Theo Macdonald
The Oshima Gang
3 September – 11 October 2025
The Oshima Gang is an experimental documentary that revisits five colonial-era institutions featured in the 1983 World War II film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence: Auckland Railway Station, King’s College, Auckland Council Chambers, Mount Eden Prison, and the Auckland Domain Wintergardens.
Layering contemporary Super 8 footage of these sites with archival text and raw production sound from the original 1982 shoot, The Oshima Gang invites viewers to consider postcolonial identity in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland; to reflect on how outsiders perceive this landscape, and how locals, too, might be made to feel like outsiders within it. The film treats Auckland’s preserved, decaying, and repurposed colonial architecture as a malleable text, open to interpretation and critique.
The project’s methods are informed by Fûkeiron (“Landscape Theory”), a short-lived radical film movement that emerged in Japan following the collapse of the 1960s student protests. Rejecting human subjects entirely, Fûkeiron proposed that the oppressive structures of the urban environment best reveal the political and psychological conditions of contemporary life.
Accompanying The Oshima Gang is Tokyo Landscape War Memorial, a shot-for-shot remake of a pivotal sequence from the 1970 film The Man Who Left His Will on Film – the principal contribution to Fûkeiron by Nagisa Oshima, director of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.
By placing these historical ideas and documents in dialogue with the present, this exhibition looks to the lessons of the late 1960s to examine how we might represent and record this current moment in New Zealand history, a time defined by rising militarism, Western bloc violence, urban neglect, and widespread institutional failure.
Special thanks to:
Auckland Festival of Photography
Auckland Council & Mandi Gamley
King’s College & Cara McCarthy
Grand Central Serviced Apartments
Screen Auckland & Karen Ngawhika
Lindsay Shelton
Mike Westgate and Justin Westgate
Naofumi Higuchi
Roger Pulvers
Images by Jude Stevens