Three Resurrected Drunkards
Friday, March 6, 7 PM, Freer Gallery of Art
Unbelievable fun once you grasp its quirky manner – one reel change alone can cause mass consternation in an unsuspecting audience – Three Resurrected Drunkards ranks high among the "buried treasures" of Oshima's career. We're crazy about it, and it was gratifying to see that some of the Oshima authorities are too. Drunkards is shot in eye-popping widescreen and pulsing color – from purple underwear to paisley trousers to hot pink outfits sported at an onsen (hot spring) – and scored with crazed insistence (the music veers from James Bond parody to a pop song by lead Kazuhiko Kato, celebrated singer of the Sadistic Mika Band and the tall one of the three lead actors). All the better to serve its Hard Day's Night tale of a trio of hapless young guys who have their clothes stolen while cavorting in the sea, are mistaken for Korean stowaways, and become involved with a young woman whose brutal older husband, sporting an eye patch and metal hook, represents Japan's repressive older generation. This is 1968, after all, and amid the hi-jinx, chases, conceptual jokes and flash costume changes (including one into female drag), Oshima injects stinging commentary on the Vietnam War, Japan's war guilt, and prejudice against Koreans, and gives the film a very powerful and moving finale. Reminiscent moment to moment of Tashlin, Godard, Sam Fuller, Buñuel, Drunkards makes for raucous satire, brilliantly achieved and surprisingly touching. As one fan recently wrote on Criterion's website: "What a stunning, hilarious, and unforgettable film Three Resurrected Drunkards is." (1968, 80 min.)

A Town of Love and Hope
followed by Diary of Yunbogi
Saturday, March 7, 2 PM, National Gallery of Art
A boy's lucrative con game consists of continually reselling his pet pigeon-a homing pigeon-to fund his mother's medical expenses. Then the boy befriends a well-to-do businessman's daughter and his life seems to improve. "A prime example of the socially critical eye that would guide all of Oshima's work"-Tony Rayns. (1959, 35 mm, 62 min.)

Diary of Yunbogi is a moving evocation of a Korean boy's plight through a striking montage of still photographs taken by Oshima during a 1964 visit to Korea. In dramatic voiceover, the director reads from the boy's diary, reminding the viewer that Japan's wartime occupation of Korea continues to have an effect. (1965, 35 mm, 30
min.)

Cruel Story of Youth
Saturday, March 7, 4 PM, National Gallery of Art
Sunday, March 8, 4:30 PM, National Gallery of Art
A thrill-seeking teenager is rescued by a sometime student when her reckless hitchhiking turns ugly. Then, the two start playing this badger game for real. The popularity and notoriety of Oshima's second film, with its dramatically lurid urban night scenes, jump cuts, hand-held traveling CinemaScope camerawork, and blaring color scheme, made him the "darling of the age." (1960, 35 mm, 96 min.)

Sing a Song of Sex
Sunday, March 8, 2 PM, Freer Gallery of Art
This gets our vote as the most overlooked of Oshima's films, underrated perhaps because its English title makes it appear frivolous. It's decidedly not. Despite flights of comedy, (unnerving) sexual fantasy, youthful yearning, karaoke and hootenannies, Sing a Song of Sex offers an intense, penetrating portrait of a generation confronting its new freedoms and its inability to act on them. Oshima obviously considered the film very important, one infers from the essays he wrote about it. In some ways, Sing a Song resembles Godard's La Chinoise (notice the pop visual compositions, with looming movie posters and Coca-Cola billboards). A group of provincial students arrives in Tokyo to take university entrance exams. Disillusioned and nihilistic, they spend their time singing dirty songs and fantasizing about strangling a rich girl. Set on a politically charged day – the Founder's Day holiday, reinstated in 1967 after the American Occupation had banned it – amid gently falling snow, this tender, crushingly sad examination of the alienation of Japanese youth suggests that solidarity is illusionary, and that political action will always be trumped or undone by sexual desire. The portrait of Otake, the students' mentor who teaches them the sex songs of the title, which he says express the despair of the oppressed, is movingly ambiguous. The film's final sequences are among Oshima's most disturbing. Intended for mature audiences. (1967, 103 min.)

