Nagisa Oshima is universally considered the most important force in modern Japanese cinema. For his explosive mixture of radical politics, baroque style and absurdist dramatics, he has been variously called a “one-man Japanese new wave” and “the Godard of Japan” (he jokingly calls Godard “the Oshima of France”).
We are honored to welcome Nagisa Oshima tonight to discuss his films and take questions from the audience. Audie Bock will be translating for Mr. Oshima.

The Ceremony is perhaps Oshima's most ambitious essay on modern Japanese life. The chronicle of a family named Sakurada from 1946 to the present, the film's subject is nothing less than the entire history of the postwar Japanese state, which Oshima has chosen this fictional family to represent. The patriarch is the grandfather, a high ranking government official before and during the war; his son commits suicide after the war, and the son's wife returns from China with her young son, Masuo, who becomes the central character of the film, and obviously a spiritual alter ego for Oshima. All the key action takes place during ceremonies--funerals, weddings, Buddhist services-- when the strength of family tradition, and the spiritual authority of the state, are most obvious. But what starts out looking like one of those long and formal family sagas the Japanese love so well snowballs into the horror and violence of the ripest Jacobean dramas: bizarre set-pieces pile onto one another in a vertiginous indictment of the madness of contemporary Japan.