100 Years of Japanese Cinema (TV)

If Godard’s history of French cinema for the British Film Institute’s “Century of Cinema” series was predictably polemical, Oshima’s goes it one better by producing a history of Japanese film that is outright perverse in its seeming disdain for many of its giants. (Critics have speculated as to why Mizoguchi, Ozu, and Kurosawa are slighted, given one clip each while Oshima accords his own films four!) Oshima begins with the silent period, and shuttles through the family dramas of the Thirties, the rise of militarism and the effect of WWII on the film industry, the postwar golden age, the arrival of the Japanese New Wave, and the subsequent emergence of independent directors from Terayama and Kitano to Yoshimitsu Morita and Yoichi Sai. Oshima ends with the wish that Japanese cinema “free itself from the spell of Japan and blossom as pure cinema.”