Ahead of our much-anticipated Love Double Bill, cinema usher Tom Hughes sheds some light on Nagisa Oshima’s controversial and rarely-screened In the Realm of the Senses.
For the late-night instalment of our Love Double Bill, we proudly present one of the most visceral and unforgettable experiences ever made available to cinemagoers. Made available, it should be noted, by means of a long and baleful censorship history, for In the Realm of the Senses is a contender for a very special title: that of most controversial film of all time.
Now in its full, uncensored form, restored to vivid new heights of crispness and depth of colour, this film had been through many incarnations since it was first released in 1976 to the sound of bans and widespread public outcry. It also showed that year at the Cannes festival, where demand to see it was so high that 13 separate screenings had to be arranged, but the publication of the script and stills led to an obscenity trial in its native Japan. Even now, profuse and profane sexual content prevents the version we present from legally being screened in the country of origin.
Nagisa Oshima’s best-known work should not be thought of as a dramatic film that features a lot of sex scenes; it is a sexual drama that features some dialogue scenes. Sexual intercourse is the very language of the film; it is the mode of action by which the story is told, just as other films may use dialogue, fistfights, singing or gunplay. When a sex scene appears amongst those more conventional stories, its outcome is generally a foregone conclusion; all the audience needs be shown is the fact that the sex takes place, hence the familiar pattern of a passionate moment of initiation followed by the obligatory cut-away, which may be for considerations of ‘taste’, but it also for narrative reasons – unless something unexpected happens actually during intercourse, the sex scene is a boring (from a dramatic perspective) and unnecessary digression from the story. In the Realm of the Senses does not cut away, but during its long-lingering sex scenes many unexpected things do occur: characters are revealed through their sexual behaviour, the plot turns on sexual acts, and the film’s most resonant images are unveiled – all of them explicitly sexual.
Many critics are keen to disassociate the film from the label ‘pornography’. It is sufficient to say that as a serious, insightful and heartfelt work of art, its ultimate aims are far more ambitious than merely to sexually arouse the viewer, though arousal does form a part of its broad palette alongside other responses provoked, such as repulsion, laughter, grief, awe, horror, and various uncomfortable combinations of the above. All are deployed in the service of a truly original aesthetic and political vision.
Aiming to strike a blow at what he saw as Japan’s social conformism in both 1936 (where the film is set, the characters shutting out their society’s rising militarism), and 1976, (where it was shot, amid post-occupation US-brand consumerism), and against repressive mores everywhere, Oshima made In the Realm of the Senses political in subject matter; it functions as an allegory of the relationship between an oppressive state and its populace. But the film is also a political act in and of itself. By representing this relationship (all the more subversive for having actually happened,) inverting conventional gender roles, sympathetically portraying extreme S&M beyond any notion of safety, and presenting a relationship in which lovers treat each other in cruel ways, that make the senses revolt but that takes place within a realm of consent, a bubble of privacy and the moral unassailability that comes from them both entering into this dynamic as consenting adults, by thus successfully formulating an equation of intense love with destruction, Oshima achieves something very far-out: a truly challenging film.
This film contains graphic content of a sexual and violent nature.