by Allan Fish
(Japan 1971 121m) DVD2 (Japan only, no Eng subs)
Aka. Gishiki
Nothing is unthinkable
p Kinshiru Kuzui, Takuji Yamaguchi d Nagisa Oshima w Nagisa Oshima, Tsutomo Tamura ph Toichiro Narushima ed Keiichi Uraoka m Toru Takemitsu art Jusho Toda
Kenzo Kawarazaki (Masuo), Atsuo Nakamura (Terumichi), Akiko Koyama (Satsuko), Atsoku Kako (Ritsuko), Kiyoshi Tsuchiya (Tadashi), Kei Sato (Grandfather Kazuomi), Fumio Watanabe, Nobuko Otowa,
Japanese cinema has always been unable to shake off stereotyping, pigeon-holing and the cursed canonical critical approbation theory. Names such as Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu – in the order in which they were made known to the west – are rightly fêted, as now are Kinoshita, Naruse, Yamanaka, Ichikawa, and so many other masters. However, the post-war era – by which I mean directors who worked exclusively after the armistice, has been less discussed in the west. This is partly due to the two greatest – and certainly most influential – of that generation of directors, Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura, rarely being mentioned in the west for the early films that made their name and remain their best, rather than the later ones that got to the west and were appreciated. Oshima, to me, is the biggest sufferer, for he is Imamura’s master, the greatest of all the anti-establishment auteurs of the era, and though Ai No Corrida was a masterpiece of its type, it’s this earlier film that is his most important, as well as the crowning glory on three years of masterful work. Derek Malcolm was quite right when he observed that “he is undoubtedly as significant and skilful a director as most of the great Japanese film-makers of the generation before him.”
The Ceremony tells the tale of the death of the patriarch of a family (“relatives who do not see each other, except for weddings and funerals” we are told) bringing two such members back for a funeral, Masuo and Ritsuko. While on the journey home, Masuo in particular attempts to relive the events that brought him there, and takes himself back to the immediate aftermath of the war, when he left Manchuria, the occupied state in which he was born, to return home in infancy. The conversation between Masuo and Ritsuko brings back many painful memories, and centres around the character of Setsuko, aunt to Masuo, who wills herself to death, and the reasons for it.
Oshima’s earlier gems, from Cruel Story of Youth to Death by Hanging, Diary of a Shinjuku Thief and Boy, all took a certain stance which is unmistakable. The directorial style in The Ceremony is very much the same, but the stance is more ambiguous. Writers have been quick to note Oshima’s embracing of the French nouvelle vague in certain sequences of these films, but there are also true Buñuelian layers that remain as savagely satirical nearly forty years on, and none more so than in The Ceremony. Certain events truly have a surreal edge to them, with the various romantic couplings, some bordering on the incestuous, mirroring perfectly the political climate of Japan for the quarter century the story covers. David Thomson has called it “a bleak but luminous picture of how domestic ritual destroys or perverts the life force of a family”, but it is also a potent analysis of the very institution of family, a million miles from the formal simplicity of the various families in the works of Ozu, as well as showing how the ambitions, fears and preconceptions (and misconceptions) are formed an early age. There’s an inescapable, relentless sense of causality about the proceedings and the finale, which incorporates two deaths, is perfectly in-keeping with the way the family seemed to have self-imploded over the intervening years, spiralling out of control like young seven year old Masuo taking his first drink of sake. The aforementioned Derek Malcolm has said that Oshima “clearly sees Japan developing blindly, its old values corrupted, and its new ones worthless.” Or, to put that to test in the film, when grandfather dies, corrupt or not, the new generation collapse without him. Oshima’s masterpiece is extremely hard to see, but make the effort. It’s essential.
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Here’s an excellent illustration as to why I LOVE Allan’s count-downs. As an American who is deprived of fine foreign cinema and completely overwhelmed by the mass-marketed commercialism of todays American movier franchises, it’s great to come here and always be surprised or educated. So often I visit this count and come across a forgotten gem (ex. FAT CITY) or a master-work (such as todays selection) that neither my education or my video store knows anything about. I think it’s precisely because Allan is not from the U.S. that he’s able to look at this count down through eyes unjaded by the bloatedness of American cinema. I knew of IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES, however unless you scour the internet or the library for information on foreign cinema, one would never know of the other works by this director or any director foreign to U.S. I look forward to this film now that I know about it. Thanks Allan!
Ok then, Sam/Allan. What other films by Oshima are on the “must see” list?
“Writers have been quick to note Oshima’s embracing of the French nouvelle vague in certain sequences of these films, but there are also true Buñuelian layers that remain as savagely satirical nearly forty years on, and none more so than in The Ceremony. Certain events truly have a surreal edge to them, with the various romantic couplings, some bordering on the incestuous, mirroring perfectly the political climate of Japan for the quarter century the story covers.”
Well, luckily, thanks to the now defunct DVD internet outlet “Super Happy Fun” I own beautiful subtitled copies of this masterpiece (the greatest of the Japanese New Wave titles and deservingly high up here on Allan’s countdown) as well as BOY, which would push close and two others, DIARY OF A SHINKIKU THIEF and DEATH BY HANGING, several of which Allan mentions here. These are available free of charge of course to anyone who wishes copies.