The Pleasures Of The Flesh
Sunday, March 8, 7:45 PM, AFI Silver Theatre
Tuesday, March 10, 7 PM, AFI Silver Theatre
In the mid-1960s, Japan witnessed a rush of artistically ambitious soft-core pink films inspired by the gradual liberalization of Japan's censorship regulations and the audacity of rebellious young auteurs who found a creative haven within the popular genre such as Koji Wakamatsu, Takechi Tesuji and, briefly, Oshima, with Pleasures Of The Flesh. Centered around a man's decision to dedicate the last year of his life and a cache of embezzled money to the unbridled pursuit of his sexual fantasies, Oshima's sole foray into pink films clearly anticipates In The Realm Of The Senses' exploration of relationships bonded by sexual intensity. This film also marks a more controlled and restrained visual and narrative style, hereby restricting his signature sequence-shots to the extended erotic scenes. (1965, 104 min.)

Night and Fog in Japan
Saturday, March 14, 4:30PM, National Gallery of Art
In the wake of riots over Japan's security pact with the United States, a marriage between demonstrators turns sour when two generations of opposing factions erupt in acrimony. Night and Fog in Japan's hypnotic combination of endless and constantly moving takes (forty-three shots compose the entire film) and its passionate, dramatic denunciations compelled the horrified studio to pull the film from theaters during its first week. (1960, 35 mm, 107 min.)

Boy
Sunday, March 15, 2 PM, Freer Gallery of Art
On no account to be missed: a stunning new Scope print of "Oshima's finest film" (Donald Richie). Boy recounts the true story, one that briefly shocked Japan in 1966, of a married couple who trained their ten-year-old child to fake being hit by autos so they could collect damages from the shaken drivers. Oshima brilliantly employs this simple tale in a complex double portrait – of the desperate family, driven to callous extortion and exploitation, and the grasping society in which they live, one the director holds accountable for their actions. ("The blood of this young boy dyes all of Japan red," claimed the trailer for the film.) With rigorous empathy, Oshima portrays the father, who was a soldier in the war and whose wounds are both real and symbolic; the hard-nosed stepmother, "the worst outlaw of all" according to Oshima; and their two children, the unblinking boy who throws his small body against speeding metal to ensure the family's survival, and his mercifully uncomprehending baby brother. Stunningly shot in Scope throughout Japan (including snowy Hokkaido), with charged use of color, composition, and unnerving music, Boy was for Oshima both an objective view of a dire situation and what the director called "a prayer." His tender, matter-of-fact treatment of the boy has rarely been equaled in cinema for its evocation of a child's apprehension of the world. "Extraordinary: a mysteriously tranquil tale . . . cool and remote, shot in bright, jewel colors, the film builds steadily and sleekly to a haunting climax. . . . Weird, beautiful, and terrifying" (Tom Milne, The Observer). (1969, 97 min.)

The Sun's Burial
Sunday, March 15, 4:30 PM, National Gallery of Art
In the depths of a Tokyo slum a young girl makes ends meet by selling blackmarket blood by day and her body by night, even as her right-wing father runs a gang of thieves. Could the film's title perhaps be a metaphor? "Oshima's focus here is not the romanticism of disillusionment, but the politics of despair in postwar Japan"-Pacific Film Archive. (1960, 35 mm, 87 min.)

Band Of Ninja
Saturday, March 21, 3 PM, AFI Silver Theatre
Tuesday, March 24, 9 PM, AFI Silver Theatre
Oshima adopted a decidedly unorthodox approach for his one and only anime feature, a spirited adaptation of Sanpei Shirato's popular manga epic about the struggle of a young samurai warrior to avenge his father's death. Out of respect for the unique artistic and textual qualities of Shirato's celebrated graphic novel, Oshima restricted his production to filming the drawn pages themselves and matching the images to the film's layered music, sound and voice tracks. An inspired follow-up to Diary Of Yunbogi's powerful montage of still images, Band Of Ninja offers a totally novel and effective mode of adaptation and a fascinating meditation on the relationship between comic books and cinema. (1967, b&w, 135 min.)

Violence At Noon
Sunday, March 22, 1 PM, AFI Silver Theatre
Wednesday, March 25, 9:45 PM, AFI Silver Theatre
Based on the notorious nationwide killing spree of the "Daylight Demon," a brutal murderer who took the lives of over 30 victims during the late 1950s—all women and all killed in the middle of the day. In Oshima's version, the killer is also part of a failed cooperative farm in rural Japan whose members include two idealistic women who become involved with the future killer. Violence At Noon introduced a new formal complexity into Oshima's cinema, abandoning the extended long takes that were the staple of his early films to embrace a radically fragmented montage style that mirrors the women's attempts to understand their traumatic memories. The film is a disturbing study of the criminal mind and a moving elegy to failed dreams. (1966, b&w, 99 min.)

