Vilken film ska du se nu och varför? v2.0

But to grasp at least how Oshima situates himself, 100 Years of Japanese Cinema, the fifty-two-minute documentary he made for the British Film Institute in 1994, provides a helpful start. That he was offered this assignment at all is comical, given his oft-expressed and unyielding hatred of Japanese cinema as a whole, including his own films. He expressed this aversion in his first major interview in Cahiers du cinéma in March 1970, when he told his interlocutors that Europeans who praised Japanese cinema for its formal beauty should speak more about its content. At the time, one should note, these critics had only recently learned how to love Kurosawa in addition to Mizoguchi (whom they had championed since the ’50s), without having yet discovered Ozu or Naruse. Oshima detested all four. A quarter of a century later, offering a leftist and almost exclusively content-driven survey of his subject in 100 Years, he chose to mind his manners — even if he restricted Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Kurosawa to I Was Born, But . . . (1932), Osaka Elegy (1936), and No Regrets for Our Youth (1946), respectively, and omitted Naruse entirely.¹