Safeguarding a Japanese Master’s Place in Film

For many critics and cinephiles who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s, Nagisa Oshima, now 76, has long held the mantle of Japan’s greatest living filmmaker. Younger viewers, for the most part, have had to take them at their word since his films are scarcely available on home video and rarely revived for repertory screenings.

With this once-towering figure almost in eclipse, it is hard to overstate the significance of “In the Realm of Oshima,” his first major retrospective in the United States in more than 20 years. The series, which runs from Saturday through Oct. 14 as part of the New York Film Festival, includes all 23 of his fiction features. Its title alludes to “In the Realm of the Senses,” a 1976 hard-core provocation and the one Oshima film whose notoriety survives.

The retrospective, which will travel to about a dozen other North American cities, is a labor of love for its curator, James Quandt of the Cinematheque Ontario, who has worked on it for 10 years, tracking down obscure print sources and negotiating a tangle of rights problems. In the context of an amnesiac film culture, it is also a heroic intervention, a bid to safeguard a master’s place in the canon.

Richard Peña, the program director at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which organized the show jointly with the Cinematheque Ontario, said he realized that a retrospective was long overdue when he taught a seminar at Columbia University a few years ago on “Cruel Story of Youth,” Mr. Oshima’s breakthrough second feature, from 1960, and found that none of his students had heard of the filmmaker.

He added that Mr. Oshima’s reputation had suffered from the increasing timidity of art-house tastes: “For a while there was a kind of hostility to the radical experiments in form that Oshima came to incarnate.”

If Mr. Oshima’s legacy now seems a bit murky, it is partly because he was, by design, a tough filmmaker to pin down. Several thematic threads run through his movies — sex, crime, an alertness to the social and political dimensions of his characters’ transgressions — but there is no stylistic signature. Mr. Oshima swerved between extremes, reshaping familiar genres (family epics, youth films) and inventing new ones (freely mixing modes like documentary realism and avant-garde surrealism), always searching for radical forms to match radical content.

Born into a family with samurai ancestry and socialist leanings, Mr. Oshima studied law at Kyoto University, where he became active in the left-wing student movement. His youthful ideals extended into his film career, and his interest in cinema as a revolutionary tool — along with his gift for acid polemics and his pop touch with political material — earned him repeated comparisons to another ’60s titan, Jean-Luc Godard. (Tired of being called Japan’s answer to Mr. Godard, Mr. Oshima suggested that Mr. Godard be considered the Oshima of France.)