ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author considers the cinema of Oshima Nagisa in relation to the concept of the public sphere; Oshima Nagisa has clearly sought to fashion his cinema as a site of interrogatory and oppositional discourse connected to the idea of the public sphere. A portion of the public sphere comes into being in every convention in which private individuals assemble to form a public body. The author examines Jurgen Habermas's notion of the public sphere, and draws attention to the strengths and weaknesses as well as the heuristic usefulness of the concept. He discusses Oshima Nagisa's cinema as constituting an important site of contestation related to the public sphere. The author focuses on the films of the Taiwan director Hou Hsiao-hsien, who is emerging as a highly gifted and influential Asian filmmaker. He utilizes Hou's work to assess the strengths and weaknesses and the innovations and capitulations of Oshima's films.