Dennis, these titles are essential as is AI NO CORRIDA.
Thanks Sammy for the quick and most detailed reply. This review has sparked my interest in making Oshima a target for intense study and appraisal. Allan has also sparked me up on Truffaut again, his review for TWO ENGLISH GIRLS made me re-investigate his filmography and his life story. Once again WitD comes in and adds a new dimension into my education of world cinema. I book-marked the site so now all I have to do is hit one key on my Blackberry and I’m whisked straight to WitD. The information here is like no other on the net. Bravo, Allan/Sam!
All I have to do is hit one key on my Blackberry and whisk straight to the site, one that I visit more than any other. The wealth of information here is like no other!
wow, i hope your passengers in the cab can overlook the brown stains on your nose. They had a huge Oshima retrospective at BAM a few months ago. “The Sun’s Burial” is one of his best works.
This is a fine piece. The Ceremony is Oshima’s greatest film in all probability. In the Realm of the Senses is a hard one to judge for all kinds of theoretical reasons. But what I would fervently resist is the idea that Oshima is as great as that greatest generation of Japanese directors. The Japanese ‘new wave’ radicalized the French one in some ways and yet it also succumbed to the ‘sensationalist’. Within an extremely hierarchical society like the Japanese one (as it was at the time and continues to be in some ways) an Oshima or an Imamura become very comprehensible. And yet for all the immediacy of their cinema there is something of ‘art’ that is lost. To put it differently ‘art’ can become a casualty to political protest. Or again, the balance between ‘art’ and ‘polemic’ is a difficult one and Oshima often crosses over much as Imamura does. Quite consciously I would add. In many ways Masumara seems to me the Japanese modernist who preserves the balance much as Teshigahara does. Ichikawa, though he overlaps with each generation might be considered a sort of bridge between the two in a thematic sense. But in any case Red Angel to my mind exceeds the accomplishments of Oshima or Imamura. I would say something similar for the best of Teshigahara. This is not to underestimate the significance of Oshima and Imamura within that industry but the reaction to the old (and I think these careers can be seen most usefully as suffering from an enormous ‘anxiety’ regarding that great Japanese troika of Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi.. in other words the ‘agon, in Bloomian terms, is with those three and if ‘history’ upto this point is any judge the battle has been lost by Oshima and Imamura in their very own age) that is visible in their cinema was not tempered enough with ‘artistic ambition’ in a more formalistic sense but also in terms of pure narrative. I am unsure what one gets out of Oshima that one cannot out of Godard or some of the other great French new wave masters, barring those admittedly vital Japanese contexts. The ‘evasion’ of the earlier Japanese greats for Oshima happened to pass through the French new wave. A potent mix for sure. But not enough to really stand up with those older titans. Such is at least my sense. I should lastly add that even at a very personal level the works of Oshima or Imamura have never been the most compelling even as these are always engaging. It is not just Masumara. I think there are some spectacular Japanese achievements in the mode of ‘modernism’. I have mentioned a few of these but there are others. Allan for example highlighted Eros + Massacre not so long ago. These director were often not as prolific as Oshima or Imamura but I think they’re created either more permanent art or at least more radical experimentation.
I would agree to a degree on Imamura, who I don’t think made a masterpiece, just one that came close (The Insect Woman), where Oshima had Ai No Corrida and this film with Death by Hanging just behind. However, I would agree on Masumura’s Red Angel, and I find Masumura more entertaining in many ways.
Excellent movie, that I just saw for the first time. It does a great job of fusing social satire with psychological resonance, not the easiest task but when it’s done right we realize the connections between both, and to what extent – to flip the old feminist slogan – the political really is personal. At times I wondered if the themes and historical connections were too specifically explicated, but that’s hard to judge on a first viewing (in some ways I was thankful, as they guided this foreign viewer to a more immediate understanding of the context, though at times they seemed unnecessary – I suppose follow-up viewings will reveal whether or not they “hold up”).
I disagree with Thomson’s characterization, because I don’t think the rituals “destroy” or “pervert” the life force of the family, I think they reveal the life forces in the process of being destroyed and/or perverted. Indeed, on the basis of the film itself we have virtually nothing by which to judge these supposedly vital (when not corrupted by ritual) life-forces, we only see the family at ceremonies, and we are led to believe, by what they say and what we can deduce, that these are the only times any sort of life force is manifested. Traumatic and agonizing they may be, these ceremonies are probably nonetheless the only form of vitality left to these weary, confused, and neutered people.
As for Kaleem’s comment above, this is the only Oshima I’ve seen so I have to take it in isolation but based on this I don’t think “art” is lost – and I think it’s because of the psychological potency of his portrait. If it was just a polemic with cardboard characters, perhaps that would be the case, but the characters are not only symbols but people, albeit sharply drawn and somewhat “purified” people; nonetheless they breathe, move, and emote convincingly – and as such, they help us recognize the phenomenal underpinnings of symbols, that sometimes get lost in works which sacrifice the individual to the universal.