In 1982, iconoclast filmmaker Nagisa Oshima travelled to Aotearoa and Rarotonga to shoot Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, a World War II POW camp film set in Indonesia and South Africa, and Oshima’s first film made outside Japan. The shooting period was 45 days, with actual filming taking place on 34 days. Although perhaps a minor film in Japan, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence was one of the first international films made in New Zealand during a fouryear tax shelter period, and employed many burgeoning local filmmakers, including Larry Parr and Lee Tamahori.
As a young man, Nagisa Oshima had been deeply involved with fûkeiron ("landscape theory"), a film and photography movement which sought to represent Japan's political repression by imaging the banal urban landscapes Japanese citizens inhabit day by day. Fûkeiron grew out of Japan’s student protests in the late 1960s. Filmmakers, photographers and critics, including Oshima, Matsuda Masao, Masao Adachi and Takuma Nakahira, argued that the political reality of the Japanese people could not be sufficiently communicated through the stories of individual leftists. Instead, the camera must be trained on the urban landscapes everyday people inhabit, reading these offices, apartment blocks, public parks, highways, train tracks and hotels as — in the words of activist-writer Tsumara Takashi — “texts of state power”.
Fûkeiron took root in Japan’s reconstruction following the Second World War, however the framework it proposes for interrogating urban identity and political repression resonates with the economic inequality and infrastructural collapse of today’s Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. My project The Oshima Gang focuses on sites in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland featured in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, including King's College, the Domain Wintergardens, Mount Eden Prison and the historic Auckland Railway Station. What can these institutions, constructed between the 1850s and 1930, and in varied stages of current use, tell us about Aotearoa's post-colonial political identity? How might Oshima's external gaze decipher the psychological effects inscribed into our urban landscapes?
These three photographs of King’s College, the Wintergardens and Railway Station are each taken within these institutions’ grounds. They required permission, and in some cases payment, to photograph. Each subject is framed from afar. Two of the photographs include specific sites framed in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, although in neither is this site immediately recognisable — the past forty years have involved significant renovations, especially to the Railway Station. The Railway Station concourse where David Bowie was once strung up and shot at by a firing squad is now a shared kitchen for the Railway Apartments.
In Tokyo this September, I met Naofumi Higuchi, a director and critic who knew and worked with Oshima for 35 years. I asked him, through a translator, whether Japanese audiences who watched Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence when it first came out believed they were looking at the real Indonesia, rather than a crudely dressed up Auckland. He replied that they had no reason not to believe, as at that time it was very uncommon for Japanese people to take time off work to travel overseas.
For Oshima, Higuchi continued, filming in Auckland was irrelevant, as he intended to dress the sets up to obscure anything that wouldn't read as Java. The focus for Oshima was not the place but the people, and the theme of conflict between two individuals who live by their own beliefs and codes of conduct.
Oshima, and his cast and crew, did not set out to describe Auckland, yet they do so nonetheless — the irrelevance of Auckland makes the film a compelling portrait of this city. Director Masao Adachi said about his film A.K.A Serial Killer, which follows the trail of serial killer Norio Nagayama, “I began to realise that Nagayama’s unique landscape and my unique landscape were part of the same landscape, in short, it wasn’t that we were seeing landscape, but rather we were being seen by the landscapes we were trying to film.” How did Oshima look at the city I live in, and how did the city look back at him? Can Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence be considered a “landscape theory” film, if only for New Zealand viewers?
→ Exhibition text by Theo Macdonald
About the artist
Theo Macdonald is an Aotearoa New Zealand artist whose work integrates still and moving documentary photography with a gothic iconography to record and critique public expressions of militarism, personal memory and national identity.
He has exhibited widely in New Zealand and overseas, in solo and group exhibitions. In 2023, Macdonald completed a Master of Visual Arts at Auckland’s AUT University, where he investigated approaches to imaging what he defines as "military imperialism" in Aotearoa, focusing on the local presence of the space company Rocket Lab.