A Panoramic View of Japanese Director's Dark Genius

In 1976, the Japanese director Nagisa Oshima released a pornographic film called "In the Realm of the Senses" that was as shocking for its psychological subtlety and gentle melancholy as it was for its hard-core sex. Seven years later, he released another film, "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence," set during World War II, starring David Bowie as an ethereally beautiful prisoner in a homoerotically charged Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. The notoriety of the first film, and the star power of the second, made these two color features the sum total of his work in most mental dictionaries.

But Oshima didn't earn the label "greatest living Japanese director" based on these two films alone. There was another label, "the Japanese Godard" that also stuck to him, based on his tightly wrought, nervous and passionately sharp-edged films from the 1960s, when he seemed to reinvent himself with every new project, defining the spirit of the Japanese new wave.

Oshima, who is alive but incapacitated by a stroke, is the subject of a richly rewarding six-week festival, spread among the National Gallery, the Freer and Sackler galleries and the AFI Silver Theatre. The series, which began yesterday, is a reliable bet for audiences: Oshima's craftsmanship, his eye, his narrative sense and the relentless seriousness of his work make any one of these films worth a look. For critics, however, the festival is harder work. Because Oshima refused to be pinned down, to work in a consistent style, to allow himself to be confined by any simple summary of his vision.

First-timers to Oshima might want to start with this admittedly simpleminded shorthand: "In the Realm of the Senses" was his most infamous film; "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence," one of his most engaging; "Violence at Noon," one of the most visually transcendent; "Cruel Story of Youth," his most celebrated; "Night and Fog in Japan," his most important and respected; "The Sun's Burial," one of his darkest and most distinctive; "Japanese Summer: Double Suicide," one of his most overtly Brechtian and experimental. The list goes on, and very few people have seen them all.

To explain Oshima, most critics revert to history, plotting his work against the traumas of postwar Japan. Oshima was a committed leftist and deeply engaged with both the street protests over Japan's 1960 defense pact with the United States, which pushed the country definitively toward alliance with the West and capitalism, and the increasingly globalized youth culture spreading from the United States. It was a do-or-die moment for the left, and the protests were vehement and violent. They were also unsuccessful. To be on the left was to feel desperate, betrayed and impotent.

That critical year, 1960, was a watershed for Oshima, who had one of the greatest bursts of cinematic creativity of any director in history. He released three films, all of them essential. "Cruel Story of Youth" was a "Sun Tribe" film (the label referenced a 1955 novel about violent, sex-addled youths), which follows a precocious young woman in a desperate affair with a petty hoodlum. Together, they shake down older men for money and live by the basic code of new wave alienation: If you have nothing, you have nothing to lose.

If "Cruel Story of Youth" was about the street, "The Sun's Burial" was about the gutter. Also made in 1960, it follows a violent but petty gang battle in a shanty town, and it broached the lingering bitterness about World War II, the atavistic craving for the old empire, and disaffection with the new dog-eat-dog economy. It is one of the saddest and harshest of his films, perhaps because unlike the relatively pampered youth of "Cruel Story," the people in "Sun's Burial" truly have nothing to lose.

But it is "Night and Fog in Japan," Oshima's formal triumph, that dealt with the politics of 1960 most directly. The film begins with a wedding, which is torn apart as friends, comrades and rivals from the youth movement open old wounds and rehash the failure of their movement. From platitudinous wishes for the happy couple to platitudinous political slogans, the film breaks down the left into its perennial types: the purists, the pacifists, the Stalinists, the idealists, the poets, the philosophers and the opportunists. In a series of daringly long single takes, the camera moves about the room, picking faces out of the dark, as members of the wedding party explore past mistakes, failings and crimes. It is a dark symphony of acrimony -- literally, because one of Oshima's most compelling talents is his astonishingly powerful use of music, which often functions as a lyrical counterpoint to emotional humiliation.

"Night and Fog" is also, in a metaphorical way, a family film, related to the great family dramas of Oshima's predecessors in Japanese cinema. To understand the impact of any of these three seminal early works, one needs to understand the previous generation of Japanese directors such as Yasujiro Ozu (subject of a similar retrospective in Washington five years ago) and Kenji Mizoguchi. Oshima is seemingly the anti-Ozu, offering violence and social dissolution where Ozu saw the power of family and tradition. Oshima wields a hand-held camera with nervous intensity where Ozu favored a transcendently still, spare and lingering style. Oshima was the radical, in violent argument with filmmakers such as Ozu, who by the early 1960s, was accused of having lapsed into hermetic conservativism, perhaps even a dangerous return to the old, hierarchical, imperialist ethos of prewar Japan.

Oshima once said, "My hatred of Japanese cinema includes absolutely all of it." And yet he couldn't quite abandon the humanistic films of the earlier generation. Love happens in Oshima, even if he punishes it severely. Beauty happens, wrapped up in the same forms that Ozu used -- compare the hauntingly grim factories of "Sun's Burial" with those of Ozu's "An Inn in Tokyo" -- even if such scenes are fleeting. Good and decent people are scattered through Oshima's work like lost shepherds in a landscape painting, defined by small spots of bright paint.

Oshima resisted the idea of style. He was interested in the political and social world, engaged in a lifelong critique of Japanese society, its prejudices, its feudal tendencies, its debilitating submission to tradition. "The greatest barrier to development in Japan has always been our family system," he said in 1995. Over his career, he would attack the family in all its forms: the nuclear family, the extended family of the left and, in films such as "Death by Hanging" (about anti-Korean bigotry in Japan), the larger family of Japanese society.

Still, there is more connective tissue in the body of his work than mere contrariness. Oshima's films may be bred from anger, but they aren't angry films, at least not in the sense of impotent, formless, raging anger. Many of his films center on a crime and the pursuit of its cause, meaning and consequences. Indeed, crime is elemental to the way Oshima thinks about society, which often seems woven of interlocking threads of crime, from top to bottom.

It's dangerous, given Oshima's own resistance to any label, to suggest one. He never liked being called the "Japanese Godard" and suggested that Godard should be called the "Japanese Oshima." But there is a recurring sense in his work that he was interested in the dynamics of the love-hate relationship -- the volatility of both emotions, their ability to morph into each other. "In the Realm of the Senses" was considered a radical departure for Oshima, for its sheer prettiness and its obsession with sex. But it was also another exploration of the danger that stalks any passionate love -- for people or politics or society. That is, in essence, the position of Oshima the social critic, filled with passionate ambivalence, in love and hate with his cinematic ancestors, his history and his countrymen.

"In the Realm of Oshima," at the National Gallery, the AFI Silver Theatre and the Freer and Sackler Galleries, continues through April 26. For more information go to http://www.nga.gov, http://www.asia.si.edu or http://AFI.com/silver.