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 selfreferential 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 consistentely 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
Parmigiano,
Giovanni Bellini, Madonna of
Madonna with the
the Meadows (ca.1500)
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.
Rosso Fiorentino,
Dead Christ with
Two Angels (1527)
Filippino Lippi, Pieta (1500)
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 selfreflexive 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
•
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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