Nagisa Ōshima’s first feature, A Town of Love and Hope, introduced his interest in class inequality and youth under pressure. Made at the major studio Shochiku, the film helped position him among a younger generation of directors who challenged postwar screen norms. This debut set the stage for his key Japanese New Wave run of the 1960s and early 1970s.
In The Sun’s Burial, Ōshima focused on people living at the bottom of the social order in Osaka. The film pushed New Wave realism and anger further, shifting attention from middle-class drama to marginalized communities and street economies. This move widened what Japanese mainstream cinema could depict, and it reinforced Ōshima’s reputation for social critique.
Ōshima’s Cruel Story of Youth used a violent teenage relationship to show disillusionment in postwar Japan, with political protests visible in the background. Its mix of contemporary politics, sex, and crime became strongly associated with the Japanese New Wave’s break from polite studio storytelling. The film’s success also showed there was an audience for more confrontational youth-centered cinema.
Ōshima’s Night and Fog in Japan examined divisions within Japan’s left-wing student movements, using a wedding gathering to stage arguments about past and present activism. Its stylized form and direct political content made it a landmark of the New Wave’s engagement with recent history. The film also became central to debates about the limits of studio tolerance for political cinema.
Only days after its release, Night and Fog in Japan was abruptly withdrawn by Shochiku in the tense political climate following Socialist politician Inejirō Asanuma’s assassination. The incident became a widely cited example of how political events could shape film distribution and studio decision-making. For Ōshima, it marked a turning point toward greater independence from the major studio system.
With The Catch, based on a novella by Kenzaburō Ōe, Ōshima moved into independent production after leaving Shochiku. The film’s wartime setting—a captured Black U.S. pilot in a rural village—allowed Ōshima to explore fear, power, and community violence. It showed that his New Wave approach could extend beyond contemporary youth stories into broader social allegory.
Ōshima’s Pleasures of the Flesh entered the popular “pink film” space (soft-core erotic cinema) while keeping a critical, character-driven focus. By blending sexual material with moral and social commentary, he challenged the idea that erotic genres had to be politically empty. The film helped define how Japanese New Wave directors could borrow from commercial forms without accepting their usual boundaries.
In Violence at Noon, Ōshima used a crime story to examine sexual violence, memory, and social hypocrisy, pushing editing and narrative structure in more fragmentary directions. The film’s intensity and technique showed the New Wave’s growing interest in breaking linear storytelling to reflect psychological and social fracture. It also reinforced Ōshima’s pattern of using disturbing subject matter to question everyday respectability.
Sing a Song of Sex followed high school students through fantasies, songs, and drifting conversations on a politically charged holiday, rather than building a traditional plot. Its collage-like style and improvised feeling reflected Ōshima’s interest in how desire and politics mix in everyday life. The film suggested that social change could not be understood only through speeches and protests—private fantasies mattered too.
In Double Suicide: Japanese Summer, Ōshima combined political tensions, sexual conflict, and chaotic violence into a deliberately unstable narrative. The film treated modern life as a kind of performance, where media attention and aggression could become inseparable. This approach fit the late-1960s turn in Japanese New Wave cinema toward sharper satire and more radical form.
Released the same month as Death by Hanging, Three Resurrected Drunkards used mistaken identity and absurd chases to highlight hostility toward Korean residents and migrants. Its comedy sharpened the critique: officials and crowds become part of the problem, not neutral enforcers. The film showed Ōshima’s ability to move between serious political indictment and playful, disruptive satire.
Death by Hanging used dark comedy and “Brechtian” distancing (techniques that keep viewers thinking, not just feeling) to criticize capital punishment and discrimination against Koreans in Japan. The film’s premise—an execution fails and officials try to “reconstruct” guilt—turns a legal process into a moral and political argument. It became one of Ōshima’s best-known New Wave statements about state power and injustice.
In Boy, Ōshima dramatized a real-life scam in which a child is pressured into staged accidents so adults can extort drivers. The film shifted focus from student politics to everyday exploitation, showing harm inside the family rather than only from the state. Its controlled storytelling and emotional restraint helped make the social critique harder to dismiss as simple shock.
Ōshima’s 1970 film centered on young activists after the 1968 student protest wave, using a dead filmmaker’s footage as a mystery and a political question. By making film itself the “will” that remains, Ōshima linked artistic practice to political responsibility. The result was a self-reflective New Wave work about how movements are remembered, misunderstood, or repeated.
With The Ceremony, Ōshima traced a family’s postwar history through repeated weddings and funerals, using ritual to show how power and silence can be passed down. The film brought his decade of New Wave work into a broader historical frame, shifting from street-level rebellion to the long life of institutions like the family clan. As a culmination, it suggested that political change also requires confronting traditions that survive behind “proper” ceremonies.
Nagisa Oshima's Japanese New Wave films, 1960–1972