Born in 1932 and active until 2013, Nagisa Ôshima grew up in a leftist household and took to the streets as a student during the turbulent post-WWII years in Japan. At 22, after graduating with a law degree, he began working at the Shochiku film studio, where he was an assistant to Masaki Kobayashi. However, Ôshima first made a name for himself in his twenties as a film critic, known for his sharp and often scathing reviews. This reputation led Shochiku to offer him a directing role to connect with a younger audience, something their competitors had already achieved. Ôshima made his directorial debut in 1959 with A Town of Love and Hope. Through nihilistic films about juvenile delinquency, laced with sex and violence, he delivered a biting critique of conservative Japanese society. But, as seen in the cutting Night and Fog in Japan, he was equally disillusioned with his former communist allies.

What’s striking about Ôshima is his refusal to adopt a consistent visual style. One moment, he embraces an aestheticized approach with numerous close-ups; the next, he opts for a naturalistic style. Night and Fog in Japan, for example, contains fewer than fifty shots, thanks to its use of long takes. Or consider Three Resurrected Drunkards, where the film appears to start over after twenty minutes with the same shots, slowly revealing subtle changes. This results in a body of work that is at times radically modernist and experimental, and at others more aligned with mainstream cinema. Ôshima once said that the style of a film is determined by what he feels in relation to the story he is trying to tell.

Feeling confined by the limits imposed by studios, Ôshima slammed the door on Shochiku and founded his own production company to freely pursue his subversive desires with full independence. This led to A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs and The Rebel, which dealt with the persecution of Japanese Catholics, as well as Pleasures of the Flesh. However, these films lacked the impact of his previous works. In 1966, he released Violence at Noon, where Ôshima completely revolutionized his style, portraying a rapist and murderer through a stream of mental images. A dark and flamboyant film, it stages destructive attraction, a recurring theme in the director's work. In the late 1960s, Japan encountered a more marginal cinema: "Pink cinema", a form of exploitation film with varying degrees of eroticism that constantly challenged censorship. Despite its nudity, these films were more about anarchistic energy than mere titillation. This cinema brought the streets to the screen, portraying the harsh realities of a society grappling with state abuses and police brutality against leftist student unions. Ôshima drew inspiration from this fringe movement, which influenced Japanese Summer: Double Suicide, Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, and Death by Hanging, three unleashed and completely free works where he engaged in all kinds of visual and narrative experiments.

A fierce critic of post-war Japanese society, Ôshima tackled and attacked the idea of racial purity, a fantasy in a nation undergoing major changes. In Three Resurrected Drunkards, three Japanese men are mistaken by authorities for Korean immigrants. In the masterpiece The Ceremony, a wedding must take place despite the disappearance of the bride in order to "save face". The virtuous Japanese virgin is but a ghost, and the pure and noble Japan is nothing more than an imaginary fantasy. In the Realm of the Senses, Ôshima’s most famous film, was his unapologetic response to its backers, Argos Films and Anatole Dauman, who commissioned Ôshima to make the first artistic pornographic film. The film caused an unimaginable scandal in Japan and solidified Ôshima’s status as the greatest Japanese filmmaker of his time, especially after its screening at the Cannes Film Festival.

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