The Criterion Collection has recently announced that it will release five Nagisa Oshima films on DVD as part of its Eclipse series. Pleasures of the Flesh, Violence at Noon, Sing a Song of Sex, Japanese Summer: Double Suicide, and Three Resurrected Drunkards, all dating from 1965-68, are set to be released on Mat 18, 2010. However, what’s struck me most about this announcement is not that these films are getting a long overdue DVD release in the West (although this is true), but how long it took and how many Asian films still haven’t seen an English-language or North American DVD release.

The DVD has been the dominant mode of viewing older films for over a decade now, and yet many classic Asian films are still completely unavailable on DVD and in many cases on VHS as well. The situation is especially bad when it comes to Japanese films from the 1960s, one of the most important and interesting periods in Japanese cinema.

Nagisa Oshima provides a perfect example of this unfortunate situation. Despite being critically acclaimed as a definitive voice of the Japanese New Wave and an important experimental filmmaker, shockingly little of his catalogue has so far been available in North America. The upcoming Criterion release represents a chance to change this, but even after this release many of his most important films are still going to be legally unavailable to Canadian and American consumers. The 1960s were Oshima’s breakout period, and yet most of his important films from then are still unavailable. Want to see The Sun’s Burial, his unflinching, unsentimental portrayal of an Osaka slum from 1960? Too bad. How about his Brechtian 1968 film Death by Hanging? No luck there either. The personal and political Night and Fog in Japan from 1969? Better get a region-free DVD player and an imported copy. 1969′s Diary of a Shinjuku Thief? Hah. Maybe 1967′s Band of Ninja, an experimental manga adaptation composed entirely of panels from the manga with music and sound effects? Now you’re just kidding yourself.

Oshima is hardly alone here. The other most famous Japanese New Wave director, Shohei Imamura, is also under-represented when it comes to his earlier filmography. While the Criterion Collection (beginning to see a pattern here?) did recently put out a collection of three of his sixties films (The Insect Woman, Murderous Instincts, and Pigs and Battleships) many of his other works have yet to hit our shores, and might not do so anytime soon. Films of his such as Endless Desire (1958), My Second Brother (1959), A Man Vanishes (1967), The Profound Desire of the Gods (1968), and History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (1970) are all unavailable for North American audiences.

Then there’s the case of Toshio Matsumoto’s 1969 film Funeral Parade of Roses, which has been cited as a direct influence on Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. It’s both funny and violent, highly experimental while maintaining enough pulp appeal to fill a grindhouse. The film follows Edie, a transvestite bar hostess, but rather than stick to any single track, the film swerves into fast-forward fight scenes, arguments enacted with word balloons, real interviews with the actors (many of whom are actual transvestites), guerilla street theater, Oedipal murder, and experimental bits of montage. Despite the fact that all these elements essentially make the film a wet dream for cultural academics, it’s only available in North America as an import.

This trend becomes even more frustrating when you move on from the seminal directors and films of this period to the directors who aren’t as famous. Some of these directors made New Wave films while others didn’t, but many of them were making interesting and engaging genre films in the same period as Oshima or Imamura. Unfortunately, however, even less information is available about the 1960s oeuvre of these directors. While some of their films are available here on DVD, much of their work seems destined to remain unreleased. Interested Western viewers are left with tantalizing tastes of their work, the rest of their films remaining out of reach.

For example, if Pale Flower or Samurai Spy made you curious about Masahiro Shinoda’s other 1960s films, you’re out of luck. Or take Yasuzo Masumura, who directed Giants and Toys and Blind Beast. He was a startlingly prolific filmmaker, yet films like his despairing WWII picture Hoodlum Soldier are still unavailable in North America. Same goes for Kihachi Okamoto, the director of Kill! and Sword of Doom, whose cynical films such as the anti-war thriller Desperate Outpost or black comedy Age of Assassins seem unlikely to get released here anytime soon. Hideo Gosha, director of Sword of the Beast and Goyokin, is yet another director who could certainly do with more Region 1 releases. Kon Ichikawa, the celebrated director of films such as Tokyo Olympiad and The Burmese Harp, has a robust collection of films from the 1950s and 60s that are totally unavailable. Even a well-represented director such as Seijun Suzuki has intriguing gaps in his oeuvre such as The Flower and the Angry Waves. Many of these directors took on Japanese society with their films, sometimes looking directly back at the war that they had lived through. Many of their films embody a kind of national reevaluation, yet this fascinating process has been closed off from us due to lack of availability.

This problem isn’t at all unique to Japanese films of the 1960s, but this is a good example of how even while the period has some representation in the North American DVD market, many films are still missing. Those of us who are interested in these films, like those who are interested in any number of other foreign films from different genres and time periods, are left to sigh while watching trailers for inaccessible films on youtube, or be driven to piracy (assuming that one can even find the films one wants on file-sharing programs). Piracy combined with declining DVD sales means we may be in for a long wait before these films reach North America. Still, there seems to be a market for older Asian films, even if it is a niche one, so one can still hope for more releases. And companies such as the Criterion Collection deserve commendation for bringing both important and entertaining works over to the North American market. The release of these Oshima films is heartening news, but it’s worth remembering that there’s still a long way to go.

by Aaron Fox-Lerner