Emperor of the Senses: RIP Nagisa Oshima 1932-2013

Last updated January 22, 2013

Screen capture of a scene from 愛のコリーダ/Ai no Korīda/In the Realm of the Senses/L'Empire des sens (Nagisa Oshima, 1976)

Compelling tension in this way is my dramaturgy (doramatsurujii). I compel tension in everyone. It is fine to compel tension in one person, but to compel tension in a great number of people, to increase it by ten-fold, that kind of tension is, I think, what life (seimei) is about.

Nagisa Oshima in 1993. Cited by Isolde Standish, 'Night and Fog in Japan: Fifty Years On', Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 1.2, 2009

Film Studies For Free was very sad to hear news of the death of one of the very greatest Japanese filmmakers Nagisa Oshima (大島 渚, Ōshima Nagisa). Links to tributes and to online studies of his work will continue to appear here over the next hours and days.

Online tributes

• David Hudson, 'DAILY | Nagisa Oshima, 1932 – 2013', Keyframe blog at Fandor, January 15, 2013
• Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, 'NagisaOshima (1932-2013), a Tribute...', Film Studies For Free, January 22, 2013
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Sun Also Sets (in memory of Nagisa Oshima, March 31, 1932 — January 15, 2013) at JonathanRosenbaum.com, January 15, 2013
• Ronald Bergan, 'Nagisa Oshima Obituary', The Guardian, January 15, 2013 
• Dennis Lim, 'Nagisa Oshima, Iconoclastic Filmmaker, Dies at 80', New York Times, January 15, 2013 
• 'Nagisa Oshima', Daily Telegraph, January 15, 2013

Online studies

• James R. Alexander,'Obscenity, Pornography, and the Law in Japan:Reconsidering Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses', Asian-Pacific Law and Policy Journal, Vol. 4, Issue 1 (Winter 2003)
• Michael Atkinson, 'Be My Knife', Moving Image Source, 2008 
• Nöel Burch, To the distant observer: form and meaning in the Japanese cinema (University of Michigan Press, 1979)
• Case Study on "L'Empire Des Sens (In The Realm Of The Senses)", Students British Board of Film Classification
• Joshua M. Ferguson, 'Queer Japanese cinema : a rich and diverse cultural history’s challenge to hegemonic ideologies of gender and sexuality', MA Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2010
  
• Freda Freiberg, 'The Unkindest Cut of All? Some Reflections on the Recent Cinematic Release of the Uncut Version of Nagisa Oshima's Ai no corrida', Senses of Cinema, Issue 12, Feb-Mar 2001
• Chris Fujiwara, 'The Struggle to Believe', Moving Image Source', 2008
• Andrew Grossman, 'Gohatto-or the End of Oshima Nagisa?', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 33, 2001 July  
• Oliver Hansen, 'Cruel Story of Youth', Midnight Eye, September 2012 
• Go Hirasawa, 'Underground Cinema and the Art Theatre Guild', Midnight Eye, August 2005 
• Hikari Hori, 'Representing a Woman’s Story: Explicit Film and the Efficacy of Censorship in Japan', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Alexander Jacoby, ''In the Realm of Oshima', Sight and Sound, September 2009 
• Nelson Kim, 'Nagisa Oshima', Senses of Cinema, Issue 31, 2004
• Joshua Land, 'Criminal Minded', Moving Image Source, 2008
• G. C. Macnab, updated by Guo-Juin Hong , 'Nagisa Oshima', Filmreference.com (date unknown)
• Kate Moran, 'Gohatto (Taboo)', Scope, November 2003
• Michael R. (Mike) Mosher, 'A Visit to Ogawa Productions', Leonardo Digital Reviews, July 2005
• Rob Nelson, 'His Will on Film', Moving Image Source, 2008
• Rob Nelson, 'Forty Years Ago Today: Oshima in ‘68', Walker Magazine, 2008
• David Phelps, 'Oshima: Artists and Lovers, Take One (of Four)', MUBI Notebook,  December 2008 (Prologue, Take Two, Take Three, Take Four)  
• David Phelps, 'The Closed World: The Films of Shinoda Masahiro – Surface play and subterfuge in the movies of a modern classicist', Senses of Cinema, Issue 61, 2011
• James Quandt, 'In the Realm of Oshima: The Films of Japanese Master Nagisa Oshim', Walker Magazine, 2008
• Tony Rayns, ' A Samurai Among Farmers: Nagisa Oshima', Film Comment, September/October 2008
• Tony Rayns, 'Empire of Passion: Love’s Phantom', Criterion Film Essays, April 27, 2009 
• Donald Richie, 'In the Realm of the Senses: Some Notes on Oshima and Pornography', Criterion Film Essays, April 30, 2009
• Kari L. Shepardson, 'Fists, Youth, and Protest: Oshima Nagisa's Filmic Rebellion in 1960', MA Thesis, University of British Columbia, December 2002
• Isolde Standish, 'Night and Fog in Japan: Fifty Years On', Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 1.2, 2009 
• Philip Strick, 'Love, honour and obey: Film of the Month: Gohatto', Sight and Sound, August 2001
  
