Nagisa Oshima - 1970s

1970s

The Ceremony (1971) was a satirical look at Japanese attitudes, famously expressed in a scene where a marriage ceremony has to go ahead even though the bride is not present.

Ōshima is best known for In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no korīda; 愛のコリーダ 1976), a film based on a true story of fatal sexual obsession in 1930s Japan. Ōshima, a critic of censorship and his contemporary Akira Kurosawa's humanism, was determined that the film should feature unsimulated sex and thus the undeveloped film had to be transported to France to be processed and an uncensored version of the movie is still unavailable in Japan.

In his 1978 companion film to In the Realm of the Senses, Empire of Passion (Ai no bōrei; 愛の亡霊), Ōshima took a more restrained approach to depicting the sexual passions of the two lovers driven to murder, and the film won the 1978 Cannes Film Festival award for best director.

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