Oshima Nagisa 2

Stylistic Self-negation

Changing Styles

• A variety of visual and narrative styles.

• Different visual and narrative styles employed in each film

• Deliberate refusal of relying on a constant and enduring visual (narrative) styles.

Changing Styles • Referential and self-referential style - formal characteristics made of cinematic quotations

• Reference to Brecht Theatre, films of French ‘nouvelle vague’ (Jean-Luc Goddard) and Alain Resnais, British social realist films, etc.

• Self-referential: conscious about his own film styles

Experimental film making

• Style is different in each film but is con-sistentely experimental.

• New, unexpected, unpredictable and the most importantly challenging and subversive (aesthetically and politically)

• Unconventional • On the verge of being

vulgar and offensive

Mannerist Filmmaking • Mannerism: Artistic style after the end of High

Renaissance• Reacting to the harmonious ideals and mimetic

naturalism of High Renaissance, it sought after tension and instability rather than balance and clarity.

• Mannerist visual style characterized by artificiality and artiness; elegance and technical virtuosity; sophisticated bizarreness

• Baroque (> barocco) ‘rough or imperfect pearl’

Mannerism and Baroque: aesthetic attitudes which prefer inharmoniousness and imperfection to perfect harmony

Paintings of High Renaissance perfect harmony and naturalism Giovanni Bellini, Madonna of the Meadows (ca.1500)

Parmigiano, Madonna with the Long Neck (1935-40)

Figures in Mannerist paintings have graceful but strangely elongated limbs, small heads, stylized facial features;Their poses are difficult;Deep, linear perspective of High Renaissance disappeared and is flattened so that figures appear decorative forms.Intense & unnatural colours;Sense of scale ignored;Inventive, grotesque pictorial fantasy.

Filippino Lippi, Pieta (1500)Rosso Fiorentino, Dead Christ with Two Angels (1527)

Mannerist Visual Styles• Throughout the film

the camera are tilted – crooked, precarious imagery

• Corresponding to the film’s subject – insecurity of a boy of a single parent

• The Town of Love and Hope Oshima’s first film.

Mannerist Visual Styles

• Bold compositions making most of the wide screen format

• Garish, raw and lurid colours in Oshima’s second film, Cruel Story of the Youth

Mannerist Visual Styles: Sun’s Burial

• Sexual energy in utter hopelessness and poverty is expressed by the use of symbolic colour – lurid red in Sun’s Burial

• Red of the national flag (sarcastic comment)

• Red of blood (hemorrhage)

• Red of hot desire• Widescreen and close ups

Mannerist Visual Styles: Night and Fog in Japan

• 100 minutes discussion and debate about the Japanese politics and political betrayal in the setting of a wedding reception.

• Brechtian chamber drama • Night and Fog in Japan, Alain Resnais’ Nuit et

Brouillard (Night and Fog)

• The film is made of only 43 shots (c.f. 2,000 in Violence at Noon)

• Even more jagged camerawork with hand-held camera

• Format of chamber drama, ‘discussion drama’ shot in sets - 1& 2/1 hour debate on the left-wing politics in 1960.

Shallow space composition

Widescreen and close-up

Widescreen, close-up and shallow space

Mannerist Visual Styles: Violence at Noon

• Unlike Night and Fog, Violence at Noon is frenetically edited with jagged jump cuts (an action is not shown to the end and an action begins in the middle) 2,000 shots

• Complicated flashbacks• Overexposed and whitewashed grainy photography

Mannerist Visual Styles: Pleasure of the Flesh

• Pleasure of the Flesh• Displays Oshima’s favourite mise-en-scène –

widescreen, lots of close-ups, sexual actions in which a body stretches horizontally and a face looks down on it virtically

Experimental Film Making

• Reference to soft-porn film genre • Reference to gangster film genre• Avant-garde and surrealistic narrative and images• In Pleasure of the Flesh

Mannerist Visual Styles: Death by Hanging

• Shifting styles - in the beginning the film is shot in somber instruction film - later, it adopts more self-reflexive avant-garde style (characters and Oshima speaking to the spectator).

• Artificial compositions – symmetry, profile, straight-on, and framing

Mannerist Visual Styles: Sing a Song of Sex

• In the format of a typical ‘coming-of-age’ film, Oshima vents his frustration with the apathy of young generation in Japan through this image of frigidity in Sing a Song of Sex

• Oshima created a series of politically subversive images.

Mannerist Visual Styles: Japanese Summer

• Changes in gender roles - a girl obsessed with sex and a man with death in Japanese Summer: Double Suicide

• Signs – written words and symbols became conspicuous elements of Oshima’s films

• Oshima’s signature mise-en-scène: close-up in WS

Experimental Film Making

• The Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, one of the most experimental of Oshima’s films

• Reference to Goddard’s La Chinoise • Diary of a Shinjuku Thief

Mannerist Visual Styles: Diary of a Shinjuku Thief

• Shot as a cinematic collage• (Collage = a picture made by sticking other

pictures, photographs, cloth etc.)• Collage of documentary film, (avant-garde)

theatrical performance, words and the cameo appearance of cultural icons of the 1960s (Yoko’o Tadanori, Tanabe Moichi, Kara Juro, etc.)

Mannerist Visual Styles: Boy

• Entirely shot on location from Kochi to Hokkaido.

• Cinema-véritè like realism shot with long lens and hand-held camera.

• Shot with available, natural light

• Fidelity to landscape and figures in it.

• ‘Boy’ did not have previous acting experience.

Experimental Film Making

• Image of loneliness - a boy denied education and happiness in The Boy

• Long shots against the background of forlorn landscape and indifferent cityscape.

Mannerist Visual Styles: The Ceromony

• The Ceremony• A grandiose set was constructed by the art

department of Daiei Kyoto Studios• Solemn photography and stylized mise-en-scène• Events are shown in bold flashbacks. • Conventional representation with Brechitian detours

Mannerist Visual Styles

• Stylized and contrived compositions in Ceremony – symmetrical and unsymmetrical, bold compositions

• Metaphor for patriarchal order and disorder

Mannerist Visual Styles: The Realm of Senses

• Pursuit of total pleasure and happiness at the time of the Sino-Japanese War in In the Realm of Senses.

• Shot in lurid colours and bold composition

Late Film Making Styles

• Its mise-en-scene creates claustrophobic atmosphere.

• Strong and deep colours with low-key lighting (Eastmancolor).

• No demarcation between spiritual and physical love - solemnity and gravity of love-making images

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bk_aOjfkCrY

Mannerist Visual Styles: Empire of Passion

• Pursuit of pleasure and the price to pay for it - image of uncontrollable passion and guilt in Empire of Passion

• Shot in somber and rich pastel colours

Late Film Making Styles

• Underlit - dominated by deep green and brown colours.

• Styles closely associated with genre movies - film noir, ghost film and historic drama.

• The same motif but a lot less intense than In the Realm of Senses

Mannerist Visual Styles: Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence

• Oshima shifted his film subject from heterosexual to homosexual love

• Shot in more conventional war-film style

Late Film Making Styles

• Mixture of stylistic and impressive images and conventional visualization.

• Mixture of sloppiness and sophistication

• Star vehicle: David Bowie, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Beat Takeshi

Late Film Making Styles

• Ideas shocked the viewer – Max, Mon amour• Forbidden love with an animal• Luis Buñuel style satire on bourgeois moral

Mannerist Visual Styles: Taboo• Highly aesthetic

historical drama• Beautiful and stylized

set design• Audacious costumes

designed by Wada Emi• Mesmerizing sword

play• Deep and strong

colours: dominant colour blue