fashionista
http://www.fashionista.com/
Fashionista.com is an online explosion of personalities, companies, events and trends that shape the fashion universe. We chronicle the fashion trail from the runway to the first Canal Street knockoffs, while dishing the latest in supermodel gossip and finding the hottest new designers. Fashionista is published by Breaking Media.
The Filmmaker Overview Essay
http://www.girishshambu.com/blog/2008...
excerpt
haring formal and social audacity, a brilliant ability to exploit the widescreen format, a rejection of the refined and self-sacrificing tenor of traditional Japanese cinema, a propensity for mixing fiction and reality, and certain key themes – sex and criminality, the abuse and resilience of women, incest, the social fissures of postwar Japan, the aggravated acts of outcasts in a tightly battened monoculture – Imamura and Oshima nevertheless can be construed as contraries, if not opposites. (It would be illuminating to pair certain of their films: Imamura’s A Man Vanishes with Oshima’s The Man Who Left His Will on Film; Pigs and Battleships with The Sun’s Burial; Vengeance Is Mine with Violence at Noon.) Where Imamura made defiantly “messy” and “juicy” (his preferred terms) films that celebrated the irrational, the instinctual, the carnal, squalid, violent, and superstitious life of Japan’s underclass, Oshima’s films are primarily ideational, probing, and controlled even when anarchic
Oshima, some of his films
http://filmref.com/directors/dirpages...
Nagisa Oshima presents a searing and provocative examination of the socially enabled, self-perpetuating interrelation between poverty and crime in A Town of Love and Hope. As a novice filmmaker, Oshima worked with members of the cast and crew of veteran director, Keisuke Kinoshita, whose 1950s sentimental "women's" pictures for Shochiku's Ofuna Studio embodied the Ofuna flavor, which Audie Bock describes as "subscribing to myths of human goodness, romantic love, and maternal righteousness" in Japanese Film Directors. However, Oshima would subvert the familiar elements of the Ofuna melodrama (ushering an artistic direction that encouraged non-traditonal creativity and experimentation that would define the Ofuna new wave) with dispassionate and muted expression (particularly evident in Masao and Yasuo's seeming emotional detachment) and character framing in predominantly medium and long shots that create a sense of distance and objectivity
Nagisa Oshima,
http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/con...
excerpt
Oshima's obsession with crime and criminals runs deep, from the boy with the homing-pigeon scam to the killers who populate his later work. (Audie Bock: “[I]n every Oshima film at least one murder, rape, theft or blackmail incident can be found, and often the whole of the film is constructed around the chronic repetition of such a crime” (10)). In his writings and interviews, Oshima sometimes equates the outlaw with the artist: both live lives of risk and uncertainty, closer to the edge than those who conform to social norms. This is not an original or profound observation, and Oshima can sound naïve, vain, or foolish when expounding on the theme in print:
Nagisa Oshima and the Struggle for a ...
http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2008...
An unflinchingly iconoclastic and ceaselessly inventive filmmaker, Nagisa Oshima (1932- ) has scorched an indelible path across postwar Japanese cinema. Oshima is one of Japan’s original outlaw masters – a rebellious and instinctively anti-establishment artist whose apprentice work bears a resemblance to the films of such contemporary enfant terribles as Sejun Suzuki (1923- ), Koji Wakamatsu (1936- ) and Kiju Yoshida (1933- ), maverick and fiercely independent directors who, like Oshima, all began under studio contracts. Oshima quickly established himself as one of the most politically committed and driven filmmakers of his generation, beginning with the remarkable elegy to the failed student-led protest movement offered by his controversial third feature, Night and Fog in Japan (1960), which was almost immediately pulled from theatrical distribution by his studio, Shochiku, and banned from public and private exhibition.
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Coilhouse
http://coilhouse.net/
COILHOUSE is a love letter to alternative culture, written in an era when alternative culture no longer exists. And because it no longer exists, we take from yesterday and tomorrow, from the mainstream and from the underground, to construct our own version. We cover art, fashion, technology, music and film to create an alternative culture that we would like to live in, as opposed to the one that’s being sold or handed down to us. The result, in the form of articles, features and interviews, is laid out on our blog and in our print magazine for all to see. If our Utopia is your Utopia, then welcome! Anyone can contribute, and we encourage you to go to our submission page and get in touch.
Here, you will find an assemblage of the visual, cerebral, amusing, challenging and, above all, the ever-evolving. Below are samples of the topics you’ll find here, bits of the Info Strada aimed at inspiring literate progress and bringing entertainment to architects of their own past, present and, especially, future:
Remix Theory
http://remixtheory.net/
Remix Theory is an online resource by Eduardo Navas that offers some of his research on Remix.
Navas focuses on Remix itself as opposed to Remix Culture. In this site you will find a brief definition of Remix, which is examined more extensively in essays that will be added to this website as they become available.
Remix Theory is not meant to function on a daily basis. It is a resource updated periodically, according to the flow of research. It does not focus on the latest information, but on relevant material to the history of Remix, some which may have been published years ago. The site contains material that is obtained from other online sources, with the proper reference. The content of the site consists of reviews, articles, projects and images relevant to Remix. The site also features texts and projects by Eduardo Navas.
Remix Theory is designed to move towards a remix of itself, by recombining much of the material that is archived to put to test the possibilities of Remix. This will become transparent as the database grows, and specific projects are developed. The site is designed to host, archive and promote projects which explore the current possibilities of Remix online and offline; it is prepared to become a repository of collaborations with different people and institutions.
To learn more about the interdisciplinary practice of Eduardo Navas, Please visit http://navasse.net
