Outlaw's Art Dept.

On the eve of the release of that long-awaited Nagisa Oshima box set from Criterion, a long and marvelously detailed essay about the four films in the set.

Oshima’s forty-year career, beginning in 1959 and ending in 1999, was that of an outsider. A theorist and critic as much as a director, Oshima, writes scholar Maureen Turim, “saw film as an activist intervention.” Naturally, this iconolast found it difficult to function within a studio system, and the titles gathered in this set hail from the period, in the midsixties, when he had just broken away from those strictures and started producing his films independently.

I'm still jonesing for the possibility that the novel Pleasures of the Flesh was based on (by, of all people, ninja-action master Fūtaro Yamada) will be translated into English, although it's a long shot.