• Hai Leong Toh, 'Sex in Asian Cinema', Kinema, Fall 2000 

Also see Film Studies For Free's other, related entries on Japanese Cinema, Kazuo Hara and Japanese Documentary Film, Japanese cinema and animation, Satoshi Kon (1963-2010).

Corrected entry (February 12): FRAMEWORK: The Journal of Cinema and Media

'Snakes&Funerals' by Emily Jeremiah, James S. Williams and Gillian Wylde. Taking Jean-Luc Godard’s canonic film Le Mépris / Contempt (1963) as a starting-point, Snakes&Funerals set out to explore the queer possibilities of image and sound, especially of colour and of ‘straight’ repetition. First published in Frames, Issue 1, July 2012.

Film Studies For Free [thought it had] had a lovely surprise today. It found, through Google Scholar, that NINE full issues of Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media (including the most recent five issues) were freely accessible through the Digital Commons of its publisher Wayne State University Press. It jumped to the pleasing conclusion (encouraged by the use of the word Commons + free access), that this great journal had turned to open access publishing.

Then, on February 11, FSFF received a very courteously worded email with the following message from a very nice representative of Wayne State University Press:

Unfortunately, this journal is not open access, and we have no plans to make it so at this time. I'm writing to you so that you have the correct information about Framework. 

When you visited the site, BePress (administrator of Digital Commons) had not yet activated the toll-access barrier to the journal content. That was an error on our part, one that we have since rectified. Those who click on the links you have posted on your blog will not be able to download the article for free. Instead, a $5 fee is charged before access is granted. I apologize for the confusion [...].

$5 is much, much cheaper than most traditional "gated" online academic publication access, for sure. But FSFF must apologise to its readers -- who, up until a short while ago, will have been able to access contents for free -- for drawing a premature conclusion.

Issue 35 of SCREENING THE PAST: Martin, Ruiz, Godard, Marker, Malick, Ophuls, and RIP Vikki Riley

Corrected edition! [Thanks AM!]

Screen cap from Petulia (Richard Lester, 1968). Read Adrian Danks's new article on this film and its director. And read Roger Ebert's fascinating review of the film at the time of its release.

It was somewhat remiss of Film Studies For Free to tweet the link to a new, and excellent, issue of Screening the Past, and then not to follow up with an entry here. This little oversight is corrected today with the below list of contents and links.

There are a huge number of film studies topics covered in the issue (although a fair few of them, in a variety of great contributions, by Adrian Martin!). FSFF particularly liked Lorraine Sim on the ensemble film and Roger Hillman on Malick.

This blog especially recommends, also, the dossier (introduced by Martin) dedicated to the work and memory of Vikki Riley, a highly original writer on film and a tireless political activist who tragically died in a road accident in Darwin, Australia, last September.

Screening the Past, Issue 35, 2012

First Release

• Hanging Here and Groping There: On Raúl Ruiz’s “The Six Functions of the Shot”
  by Adrian Martin
• The Art of Falling Apart: Petulia and the Fate of Richard Lester
  by Adrian Danks
• Tending the Wounds of the Nation: Gender in Contemporary Iranian War Cinema
  by Michelle Langford
• Ensemble Film, Postmodernity and Moral Mapping
  by Lorraine Sim
• JLG/Jean Améry
  by Alan Wright
• Malick’s Music of the Spheres: The Tree of Life
  by Roger Hillman
• The Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals, and the Liberalisation of Film Censorship in Australia
  by Cathy Hope and Adam Dickerson 