The Man who Left his Will on Film
Sunday, March 22, 2 PM, Freer Gallery of Art
"This is one of Oshima's signature achievements" (Chuck Stephens, Film Comment). Chosen by almost every Oshima authority as an Oshima essential, this requiem for a generation begins as Endo, a young filmmaker being chased by police, leaps to his death. Was it suicide? An accident? Or was it, as the film sometimes seems to suggest, an illusory act? Endo leaves behind evidence in his movie camera that yields no clues: "meaningless" random shots of Tokyo rooftops and streets. Motoki, a comrade who believes the leap was suicidal, becomes obsessed with finding the truth, and slowly begins to take over the life of the deceased militant, starting with Endo's girlfriend. He uses the remaining film footage to reconstruct the journey that lead to the fatal jump, a quest that leads him into sexual fixation – the couplings foreshadow In the Realm of the Senses – and abandonment of self. Oshima, whose original title for the film was The War of Tokyo: Postwar Confidential, claimed great identification with Motoki, and the film can be seen as a revealing self portrait as well as something of an existential puzzle movie. Did Endo truly exist, or was he an invention or alter ego of Motoki? (1970, 94 min.)

Dear Summer Sister
Friday, March 27, 7 PM, Freer Gallery of Art
"Essential Oshima" (Donald Richie). "Certainly the oddest Oshima film yet to surface in this country," was how Vincent Canby, an Oshima champion, characterized Dear Summer Sister when it got its first New York release in 1985, and the film remains quite amazingly strange. The director takes a very serious subject – the return of Okinawa to Japan from American control – and gives it a pop, almost parodic feel, with a floating camera and free-form narrative. Sunaoko, a teenaged girl, travels from Tokyo to Okinawa to look for a boy who may be her half-brother. Oshima sends her on a Godardian travelogue; in an orange polka dot mini-dress, she tours the island with a friend and an elderly, beer-swilling "gentleman" in a white suit. "We're not ordinary tourists," Sunaoko declares as they visit war memorials, beaches, and burial sites to learn about Okinawa's recent history, culture, and funeral rites. Though he claimed at the time that the film was very clear and straightforward, Oshima keeps adding all manner of strange characters and incidents, hints of incest and illegitimacy, a murder plot, and commentary on Japan's war crimes and abuse of Okinawa, all the while maintaining a breezy, sometimes farcical tone. The effect is sometimes enchanting, sometimes baffling. "Dear Summer Sister has something of the manner of a frisky Japanese homage to Michelangelo Antonioni . . . . The performances are good, especially those of Hiromi Kurita as Sunaoko and an actress simply called Lily as Momoko. The photography – this time by Yasuhiro Yoshioka – is exceptionally bright and vivid, as it always is in Oshima's work" (Vincent Canby, The New York Times). Intended for mature audiences. (1972, 95 min.)

The Catch
Saturday, March 28, 2 PM, National Gallery of Art
Villagers gloat over the bounty they might be able to collect after capturing a black American pilot, even as he becomes their whipping boy for feuds and jealousies. One thing they have not considered-what if Japan loses the war? (1961, 35 mm, 97 min.)

Shiro Amakusa, the Christian Rebel
Saturday, March 28, 4 PM, National Gallery of Art
A rare historical film from Oshima's oeuvre, Shiro Amakusa is based on a true event, a seventeenth-century uprising in which a young boy known as Shiro (played by popular actor Hashizo Okawa) led the poor and exploited Christian peasantry against the Shogunate. (1962, 35 mm, 100 min.)

Japanese Summer: Double Suicide
Saturday, March 28, 5 PM, AFI Silver Theatre
Sunday, March 29, 3:10 PM, AFI Silver Theatre
Among Oshima's least-known films, Japanese Summer: Double Suicide is a darkly comic romance about a couple on the run—a sex-crazed young woman and her suicidal boyfriend who are drawn into a band of violent gangsters. Declared by Oshima to personify the "death drive" in Japanese culture, the irrationally violent and unsympathetic gangsters in the film suggest a more pessimistic and absurd dimension of the outlaw anti-heroes so central to Oshima's films. (1967, b&w, 98 min.)

