General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Ceremony (儀式)

The Ceremony (儀式, Gishiki) is a 1971 Japanese drama film directed by Nagisa Ōshima that tells the history of postwar Japan through the weddings and funerals of a single upper-class family, the Sakurada clan. Produced by Ōshima's company Sōzōsha in partnership with the Art Theatre Guild (ATG) as ATG's tenth-anniversary film, it is regarded as one of the most subversive works of the Japanese New Wave and won Best Film at the Kinema Junpo Awards.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director / year	Nagisa Ōshima, 1971, Japan¹
Japanese release	June 5, 1971; distributed by ATG⁴^•⁵
Production	Sōzōsha = ATG, made as ATG's tenth-anniversary commemorative film²
Key crew	Screenplay: Tsutomu Tamura, Mamoru Sasaki, Ōshima; music: Tōru Takemitsu; cinematography: Tōichirō Narushima⁵
Lead cast	Kenzō Kawarasaki (Masuo), Atsuko Kaku (Ritsuko), Kei Satō (the grandfather Kazuomi), Atsuo Nakamura (Terumichi)⁶
Awards	Kinema Junpo Best Film; Best Actor (Kei Satō), Best Director, and Best Screenplay; Mainichi awards for screenplay, score, and sound⁷
Runtime	Listed as 123 minutes by most sources; the National Film Archive of Japan's print record gives 121 minutes and Janus Films 125 minutes¹^•⁸^•⁹

Spoilers

Story and structure

The film follows Masuo (Kenzō Kawarasaki), the surviving heir of the traditional Sakurada family, who is trapped in a suffocating cycle of weddings and funerals in which ritual overrides meaning. Born in Huludao in northeast China, Masuo is returned to Japan alongside his mother once World War Two ends, and he witnesses his country rebuild after the war as his family comes apart. As the ceremonies unfold with increasing absurdity, a chronicle of heartbreak, taboos, and obsessive nationalism emerges.¹

The frame story sends Masuo and his cousin Ritsuko to the island where their relative Terumichi lives, after a telegram announces his imminent death; during the crossing Masuo remembers the family's history.¹⁰ The family's past is told through a series of flashbacks in which twisted relationships and impossible filiations are revealed, and the ceremonies shown are dated from 1947 to 1971, a span of roughly 25 years.⁷^•¹¹ The clan is headed by the grandfather Kazuomi (Kei Satō), a former bureaucrat and once-convicted war criminal who has been rehabilitated, ruling over a complicated web of half-brothers and sisters born to his wife and several concubines.¹²

Themes

The National Film Archive of Japan's program note describes the film as a summation of Ōshima's work, called "Ōshima's premature summation of postwar democracy." Through the ceremonial occasions of an old family headed by the rehabilitated war criminal grandfather, it exposes the postwar generation oppressed by patriarchy and the reality of the Japanese ie (household) system that underlay the nation's politics.² The Criterion Channel describes the clan's attempts to maintain an outward veneer of respectability as masking a pathological history of incest, xenophobic nationalism, failure, and humiliation, with the decline portrayed through a procession of weddings and funerals that work as a rejoinder to the conventions of the Japanese family melodrama.³

War songs, drunken chants, and allusions to the American occupation underscore a society struggling to redefine itself, and the film draws parallels between national identity and familial authority, mirroring the rise and collapse of militaristic Japan.¹ Ōshima himself said the film was a continuation of his personal idea that he wanted to die, and that of all his films it was the closest to his life.¹⁰

Production and release

The screenplay was written jointly by Tsutomu Tamura and Mamoru Sasaki, who had worked with Ōshima on Boy and The Man Who Left His Will on Film, together with the director.⁵^•¹³ The score is by Tōru Takemitsu, described by the Film Society of Lincoln Center as quintessentially modernist.⁵^•¹¹ Production cooperation came from Daiei's Kyoto studio, and the film was shot in color on 35mm.⁸

The film opened in Japan on June 5, 1971.⁴ In 1972 it opened a two-week retrospective of Ōshima's work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on April 20, when the director made his first visit to the United States and appeared in person; MoMA's press release described the film as a chronicle of a Japanese family from the end of World War II to the present, observed by the camera only on ceremonial days.¹⁴ It was later shown at the 56th New York Film Festival in 2018, and a new HD restoration was released on home video in France in 2015.¹¹^•¹⁰

Reception and legacy

The film was awarded Best Film at the Kinema Junpo Awards, and the Cinémathèque québécoise also lists Kinema Junpo awards for Best Actor (Kei Satō), Best Director, and Best Screenplay, as well as Mainichi Film Awards for Best Screenplay, Best Film Score, and Best Sound Recording.¹^•⁷ Contemporary Japanese commentary placed it in the aftermath of the failed 1970 security-treaty protests, reading it as an expression of the progressive camp's frustration with Japan's entrenched conservative social structure.¹⁵

Later assessments have kept it among Ōshima's most ambitious films. The Harvard Film Archive program calls it an indictment of the Japanese family, and the Criterion Channel ranks it among the director's greatest and most subversive works.¹⁶^•³ It remains in distribution through Janus Films and streams on the Criterion Channel.⁹^•⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1970s › Released 1970 to 1974

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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