Vikki Riley (1962-2012): Early Writings

• VOLA X (Introduction)
  by Adrian Martin
• The Canonisation of Junk (1982)
  by Vikki Riley
• Poetics of Pop: The Titles of Things (1982)
  by Vikki Riley
• ‘This Magazine is for Airing Personal Complaints’ (1983)
  by Vikki Riley
• Caught … Sunless and The State of Things (1984)
  by Vikki Riley

Classics and Re-runs

• Which Hollywood? Which Ophuls?
  by Adrian Martin
• The Six Functions of the Shot
  by Raúl Ruiz 

Web-teque

• Adrian Martin interview about his book Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez,
  interviewer Anna Dzenis

Reviews

• Ecce Homo: The Male-Body-In-Pain as Redemptive Figure
• by Jeremy V. Adolphson
• One Night on TV is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Popular Music on Early Television
  by Lauren Anderson
• Ephemeral Media: Transitory Screen Culture from Television to YouTube
  by Rebecca Bell-Metereau
• A Post-May Adolescence: A letter to Alice Debord
  by Jan Bryant
• Sergio Leone Something To Do With Death (reprint edition)
  by Patrick Condliffe
• Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism
  by Maura Edmond
• Fantasy Film: A Critical Introduction
  by Michael Grant
• Glimpses of Freedom: Independent Cinema in Southeast Asia.
  by David Hanan
• Science Fiction Film: A Critical Introduction
  by Adam Knee
• British Film Design: A History
  by Brian McFarlane
• New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images
  by Sarinah Masukor
• David Lynch
  by Josh Nelson
• The Neorealist body in Postwar Italian cinema
  by Luca Peretti
• Olivier Assayas
  by Claire Perkins
• The Miracle Woman
  by Eloise Ross
• Jedda
  by Shane Smithers
• Fashion in Film
  by Sue Thomas
• Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy: The Last Masterpiece
  by Jay Daniel Thompson
• Cinema’s Alchemist: The Films of Péter Forgács
  by Jeni Thornley
• Film Trilogies: New Critical Approaches
  by John Vanderhoef
• Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution
  by Mike Walsh
• Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodore Adorno
  by Tyson Wils
• South African Cinema 1896-2010
  by Suzanne Woodward

“How Motion Pictures Became the Movies”: A Video Lecture by David Bordwell

Not the actual Vimeo embed! For that you MUST visit David Bordwell's website...

Today something new has been added [to the Observations on Film Art website]. I’ve decided to retire some of the lectures I take on the road, and I’ll put them up as video lectures. They’re sort of Net substitutes for my show-and-tells about aspects of film that interest me. The first is called “How Motion Pictures Became the Movies,” and it’s devoted to what is for me the crucial period 1908-1920. It quickly surveys what was going on in cinema over those years before zeroing in on the key stylistic developments we’ve often written about here: the emergence of continuity editing and the brief but brilliant exploration of tableau staging.
     The lecture isn’t a record of me pacing around talking. Rather, it’s a PowerPoint presentation that runs as a video, with my scratchy voice-over. I didn’t write a text, but rather talked it through as if I were presenting it live. It nakedly exposes my mannerisms and bad habits, but I hope they don’t get in the way of your enjoyment. [David Bordwell, ''What next? A video lecture, I suppose. Well, actually, yeah….", Observations on Film, January 12, 2013]

The above is, hopefully, self-explanatory. In other words you should head straight over to David Bordwell's website (also see here) to be reminded, if you really needed to be, of just what a valuable resource it is, and just what a global treasure he is (and, of course, Kristin Thompson, too!].

Film Studies For Free can't wait for more of these. Thank you, David!

New Issue of MEDIASCAPE Online on "History and Technology"

Frame grab from Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980), one of the subjects of Film Studies For Free's author's latest videographic film study in her new article 'Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies', which you can find in the newly published issue of Mediascape.

The much awaited Winter 2013 issue of MEDIASCAPE, UCLA's Journal of Cinema and Media, has just been published. There are two very fine articles on historical film archives by Christina Petersen and Bryan Sebok, as well as two excellent columns on related historiographical themes. Meanwhile, the META section boasts some very good, new video essay work by Matthias Stork, Alexandra Schroeder, and Clifford James Galiher and reflections on videographic and other digital film studies practices by great luminaries, such as Yuri Tsivian and Daria Khitrova, alongside those of much more ordinary mortals! There's also a highly informative interview with filmmaker Thom Andersen and some very interesting reviews to catch up with.

