The Ceremony

The Ceremony (1971) is one of Nagis Oshima's finest films and it is also very representative of Oshima's overall body of work. Shohei Imamura famously said that he was a country farmer and Oshima was a samurai. Imamura was trying to get at the root of what it means to be Japanese by portraying common people-especially women, who live and endure despite the calamities of life. Oshima has a much more cerebral approach in which characters often represent aspects of Japanese society: the nationalists, the communists,etc. Also, it can be seen as the history of Japan from the end of the second world war to the present day, represented by a large and influential family. Each stage is marked by a specific ceremony such as an anniversary, a wedding or a funeral, exposing Oshima's deeply ambivalent attitude to Japanese society. Furthermore, Oshima in his iconoclastic role reveals several incestuous relationships within the family that are meant to keep power and wealth within the family, that can also be seen in the protectionist practices in Japanese society. The family is ruled by an ex-war crimes patriarch the grandfather, played by Kei Sato. The heir to the family ends up being Masuo (Kenzo Kawarasaki) by a process of elimination. Masuo’s flashbacks and present-time experiences allow us to view the fortunes of the Sakurada family, to which Masuo belongs, and all this in turn reflects on postwar Japanese history: such is the ambitious intent of Nagisa Oshima’s Gishiki. Masuao was born in Manchuria and has sought escape in baseball, which he is compelled to leave behind to take over the family business. It is a complex and convoluted film, one that in fact ends in the brief, fleeting present-time coda to one of Masuo’s childhood flashbacks—to a baseball game he sees but can no longer enter.