The Ceremony

A Japanese family film spread over twenty-five years. Masuo comes back from Manchuria at the end of the war. His father is dead, his brother is dead, and he arrives with his mother at his grandfather's house. The family is large. Landowning, conservative, and nobody goes against the grandfather's word. From there the film consists of ceremonies. The narrative takes place only at funerals, weddings and memorial days; the years in between are never shown. Every ceremony is staged in the same place. The same courtyard, the same seating, the same photograph, and one person fewer each time. The grandfather runs the family. He decides who marries whom and nobody objects. There is a wedding with no bride. She has not come and the ceremony is held anyway; Masuo is married to an empty cushion. That scene is the centre. The narrative states its whole argument there. His cousins are inside it too. Terumichi and Ritsuko; one leaves the house, one stays, and both arrive at the same place. What the narrative is interested in is not a family but a country: the film builds the hierarchy inside one household as postwar Japan itself and draws the grandfather directly as a political figure. The form is strict. The camera is mostly still, the framings symmetrical, and the people are lined up in ceremonial order. The colour is deliberate. The black and white of the ceremonies repeats constantly and the red that cuts in is each time a rupture. The narrative uses Japan's postwar history not as background but as a calendar; every ceremony falls on a date. Kenzō Kawarasaki, Atsuko Kaku, Atsuo Nakamura and Akiko Koyama are in the cast. Nagisa Ōshima directed and co-wrote. Who it is for: anyone who likes political Japanese cinema and formalist narrative. Who it is not for: anyone without the context; the film refers constantly to postwar Japanese politics and explains nothing.