A Second Look: ‘Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties’ on DVD

Often called Japan’s greatest living filmmaker, Nagisa Oshima, now 78, kept up a furious pace through the first half of his career, cranking out 18 films in 14 years. But he has been far less prolific since the early 1970s, and his international reputation has gone into partial eclipse. A significant portion of his work was never released on video in the States, and much of it went largely unscreened until a recent retrospective that toured North American art houses.

“Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties,” a five-film boxed set out this week from Eclipse, Criterion’s mid-price line, is an essential corrective (and includes a couple of titles, “Violence at Noon” and “Three Resurrected Drunkards,” that should be world-cinema landmarks). The movies here date from 1965 to 1968, smack in the middle of Oshima’s most productive period, and a dizzying phase even by the standards of this master iconoclast who famously defies classification and rarely repeated himself.

In the ‘60s, as cinematic new waves swept the world, the idea of an artistic rebellion was often inseparable from a political one. This was especially the case with Oshima, who was active in leftist organizations when he was a law student at Kyoto University. Once he hit his filmmaking stride, he proved as gifted a pop polemicist as Jean-Luc Godard. (For Western audiences, Oshima was routinely pitched as Japan’s answer to Godard, a formulation that so irked Oshima that he proposed Godard be called the Oshima of France.)

Even though he was too much of a shape-shifter to have a signature style, Oshima’s themes are well-established: sex, violence and the two as conjoined forces, as in his most notorious film, the hardcore provocation “In the Realm of the Senses” (1976). His characters, usually young and disaffected, are typically outlaws or outsiders, and he often found his material in true-crime stories. But his tabloid scenarios, while lurid, also had sociopolitical bite. They smashed taboos, railed against insularity and exposed the failure of old traditions and prevailing schools of thought.

The event that jumpstarted the Japanese student movement of the ‘60s — the 1960 renewal of the mutual security treaty with the U.S., which inspired widespread opposition — also had a galvanizing effect on Oshima. “Night and Fog in Japan” (1960), an unsparing account of the in-fighting among student radicals, was his response to the political mood, as well as the film that ended his contract with the major studio Shochiku.

After a three-year hiatus, during which he worked in television, Oshima returned to features, more intent than ever on upending the status quo. His comeback film, “Pleasures of the Flesh” (1965), the earliest title in the Eclipse set, is a story of blackmail and betrayal that digs beneath the shiny surface of Japan’s postwar economic miracle.

Next came “Violence at Noon” (1966), which appears to be a ripped-from-the-headlines serial-killer movie, except it shifts its attention to the two women who protect the murderer, then traces the emergence of this unusual triangle to the trio’s idealistic youth as members of a communal farm. Fractured and elusive, it’s a mosaic-like tour de force, edited to disorient, a 90-minute film composed of more than 2,000 shots.

“Japanese Summer: Double Suicide” (1967), which brings together a young woman obsessed with sex and a young man obsessed with death, is a particularly nihilist spin on the standard Oshima mix of eros and thanatos. The freewheeling “Sing a Song of Sex” (1967), about a group of young students who spend a long day in Tokyo learning bawdy folk tunes and spinning sexual fantasies, is a pungent generational portrait that introduces a recurring Oshima theme: the prejudicial treatment in Japan of the Korean minority population.

The most daring (and gratifyingly strange) film in the Eclipse set, “Three Resurrected Drunkards” (1968), also takes on “the Korean problem,” this time via an antic musical comedy whose hapless heroes are mistaken for Korean illegal immigrants. Oshima’s audacious gambit here is to “reset” the film midway through, replaying the first half but with sneaky, telling differences.

Oshima once said that the goal of his films was “to force the Japanese to look in the mirror.” That may make them sound narrow in intent. But it is precisely this confrontational impulse, and this belief that cinema can have a real-world impact, that make his movies universal, and as urgent and important as ever.

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