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 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.
(continue at link)
stylelist
http://stylelist.out.com/
Your guide to all things queer and hip.
Out.com | Popnography.com | Out Stylelist
Out Traveler | Out Traveler G.P.S
Advocate.com | Mr Sardonic | Election 2008
Advocate Insider | Advocate GenQ
HereTV.com | GayWired.com
Dance, Dance, Revolution
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?...
Engaging in a practice of permissive exploration, we strove to develop various formats for critical exchange that are both intellectually rigorous and playful. This intuitive and open generation of ideas, coupled with the speed and intensity necessitated by a limited creation period, propelled us towards an approach of decentralization. Not only did we as a Curation/Production group conceptualize and develop events, we also invited other artists to engage in the shaping of the festival. As a group we have nurtured a spirit of irreverence, and encouraged omni-directional experimentation throughout the festival’s framework. We offer a skeleton, a potentiality. We are excited to see where and how it will meet you. With love, Rebecca Brooks, Beth Gill, Erika Hand and Isabel Lewis. Neal Beasley was a member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company from 2003-2007. He is a graduate of Idyllwild Arts Academy and holds a BFA in dance from NYU/Tisch School of the Arts. In his newfound freelance life, he is currently scheduled to work with choreographers Beth Gill, Eleanor Bauer, and Larry Keigwin. He has taught technique and repertory internationally for TBDC, as well as in the New York studios. He directed rehearsals for Ms. Brown's creation for the Paris Opera Ballet, both in its 2004 debut and the revival earlier this year.
Arts Alive
http://www.artsalive.ca/en/dan/dance1...
The aim of ArtsAlive.ca Dance is to enhance your enjoyment of dance by providing the background and knowledge you seek. Maybe you want to learn how to assess and critique a performance; gain greater appreciation for the elements of dance on stage and off; find out who’s who in the world of dance – all this and more is at your fingertips, through ArtsAlive.ca Dance.