All contents are listed and linked to below. But, also, do check out MEDIASCAPE's occasional, but very high quality blog which publishes between journal issue releases. A good place to start is this entry: 'Mastering "The Master"' by Vincent Brook

MEDIASCAPE, Winter 2013

Editorial by Andy Myers and Andrew Young

Features

• The Crowd Mind: The Archival Legacy of the Payne Fund Studies’ Movies and Conduct (1933) by Christina Petersen
• Headline Hollywood: A discourse analysis of the Variety archive by Bryan Sebok

Columns

• Alex Haley’s Roots and Hyperreal Historiography by Randy Laist
• Transmission: Considering New Media and the Online Histories of HIV/AIDS by Christopher Garland

META

• What Happens When You Sleep? Multiple Layers of Voyeurism in the Paranormal Activity Trilogy by Alexandra Schroeder
• Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies by Catherine Grant
• The Three Fates of the Maltese Falcon: Hammet's Novel at Warner Bros. by Clifford James Galiher
• Photography and Fictionality by Jens Schröter
• Transmedia Synergies — Remediating Films and Video Games by Matthias Stork
• In Retrospect: 2012 Los Angeles Animation Festival by Kelly Lake
• “A Film is Alive During its Making” – An Interview with Filmmaker Thom Andersen by Matthias Stork
• On Cinemetrics, Video Essays, and Digital Scholarship – An Interview with Dr. Yuri Tsivian and Dr. Daria Khitrova by Matthias Stork

Reviews

• Total Archive: Picturing History from the Stereographic Library to the Digital Database by Brooke Belisle
• All The World’s A Video Wall: Technology, Humanity, and the Things in Between. Reviewing Chris Salter’s Entangled by Judith Kohlenberger and Samuel Zwaan
• Murder and Montage: Oliver Stone’s Hyperreal Period by Randy Laist
• Review of Useful Cinema by Andrew Myers
• Something Borrowed from the Past: Wedding Photography and Super 8mm by Paul Gansky

 

 

Holy LOLA! Issue 3 on MASKS Online

FSFF's montage of frame grabs from Les yeux sans visage / Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju, 1960) and Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012). Read Part One of LOLA's collective hailing of the latter film

Film Studies For Free is delighted to bring you the always lovely news that not only has a new issue of Adrian Martin and Girish Shambu's LOLA been published -- on Masks -- it has already been extended, as per the new rolling publication style of this wonderful online film journal.

There is one final roll-out for this issue coming soon. This will include texts on Jerry Lewis, Rivette and Carpenter compared, Sitges Film Festival, and the conclusion of 'Hail Holy Motors'. FSFF will add links to the below list of contents once these are online.

LOLA, Issue 3 (December 2012): Masks

• Hail Holy Motors Part One A Spontaneous LOLA collective 
• A Pilgrimage to the Peloponnese: Gregory Markopoulos, Eniaios and the Temenos Erika Balsom 
• Is It Weird? Or, Actualising Disallowed Cinema Philip Brophy  
• She Thinks She Looks Dana Linssen  
• Webs of Destiny and Bits of String: Edgar G. Ulmer Luc Moullet  
• Transient and Intrinsically Valuable in Their Impermanence: Television's Changing Aesthetic Norms Tom O'Regan  
• The Macao Gesture Cristina Álvarez López  
• Investigation of a Stolen Life: I giorni contati Yvette Bíró  
• Road Trip: Toronto International Film Festival 2012 Girish Shambu

Notes on Contributors

On Embodiment and the Body: New Issue of CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image

Above, a recording of composer Simon Fisher Turner and sound artist Black Sifichi's live performance of SFT's score for Derek Jarman's 1994 film Blue at Glasgow's Tramway Theatre in 2008.  Below, a brief excerpt from Vivian Sobchack's article 'Fleshing out the image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and Derek Jarman's Blue', CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, No. 3 (2012) PDF]