Kyoto, My Mother's Place
Sunday, March 29, 2 PM, Freer Gallery of Art
A lovely, revealing portrait of a place that also becomes a self portrait, Kyoto, My Mother's Place was commissioned by BBC Scotland and was chosen by Martin Scorsese as the "buried treasure" of Oshima's career. Oshima begins with his mother, showing pictures of her and interviewing her friends to reveal the period in which she lived: "A single woman, a stranger, who arrives in Kyoto ‘must obey those in power, look after the neighbors, avoid conflict, decorate beautifully, avoid starting fires, endure all sorts of trials.' Kyoto is made complete, and Oshima's love-hate relationship with Japan's ancient capital emerges. Unlike his previous documentaries about politics and society, Kyoto, My Mother's Place is a very private film about Oshima's mother, the Kyoto where she grew up, and about Oshima himself" (Yamagata Documentary Film Festival). (1991, 50 min., video)

100 Years of Japanese Cinema
Sunday, March 29, 3 PM, Freer Gallery of Art
If Godard's history of French cinema for the British Film Institute's "Century of Cinema" series was predictably polemical, Oshima's goes it one better by producing a history of Japanese film that is outright perverse in its seeming disdain for many of its giants. (Critics have speculated as to why Mizoguchi, Ozu, and Kurosawa are slighted, given one clip each while Oshima accords his own films four!) Oshima begins with the silent period, and shuttles through the family dramas of the Thirties, the rise of militarism and the effect of WWII on the film industry, the postwar golden age, the arrival of the Japanese New Wave, and the subsequent emergence of independent directors from Terayama and Kitano to Yoshimitsu Morita and Yoichi Sai. Oshima ends with the wish that Japanese cinema "free itself from the spell of Japan and blossom as pure cinema." Fascinating in the context of this retrospective, Oshima's history of his country's cinema has a muted string quartet score by Toru Takemitsu. (1994, 52 min., video, English and Japanese with English subtitles)

The Ceremony
Sunday, March 29, 4:30 PM, National Gallery of Art
Chronicling the history of a powerful provincial family, The Ceremony is a satirical allegory of Japan's postwar predicament told through flashbacks at the family's yearly ceremonial gatherings. By requiring orderliness and obedience at all costs, the patriarch clearly caused ensuing generations to crack under pressure. With three major Kinema Jumpo awards (Japan's highest film honor) bestowed in 1972, the film is seen by many as Oshima's masterpiece. (1971, 35 mm, 122 min.)

Empire of Passion
Friday, April 3, 7 PM, Freer Gallery of Art
Positioned as sister and sequel to In the Realm of the Senses, Empire of Passion similarly deals with the conflict between sexual desire and social strictures, but does so in a more decorous – and, for many critics, more profound – fashion. Visually sumptuous, it won Oshima the Best Director award at Cannes. Set in a rural village during the last days of the nineteenth century, Passion centers on the affair between an indolent young soldier recently discharged from the army, and an older woman who is married to the boozing, yam-eating local rickshaw man. In the tradition of The Postman Always Rings Twice and its ilk, the lovers' crime of passion is punished, mostly by guilt (the old man's ghost returns three years after the murder), and then by society. (As Tony Rayns has pointed out, Oshima's "hatred of the ‘authority' figure here reaches heights unseen since Death by Hanging.") "Beauty of this magnitude is ravishingly universal" (Jay Scott, The Globe & Mail). "A finer work than In the Realm of the Senses" (Richard Roud). Intended for mature audiences. (1978, 106 min.)

Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief
Saturday, April 4, 5 PM, AFI Silver Theatre
Sunday, April 5, 3:30 PM, AFI Silver Theatre
Oshima launched a guerilla assault on narrative continuity and political neutrality in this playfully experimental fable about a sexually confused book thief loose in Tokyo's boisterous Shinjuku neighborhood. The film's freeform meditation on the psychosexual ambiguities of the postwar counterculture interweaves the awkward romance and sexual therapy misadventures of the thief and his captor with a series of avant-garde kabuki performances. Set against the vivid background of the massive student-led riots against the American Security Pact and the Vietnam War, Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief adapts an energetic mode of cinema vérité to capture the violent protests and the radical street theater enacted by Oshima's cast and, at times, crew. (1968, b&w/color, 96 min.)

