this tale of a low-caste household drudge who runs off with the burglar who breaks into her house and assaults her, marks the most complete consolidation of the themes that inform Imamura’s initial cycle of features in the late 50s and early 60s. Beautifully photographed and technically perfect, a faultlessly constructed model of sophistication.

PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS (CTBA)

SAT 17 OCT, 6.45pm
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1961, 1h 17m, Subtitled

Pigs and Battleships

A cruelly comic movie, set in Yokosuka, a coastal city dominated by vice and a U.S. military base, where gangs kill each other over the right to control the black market in US Army food scraps — here, Imamura emerges as Japan’s incarnation of Buñuel, omnisciently satiric and utterly cynical. Irreverent and unabashedly human: a defining self-portrait of Japan in the post-war moment.

BLACK RAIN (PG)

SAT 17 OCT, 8.30pm
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1989, 2h 3m, Subtitled

Black Rain

A deeply affecting study of the uncalculated tragedy of nuclear holocaust, as a couple try to marry off their niece after Hiroshima. In contrast to Imamura’s usual subversively bawdy cinema, this is a spare and tonally muted masterpiece of dignity and human resilience, its carefully composed monochrome reminding us that Imamura began his career as an assistant to Ozu.

PROFOUND DESIRE OF THE GODS

SUN 18 OCT, 2.30pm
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1968, 2h 52m, Subtitled

Profound Desire of the Gods

A crystallization of Imamura’s ideas, transported to an island so secluded its inhabitants have evolved into animalistic, incestuous nutcases. Into this hothouse, full of superstition and hungry wildlife, comes a mainland civil engineer, looking for a fresh water source so a factory can be built. A hair-raising, richly imagined epic, filthy with unforgettable images and, by its end, beautifully mysterious.

THE INSECT WOMAN (CTBA)

SUN 18 OCT, 6.30pm
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1963, 2h 3m, Subtitled

Insect Woman

A beetle labouring up a tiny mound opens the film, symbol of a woman named Tomé’s slow rise through poverty, servitude, and exploitation to become one of Tokyo’s top brothel-keepers, in a time of profound national change under the repressive influence of a patriarchal society. This objective yet sympathetic portrait of Imamura’s archetype – the sensual, primal, and strong-willed heroine – celebrates the resilient soul of a marginalized national identity.

PIGS, EELS & INSECTS: SYMPOSIUM

SAT 17 OCT, 10am – 5pm, £5/£3

Pigs and Battleships

A one day event bringing together experts including Professor Tadao Sato of the Japan Academy of Moving Images, to explore and celebrate the career of Shohei Imamura. The panel will examine his incisive insights into the lives, loves and experiences of everyday people in post-war Japan. His characters move in a fascinating zone between documentary and fiction, navigating between private desires and public duty, tradition and modernity, and local and westernizing forces. Mark Bould, Reader in Film Studies at UWE, and Jasper Sharp, editor of Midnight Eye, are among the symposium presenters.

DOUBLE BILL

SUN 8 NOV, 2.30pm

THE EEL (18)
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1997, 1h 57m, Subtitled

This quirky, surreal and affecting film, following the attempts of a convicted murderer to reintegrate himself into normal life – with the help of his eel friend – after a prison sentence for murdering his philandering wife, won Imamura his second Palme d’Or. A flash of quiet brilliance that resonates long after the images have faded from the screen.

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VENGEANCE IS MINE (18)
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1979, 2h 20m, Subtitled

Based on the true story of a cold-blooded sociopath, this morally-ambivalent story unfolds using the killer’s confessions and reconstructed testimonies to retrace his past in an attempt to discover what made this monster. Exploring the problems inherent with reconstructing real-life events within a fictional format, Imamura once again proves himself ahead of the game.

SEASON PASS: ALL FILMS & SYMPOSIUM: £20/£15
SCREENINGS: £6/£4.50
SYMPOSIUM: £5/£3

With generous support from The Japan Foundation, The Daiwa Foundation and UWE Film Studies Research Group. Film prints supplied by the Japan Foundation.

