Reprint of August 1983 article

You switch on your TV set any day of the week and there’s Oshima Nagisa conversing about things sociological on a mid-day women’s program or on the panel of a “Whodunit” murder-quiz or, a few days ago, introducing the highlights of Star Wars. He even appears clad in shorts and wielding a butterfly net in a current anti-cockroach TV commercial. Ten years ago, Oshima Nagisa was the darling of dissent, the hirsute enfant terrible of the Japanese cinematic New Wave which he had virtually created in 1960. Whatever Oshima was then, it was and still is impossible to hang a label on him. His radical ideas and politically oriented films placed him in the camp of the leftists, but his Night and Fog in Japan denounced the power-hungry in-fighting and monolithic structure of Japan’s leftist factions. In a country in which everyone voluntarily ascribes to one group or other, Oshima stands alone.