From the beginning to the end of his career, Nagisa Ōshima (1932-2013) adopted an oppositional posture to the rarefied, aristocractic culture in which he was raised. His filmmaking, especially in the 1960s, was prolific, fecund, and stylistically heterodox. Ōshima's willingness to adopt and rigorously pursue a new formal approach with each film is one of the reasons his often highly topical works have such enduring power, but it also makes it challenging to delineate his auteurial style.
     One exception to this is his treatment of color. In the text below, written during his most adversarial phase in the mid-1970s, he describes his method iconoclastically. This is also evident in his early films through the heretical juxtaposition of hedonistic and violent youth culture with icons of traditional Japan (such as Osaka Castle at the beginning of the extract from The Sun's Burial, 1960, below). Like Michelangelo Antonioni in the same period, Ōshima used architecture and environment as a way of interrogating the moral and political contradictions of the era.
     The extract from Boy (1969) shares many of the same qualities, particularly in the transition from shopping center and toy store to sea. Green is distinctly visible in the background, past the Japanese flag, but it is less striking than other details, such as the yellow cap that separates the boy from the surrounding patches of seemingly naturalistic color.