Synopsis
Oshima’s magisterial epic, centering on the ambivalent surviving heir of the Sakurada clan, uses ritual and the microcosm of the traditional family to trace the rise and fall of militaristic Japan across several decades.
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The Ceremony
Cast
Director
Producers
Writers
Editor
Cinematography
Art Direction
Composer
Sound
Studios
Country
Language
Alternative Titles
Gishiki, Seremonia, La cerimonia, Gishiki (La ceremonia), La Cérémonie, 仪式, Cerimônia Solene, 의식, Die Zeremonie
Genre
Releases by Date
Theatrical
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Japan
07 Feb 1974
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USA
Releases by Country
Japan
18 May 1971
- Theatrical
USA
07 Feb 1974
- Theatrical
Popular reviews
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Nagisa Oshima’s The Ceremony is a chilling, familial saga about the wealthy and politically powerful Sakurada clan that acts as an acerbic, pitch-black commentary on postwar Japanese society. The film heavily borrows the tone and aesthetic style of Oshima’s ‘60s output, specifically that of Night and Fog in Japan as it uses long takes and wide tracking shots as well as a massive cast of interesting characters many of whom starred in his previous movies. Every frame exudes of dramatic lighting and the highly theatrical staging suggests a story on par with Greek tragedy. This is remarkable through and through and I find it as a major work by one of cinema’s most audacious talents.
The film is broken up…
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A bustling funeral and an empty wedding, Oshima makes a very conceptual and esoteric film. The composition is very sharp on still images. The highlight of every ritual is taken using this beauty. The void that emerges from the turbidity of movement is a structurally wonderful device, the whole film is very comfortable with the empty space and the placement of the characters within the frame.
Final Score : 88% 🍎 -
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Like the motif of dissonant orchestra swells cutting right as the sound peaks, Ōshima's The Ceremony is an exercise in elegance and unsettling power, wielded like a weapon across the screen.
A sprawling tale of a family that is as bleak as it is dizzying in its dark complexities. Told through the point of view of Masuro, we leap through his narrated flashbacks all centred around weddings and funerals. The core toxin of this drama is the generations of incest, like a tree growing in on itself and revealing a blackened bark that tarnishes the souls of each kin. The grandfather, played by the always great Kei Satô, looms over the entire clan like the origin of the poison that…
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Japanese family (and by extension society) rotten away and blowing up by Oshima through every formal exploration he find fits. The meeting between the large canvas and the formal autopsy becoming the movie point. It is in many ways the end of the line of Oshima 60s film work and it makessense that after one other little seen film, he took some time off before slight reconceiving his preocupations for the back half of his career.
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"I'm a country farmer. Nagisa Ôshima is samurai."
Shôhei ImamuraI believe I'll always prefer Imamura's messy, spontaneously excessive portrayals of the living dregs. They feel real; existing and breathing even beyond the edges of the frame. Ôshima's intellectualized characters resemble trouble codes in human form. Having written that, even I cannot deny the scathing power of "The Ceremony". It has to be one of the gnarliest, most resentful, and blisteringly unapologetic political films that I have ever seen. A seppuku blade as the only medicine remaining for a metastasized society.
And this Takemitsu score is one of his greatest ever! A dissonant, thousandfold dread washing over the ghostly voices of the earth. Or were they always an evil fantasy? -
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You are cordially invited to attend the death of a country, fittingly torn between baseball and skulls--lots of skulls.
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“You have to tell the truth about your country, whatever it is.” - Nagisa Oshima
By focusing on Ceremonies, Oshima is targeting Japans self-image. It is at ceremonies where appearances are carefully constructed to give off the right impressions. A nations self-image, in the eyes of its nationalists, is always a product of carefully and deliberately constructed stories and the rituals that reinforce them publicly. The ceremonies in this film hide their artificiality, emptiness, and a general oppression that simmers just below the surface through careful attention to appearances and a faithful adherence to the families rigid structures.
The Sakurada clan is an effective allegory for Japans highly patriarchal and militarist society. It is claustrophobic, oppressive, artificial, psychologically invasive, and plagued…
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Even for Nagisa Ōshima this feels perverse.
Over the course of decades, a wealthy, powerful family is exposed as a self-perpetuating, closed circuit of cruelty and degeneracy. Incest, murder, suicide, betrayals: the usual stuff. By focussing on funerals and a wedding, Ōshima underlines the repetition in ritual and its centrality to Japanese life, despite diminishing results.
During the film's sex scenes, you might find yourself repeatedly confused: Wait, is that his aunt? Aren't those two cousins? Is that her brother? No one in the world of the story seems to care, as long as the family persists.
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I understand why some people want to kill, but there are also those who want to die.
or: If he's gone mad he's hopeless in or out of the coffin.
Almost terminally humorless until suddenly the sad starts seeming funny — while also somehow remaining deeply depressing. Oshima's masterstroke as ever is the transmogrifying of a vision of utter nihilism and hopelessness into an almost profound, yearning plea for compassion, just by means of being uncompromising in his portrayal of human immorality. I say that's a "masterstroke" because I can't think of any other filmmaker who's really succeeded in maintaining a sense of sincerity, and largely avoided the pitfalls of exploitation, while working-out that particular contrast. And while taken on…
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Mostly I like the idea of a family so aware of its rottenness its members kill themselves off for the greater national good. Has moments of "prettiness," which seemed rather conventionally/successfully stunning — the family returning home from Manchuria as smoke blows across the plains — but I gather such classicist gestures are parodic. Dig the drunken singing at Isamu's wedding, like an anti-Terence Davies, with ideological songs tearing families apart rather than bringing them together.