Today, most graduate students are in such a hurry to “professionalize” and “talk the talk” of their disciplines that they often forget to attend to their own experience of “seeing” and “listening” — or they devalue it. Instead, they rush to quote others, and describe their objects of study through a range of “floating signifiers” that tend to overdetermine and foreclose their objects and their descriptions before the latter have even really begun. Hermeneutically sophisticated yet overly dependent upon “received knowledge,” these students are also secretly insecure and worried that everyone else ‘knows’ more than they do — and intellectually aware of “the death of the subject,” they are highly suspicious of their own “subjective” experience. They ignore, mistrust, and devalue it as trivial, mistaken, or irrelevantly singular — this last, a false, indeed arrogant, humility that unwittingly rejects intersubjectivity, sociality, and culture. Thus, ignoring the apodicticity (or initial certainty) and presence of their own lived-bodies engaged in being-in-the-world (and in the cinema), their thought about the world (and cinema) has no existential ground of its own from which to empirically proceed. Phenomenological inquiry affords redress to this contemporary situation: it insists we dwell on the ground of experience before moving on to more abstract or theoretical concerns, that we experience and reflect upon our own sight before we (dare I pun?) cite others. [From Vivian Sobchack, 'Fleshing out the image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and Derek Jarman's Blue', CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, No. 3 (2012) PDF]

Happy new year to all of Film Studies For Free's readers! FSFF has unfortunately been slowed up in its efforts to bring you its list of Best Online Film Studies Resources in 2012. That should now be published around the end of next week.

But, in the meantime, there are a few new journal-issues to catch up with, including a strong contender for the category of Best Single Issue of an Online Film Studies Journal in 2012: the below, latest offering from CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image on Embodiment and the Body. And, in this blog's humble opinion, Vivian Sobchack's article, from which FSFF has cited above, would be a shoo-in for Best and certainly most important 2012 Article...

CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, No. 3 (2012) PDF

EMBODIMENT AND THE BODY edited by Patrícia Silveirinha Castello Branco

• EDITORIAL: CINEMA, THE BODY AND EMBODIMENT, 1-9 PDF 
• ABSTRACTS, 10-18 PDF

Articles

• FLESHING OUT THE IMAGE: PHENOMENOLOGY, PEDAGOGY, AND DEREK JARMAN’S BLUE, 19-38 PDF  by Vivian Sobchack
• SEDUCTION INCARNATE: PRE-PRODUCTION CODE HOLLYWOOD AND POSSESSIVE SPECTATORSHIP, 39-61 PDF by Ana Salzberg 
• A PHENOMENOLOGY OF RECIPROCAL SENSATION IN THE MOVING BODY EXPERIENCE OF MOBILE PHONE FILMS, 62-83 PDF by Gavin Wilson
• CINEMA OF THE BODY: THE POLITICS OF PERFORMATIVITY IN LARS VON TRIER’S DOGVILLE AND YORGOS LANTHIMO’S DOGTOOTH, 84-108 PDF by Angelos Koutsourakis
• THE BODY OF IL DUCE: THE MYTH OF THE POLITICAL PHYSICALITY OF MUSSOLINI IN MARCO BELLOCCHIO’S VINCERE, 109-123 PDF by Marco Luceri
• EIJA-LIISA AHTILA: THE PALPABLE EVENT, 124-154 PDF byAndrew Conio
• UPSIDE-DOWN CINEMA: (DIS)SIMULATION OF THE BODY IN THE FILM EXPERIENCE, 155-182 PDF by Adriano D’Aloia 
• EMBODYING MOVIES: EMBODIED SIMULATION AND FILM STUDIES, 183-210 PDF by Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra 
• EXISTENTIAL FEELINGS: HOW CINEMA MAKES US FEEL ALIVE, 211-228 PDF by Dina Mendonça 
• THE BODY AS INTERFACE: AMBIVALENT TACTILITY IN EXPANDED RUBE CINEMA, 229-253 PDF by Seung-hoon Jeong

Interview

• A PROPOS D’IMAGES (A SUIVRE): ENTRETIEN AVEC MARIE-JOSE MONDZAIN [FR.], 254-271 PDF Conducted by Vanessa Brito

Conference Reports

• CONFERENCE ROUND-UP SUMMER 2012: POWERS OF THE FALSE (INSTITUT FRANÇAIS, LONDON, 18-19 MAY), SCSMI CONFERENCE (SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE/NYU, NEW YORK, 13-16 JUN.), FILM-GAME-EMOTION-BRAIN (UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM, 14-21 JUL.), AND FILM-PHILOSOPHY CONFERENCE (QUEEN MARY – UNIVERSITY OF LONDON/ KING’S COLLEGE LONDON/KINGSTON UNIVERSITY, 12-14 SEPT.), 272-283 PDF by William Brown

Special Section

• CÍRCULOS E POÉTICAS EM FILMES LITERÁRIOS DE FERNANDO LOPES, 284-300 PDF by Eduardo Paz Barroso