By Frank Milligan

In the early nineties, Nagisa Ōshima was asked to make a documentary about Japanese cinema. The BFI had contacted him as part of its Century of Cinema project, where major filmmakers from around the world were invited to make a film reflecting on the first hundred years of cinema in their respective countries. The resulting films range from dull, dutifully delivered bouts of received wisdom to more personal experiments in form and even narrative. What each one typically shares, however, is a sense of genuine enthusiasm on the part of the filmmaker for their national cinema.

That Ōshima was chosen by the BFI to represent Japanese cinema may come as a surprise. Outspoken in his criticism of what he perceived as a pervasive conservatism in Japan’s film culture, the director notoriously claimed that his hatred of his country’s cinema extended to “absolutely all of it”. And to be sure, as an ostensible work of authoritative film history, 100 Years of Japanese Cinema (1995) mostly fails. Despite Ōshima presenting himself as an “objective reporter”, he can barely hide his obvious distaste for much of Japanese cinema’s classical era, and is far more keen to talk about the period in which he was active. Canonical figures like Kurosawa, Ozu and Mizoguchi are afforded just one clip each (with scarcely a mention of Naruse), while Ōshima includes passages from four of his own movies — the most of any filmmaker represented. What the film can offer us, however, is a personal, refreshingly politicised insight into the relationship between an iconoclast and the conditions he sought to rebel against. 

The documentary begins with extracts from Daisuke Ito’s A Diary of Chuji’s Travels, a film once thought lost, partially rediscovered in 1991. For Ōshima, Ito’s freedom in choosing the subject of the film makes him an early example of an independent filmmaker in a system where producers typically assigned projects to directors. It’s this quality of independence — both creative and political — that Ōshima is searching for throughout, and which evidently animates his frustration with Japanese cinema. In this regard, he’s particularly eager to tie the development of Japan’s film industry to the strictures of the country’s political culture. For him, the ‘Tendency Film’ movement of the late twenties and early thirties, which took a critical view of capitalist social conditions, was undermined not only by direct censorship, but by the more diffuse influence of a rapidly militarising society. Japanese cinema’s lasting obsession with the family unit, he argues, can be traced to that same source. Images of Ozu and Sadao Yamanaka on duty in China remind us of the imbrication of Imperial Japan’s military and cinematic cultures, and Yamanaka’s death in Manchuria brings home the fact that more than creative independence was at stake for filmmakers living in the war years. The post-war period sees a renewed degree of artistic autonomy for directors, but Ōshima is critical of its overreliance on a discourse of victimisation arising from national defeat.

Ōshima is perhaps most impassioned when discussing the sixties — a decade in which he and other members of Japan’s ‘New Wave’ (a label the filmmaker firmly rejects) were at their most prolific and provocative. Across films like Night and Fog in Japan (1960), Death by Hanging (1968) and Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (1969), the director looked to tear apart the country’s ideological, ethnic and sexual mores, all the while eluding easy categorisations of genre and style through a radically versatile formal approach. Along with peers like Shōhei Imamura and Yoshishige Yoshida, he broke with the studio system to self-produce work, prioritising artistic independence over the financial safety of institutional complacency.

In this section of the film, Ōshima feels at liberty to do away with the guise of objectivity and start talking in the first person, as he celebrates a period in which politically and aesthetically heterodox films were made “by individuals, and not by companies”. Where appraisals of the “masterworks” made in Japan’s Golden Age sound as though delivered through gritted teeth, Ōshima appears to express genuine admiration for a filmmaker like Shūji Terayama, who sought to free himself from the artistic and economic limitations of Japan’s major production and distribution companies. Terayama — perhaps more than Ōshima — refused classification, working between literature, theatre, photography, radio and cinema to produce a diverse and expansive body of work united more than anything by its boundless capacity for experimentation. For Ōshima, the liberatory potential of this period ended with the collapse of both the radical left and right as threats to the political establishment. With Japanese politics no longer a serious site of contestation, he implies that the film industry found comfort in the safety of genre cinema, especially yakuza and comedy films. 

Despite the BFI project’s framing, evident through much of the film is a repudiation of the very notion of ‘national cinema’ as a critical lens. In describing the achievements of the radical filmmakers of the sixties and early seventies, Ōshima suggests that he and his peers “expanded the frontiers of not just Japanese films, but of all films.” Beyond creative freedom, the independence Ōshima seeks and celebrates is a freedom from national identity and all its accompanying presuppositions. Towards the film’s end, after paying lip service to the contributions of filmmakers like Takeshi Kitano, Hayao Miyazaki and Kazuo Hara, Ōshima’s voice comes alive once more as he discusses the increasing number of films being made by Korean-Japanese and immigrant filmmakers at the end of the century. It’s clear that for Ōshima this development represents an encouraging challenge to national (and nationalist) orthodoxy, and a push towards a cinema no longer shaped by traditional cultural values. As the director concludes his survey of the first century of Japanese film, he makes explicit his hopes for the next: “the Japanese film will free itself from the spell of Japan, and will blossom simply as pure cinema.” Ōshima was commissioned by one national institution to make a film about another. In the end, he rejected both nations and institutions, and made a film which can tell us a lot about something arguably more interesting: himself.

100 Years of Japanese Cinema screens Saturday at the ICA, as part of season Cinema and State: Films by Nagisa Ōshima