Gohatto (a.k.a. Taboo)
Sunday, April 5, 2 PM, Freer Gallery of Art
"(4 Stars) Masterpiece . . . One of the year's ten best" (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader). Oshima's first fiction film in fourteen years seems at first glance to be another taboo-breaker (as its title suggests) but, in its gorgeous design and cinematography, actually evokes the golden age of Japanese cinema. A tale of homosexual desire amongst samurai, Gohatto is set, spectacularly, in Kyoto in 1865 during the tumultuous last days of the Shogunate. Two new conscripts join the Shinsengumi militia, which is assigned to protect the shoguns from rebellion: Tashiro, a rough, handsome rural warrior, and Kano, a supernally delicate teenager with prominent forelock and rosebud lips. The latter, who elegantly performs an execution as a test of will, soon becomes the object of desire for several Shinsen members, including the macho Tashiro and Captain Hijikata, played by none other than Takeshi Kitano. A complex drama of lust, honor, and revenge culminates in a final battle between the two new recruits, one very much in love with the unattainable other, evocatively staged in a misty marsh in the style of Mizoguchi. A work of great formal beauty, the stylized, dreamy Gohatto "distills Oshima's mastery into exquisite, mesmerizing classicism and graceful economy" (Gavin Smith, The Village Voice). "One of the ten best of the year" (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice). Intended for mature audiences. (1999, 100 min.)

Death By Hanging
Saturday, April 11, 5:15 PM, AFI Silver Theatre
Sunday, April 12, 5:15 PM, AFI Silver Theatre
The late 1960s marked a remarkably productive and creatively intense period for Oshima as he began to define a truly revolutionary approach to narrative. Death By Hanging marks a high point of these fertile years as one of Oshima's most potent, stylistically daring, and intensely debated works. His first film to draw the attention of international critics, it was inspired by the highly publicized death sentence received by a Korean youth for the strangling of two young female schoolmates. The film opens with a gripping documentary-style reenactment of the execution that is suddenly derailed by an uncanny and inexplicable mishap, plunging the film into a dizzying mode of political theater where the authority of the executioners and truth claims of cinema are brilliantly put on trial. An uncompromising ode to Brechtian aesthetics, the film is an awe-inspiring and urgent work of political cinema. (1968, b&w, 117 min.)

In The Realm Of The Senses
Wednesday, April 15, 6:30 PM, AFI Silver Theatre
Friday, April 17, 7 PM, AFI Silver Theatre
Saturday, April 18, 8 PM, AFI Silver Theatre
Oshima's abiding fascination with the most dangerous extremes of sexual desire gave way to his pornographic masterpiece, one of the most intensely debated films of the 1970s and one of the first to artistically depict explicit sex. Marking a triumph for Oshima's visionary melding of eroticism and politics, the release of his first French-financed project resulted in a major international scandal and a trial on obscenity charges hurled against Oshima. Based on the true story of a tempestuous affair between a dangerous prostitute and a gambler in the 1930s, In The Realm Of The Senses is both a sumptuous period piece, with a vivid ukiyo-e inspired color scheme and architectonic compositions, and a fascinating study of the intermingling of sex and death. (1976, 105 min.)

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
Saturday, April 25, 12:30 PM, AFI Silver Theatre
Sunday, April 26, 6:40 PM, AFI Silver Theatre
Oshima's unconventional adaptation of Laurens van der Post's celebrated memoir of imprisonment in a Japanese war camp adds a lush and at times almost operatic dimension to the book, combining its moving tale of camaraderie and cultural difference with an unusual critique of masculine authority and the homoeroticism of the bushido code. Starring a mesmerizing David Bowie in one of his great film roles, Oshima's late masterpiece also features memorable performances by Ryuichi Sakamoto—who composed the film's incredible score—and Takeshi Kitano in his very first film screen appearance. Made at the height of Oshima's later international period, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence's exploration of the Japanese nation and image as seen by outsiders offers a fascinating counterpoint to the imperious and insightful scrutiny of the Japanese psyche that cuts across Oshima's work. (1983, 124 min., English and Japanese with English subtitles)

Max Mon Amour
Saturday, April 25, 5:45 PM, AFI Silver Theatre
Sunday, April 26, 9:10 PM, AFI Silver Theatre
Oshima's long admiration for Luis Buñuel finds its full flowering in this provocative tale of amour fou written in collaboration with Buñuel's frequent screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere. Charlotte Rampling stars as a diplomat's wife whose amorous attention to an affectionate gorilla infuriates her husband and sparks a wonderfully deadpan and deliciously unpredictable farce. Oshima's unexpected comic talents shine in this inspired and subversive cross-breeding of King Kong and Belle Du Jour. (1986, 96 min., French and English with English subtitles)