Oshima had a debilitating stroke at a British airport over a decade ago, but went on to make the immensely popular Gohatto, assisted by his son. We had already fallen out of touch, but I became determined that another retrospective of his films was needed to ensure that his work would not slip from view here – very little is available on DVD and almost none is in North American distribution – and, prodded by Haden Guest of Harvard Film Archive and Donald Richie, renewed the project that, as I was often told last fall in Tokyo, “has been tried by many people without success. You will need luck.” My invaluable colleagues at The Japan Foundation, the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute, and Janus Films provided more than luck and forbore my psychotic persistence with gracious patience. Our debt to them is immense, for here are films that radically remake not only one’s sense of cinema but one’s sense of the world.  – James Quandt

The Oshima Tour

Cinematheque Ontario will tour the Oshima retrospective to the following North American venues from September 2008 - June 2009: New York Film Festival; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge; Pacific Cinematheque, Vancouver; Gene Siskel Film Centre, Art Institute of Chicago; American Cinematheque and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Northwest Film Center, Seattle; Cleveland Cinematheque; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; National Gallery of Art, American Film Institute, and American Film Institute & Freer Gallery, Washington D.C.; George Eastman House, Rochester; College of Moving Images, Santa Fe; Madison Cinematheque; Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley.

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ESSENTIAL OSHIMA

Inspired by the list “Essential Oshima: 10 Key Films from the Director of Gohatto,” appended to Asian film specialist Chuck Stephens’ rave review for Gohatto in Film Comment (November - December 2000) and included here minus its annotations, we canvassed a number of Oshima authorities – film historians