1960s
Ōshima's cinematic career and influence developed very swiftly, and early watershed films Cruel Story of Youth (青春残酷物語), The Sun's Burial (太陽の墓場) and Night and Fog in Japan (日本の夜と霧) all followed in 1960. The last of these 1960 films explored - in challenging fashion - Ōshima's disillusionment with the traditional political left, and his frustrations with the right, and Shochiku withdrew the film from circulation after less than a week, claiming that, following the recent assassination of the Socialist Party leader by a right-wing extremist, there was a risk of “unrest”. Ōshima left the studio in response, and launched his own independent production company. Despite the controversy, Night And Fog In Japan was placed tenth in that year's Kinema Jumpo's best-films poll (among Japanese critics), and it has subsequently amassed considerable acclaim abroad.
Subsequently, Ōshima directed The Catch (1961), based on a novella by Kenzaburō Ōe about the relationship between a wartime Japanese village and a captured African American serviceman. The Catch has not traditionally been viewed as one of Ōshima's major works, though it did notably introduce a thematic exploration of bigotry and xenophobia, themes which would be explored in greater depth in the later documentary Diary Of Yunbogi, and feature films Death By Hanging and Three Resurrected Drunkards.
Ōshima then embarked upon a period of work in television, producing a series of documentaries; notably among them 1965's Diary Of Yunbogi. Based upon an examination of the lives of street children in Seoul, it was made by Ōshima after a trip to South Korea.
One of Ōshima's more formally unusual films was Band of Ninja (1967), an adaptation of the popular manga by Sampei Shirato, Ninja Bugei-chō, a 16th-century saga of oppressed peasants and deadly ninja. It is not a live-action film, or even an animated one; Ōshima simply photographed close-ups of Shirato's drawings and added voices. Ōshima had used the technique previously in some documentaries, and a willingness to make use of unorthodox techniques was an indication of the mature period of experimentalism which would soon surface in Ōshima's work. The film managed to become a modest critical and commercial success in Japan.
Ōshima directed three features in 1968. The first of these - Death By Hanging (1968) presented the story of the failed execution of a young Korean for rape and murder, and was loosely based upon an actual crime and execution which had taken place in 1958. The film utilizes non-realistic "distancing" techniques after the fashion of Brecht or Godard to examine Japan's record of racial discrimination against its Korean minority, incorporating elements of farce and political satire, and a number of visual techniques associated with the cinematic new wave in a densely layered narrative. It was placed third in Kinema Jumpo's 1968 poll, and has also garnered significant attention globally. Death By Hanging inaugurated a string of films (continuing through 1976's In the Realm of the Senses) that clarified a number of Ōshima's key themes, most notably a need to question social constraints, and to similarly deconstruct received political doctrines.
Months later, Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief - unites a number of Ōshima's thematic concerns, within a dense, collage-style presentation. Featuring a title which alludes to Jean Genet's The Thief's Journal, the film explores the links between sexual and political radicalism, specifically examining the day-to-day life of a would-be radical whose sexual desires take the form of kleptomania. The fragmented narrative is interrupted by commentators, including an underground noh performance troupe, a psychoanalyst, and an impromptu symposium featuring actors from previous Ōshima films (along with Ōshima himself), all dissecting varied aspects of shifting sexual politics, as embodied by various characters within the film.
Boy (1969), based on another real-life case, was the story of a family who use their child to make money by deliberately getting involved in road accidents and making the drivers pay compensation.
Read more about this topic: Nagisa Oshima