The first is the long anticipated Nagisa Oshima season curated by James Quandt of the Cinematheque Ontario that has been doing the rounds internationally over the past year. The season played the Cinematheque last October-December, and it has now finally reached London. The second is the Sexploitation season, which I’ll deal with in another post.

Nagisa Oshima, the man himself.

Nagisa Oshima is a director who’s rather fallen out of fashion in recent years, not only because much of his work, especially from the 1960s, has been very difficult to see, nor because Oshima’s own poor state of health has prevented him form being as vocal about his important status in the history of Japanese cinema as other directors from his generation. The main reason that I can see why Oshima doesn’t enjoy the same level of appreciation nowadays as some of his contemporaries like Shohei Imamura or Koji Wakamatsu is that his films are so much part of the political and intellectual discourse of the era that those coming to them cold are probably going to be left in the cold. Oshima came from the same “filmmaking as political process” philosophy as Jean-Luc Godard in France, which is not to say necessarily that he shared the same politics. But it does mean that at times his works can be pretty abstruse, unless you’ve done your background reading (and what better place to start perhaps, than my own Behind the Pink Curtain…) On the plus side however, it means that no two Oshima films are alike, in terms of form, tone or content, even though it is possible to detect threads running through his work.

The Catch (1961)

I’m pretty excited however, because the season is a more-or-less complete retrospective, which means there’s quite a few titles showing that I’ve not even seen, namely The Catch, Shiro from Amakusa: The Christian Rebel and Three Resurrected Drunkards. I’ll also make a point of heading out to see my own personal favourite of his films, Boy, on the big screen. The season will of course feature his best-known work, In the Realm of the Senses, which the BFI are putting out on an extended run across the country, no doubt in preparation for an upcoming DVD/Blueray release.

Anyway, here’s the BFI press release, and more details can be found on the website:

Boy (1969)

Throughout September and October, BFI Southbank will celebrate the astounding films  of Japan’s foremost modern master Nagisa Oshima, with a full retrospective of his films including an extended run of In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no Corrida, 1975); plus a rare opportunity to see a selection of television work from the ‘outlaw’ director who spearheaded Japan’s new wave.

One of the crucial differences that sets Nagisa Oshima apart from other great Japanese film-makers is that he has never accepted that he is defined merely by his own cultural identity. Constantly swimming against the tide, Oshima doesn’t accept consensus views on anything. Instead, he faces up to contradictions and insists on thinking his own way through them. This contrariness is reflected in his films as,  in the 1960s and fired up by his earlier experiences as a student radical, he quickly established himself as a one-man ‘new wave’ in Japanese cinema.

Initially obsessed with the idea of revolution, many of the early films deal more or less directly with the failure of the Left, and ask why campaigns often miss their targets and why some movements tear themselves apart. Gradually, as his faith in revolution faded, he turned to other ways of attacking Japan’s body politic, focusing on the plight of the country’s most discriminated-against minority, Korean immigrants, and taking a more direct approach to the two issues which disrupt the cohesive surface of Japanese society: sex and crime.

This two-part season will include all of his feature films as well as some of his equally personal TV work. Part One kicks off with the four incendiary movies he made  for Shochiku in 1959/60; A Town of Love and Hate (Ai to Kibo no Machi, 1959), Cruel Story of Youth (Taiyo no Hakaba, 1960), The Sun’s Burial (Taiyo no Hakaba, 1960) and Night and Fog in Japan (Nihon no Yoru to Kiri, 1960) before examining his achievement as an independent film-maker with work including Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (Senjo no Merry Christmas, 1983) and climaxing with Gohatto (1999), the  ‘gay samurai’ movie he willed himself into recovery to make after suffering a debilitating stroke. This retrospective includes many of the electrifying movies which helped shape our sense of what cinema is – and should be.