Nagisa Ōshima facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Nagisa Ōshima
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| 大島 渚 (Ōshima Nagisa) | |
Ōshima in 2000
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| Born | March 31, 1932 Tamano, Okayama, Empire of Japan
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| Died | January 15, 2013 (aged 80) Fujisawa, Kanagawa, Japan
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| Occupation | Film director Screenwriter |
| Years active | 1953–1999 |
| Movement | Nuberu Bagu |
| Spouse(s) |
Akiko Koyama
(m. 1960) |
| Children | 2 |
| Awards | Cannes Film Festival 1978 |
Nagisa Ōshima (大島 渚, Ōshima Nagisa, March 31, 1932 – January 15, 2013) was a Japanese film director and screenwriter.
Profile
After graduating from Kyoto University in 1954, where he studied political history, Ōshima was hired by film production company Shochiku Ltd. and quickly progressed to directing his own movies, making his debut feature A Town of Love and Hope in 1959.
Ōshima's cinematic career and influence developed very swiftly, and such films as Cruel Story of Youth, The Sun's Burial and Night and Fog in Japan followed in 1960. The last of these 1960 films explored 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 Inejiro Asanuma by the ultranationalist Otoya Yamaguchi, 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 placed tenth in that year's Kinema Jumpo's best-films poll of Japanese critics, and it has subsequently amassed considerable acclaim abroad.
In 1961 Ōshima directed The Catch, 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 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. He 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.
The Ceremony (1971) is a satire on at Japanese attitudes, famously expressed in a scene where a marriage ceremony has to go ahead even though the bride is not present.
In 1983 Ōshima had a critical success with Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, a film partly in English and set in a wartime Japanese prison camp, and featuring rock star David Bowie and musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, alongside Takeshi Kitano. The movie is sometimes viewed as a minor classic but never found a mainstream audience.
For much of the 1980s and 1990s, he served as president of the Directors Guild of Japan. He won the inaugural Directors Guild of Japan New Directors Award in 1960.
A collection of Ōshima's essays and articles was published in English in 1993 as Cinema, Censorship and the State. In 1995 he wrote and directed the archival documentary '100 Years of Japanese Cinema' for the British Film Institute. A critical study by Maureen Turim appeared in 1998.
In 1996 Ōshima suffered a stroke, but he recovered enough to return to directing in 1999 with the samurai film Taboo (Gohatto), set during the bakumatsu era and starring Takeshi Kitano.
Having a degree of fluency in English, in the 2000s, Ōshima worked as a translator. He translated four books by John Gray into Japanese, including Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.
Ōshima died on January 15, 2013, of pneumonia. He was 80.
The 2013 edition of the San Sebastian Film Festival scheduled a retrospective of Ōshima films in September.
Awards
Blue Ribbon Awards
1961 Night and Fog in Japan & Cruel Story of Youth – Best New Director
2000 Taboo – Best Director & Best Film
Kinema Junpo Awards
1969 Death by Hanging – Best Screenplay
1972 The Ceremony – Best Director, Best Film & Best Screenplay
1984 Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence – Readers' Choice Award for Best Film
See also
In Spanish: Nagisa Ōshima para niños
