Word: nagisa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...which, he has written, "the body enters a state of perfect balance. Buto belongs both to life and to death. It is a realization of the distance between a human being and the unknown." Like other artists working from within a conception of Japanese modernism-the film director Nagisa Oshima, the designer Issey Miyake-Amagatsu is obsessed with redefinition. Buto, at its point of origin in the social and artistic turmoil of the '60s, was brooding, even brutal, full of images of apocalypse. It was revolutionary, but by the time Amagatsu began his work with Sankai Juku...
MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE Directed by Nagisa Oshima Written by Nagisa Oshima and Paul Mayersberg
...superb erotic melodrama In the Realm of the Senses (1976), Japanese Writer-Director Nagisa Oshima is portraying-for Western viewers and his own Westernized countrymen-the social compulsions that once made Japan unique, and uniquely feared. In the earlier film, a prostitute and the husband of a brothel owner become casual lovers and then, following the logic of exclusive devotion, swoon into a passion whose fulfillment is violent death. In Merry Christmas, the viewer is thrown al once into the sadomasochistic excess of Oriental machismo. Here, every gesture of discipline, compassion, rage and honor is expressed by the blade...
Shohei Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama and Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence are both expected to earn their distributors about $4 million. So is The Makioka Sisters, directed by Kon Ichikawa from Junichiro Tanizaki's novel about an upper-class family just before World War II. Masaki Kobayashi's Tokyo Saiban, a grueling, 41/2-hour documentary of the Tokyo war-crimes trials, is a surprise success that should earn rental fees of $ 1.6 million...
...only the second time since 1954, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival went to a Japanese film: Shohei Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama, an elemental and unsentimentahzed portrait of Japan's mountain people in the 1880s. The same festival also showcased Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, a P.O.W. melodrama set in Java in 1942 starring David Bowie and two popular Japanese performers, Singer-Songwriter Ryuichi Sakamoto and the TV comic Takeshi. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is scheduled to open this fall in New York as the spearhead of an Oshima retrospective...