![]() ![]() In his thirty-odd films, made between 19, he often uses crime to suggest society’s shortcomings. He thus bravely faces the major foe, the political system that creates a society and then, to an extent, controls it. He sometimes castigates the left as well as the right, and always assumes that it is the individual and his or her needs that must be politically addressed. He is interested in reform but rejects the social agendas that often accompany it. He wanted a politicized eroticism rather than a pornographic performance.Īll of Oshima’s films are criticisms of society and the political assumptions that form it. This wasn’t two actors trying to titillate us, as in the pink film the hard-core film Oshima was inventing would be about two real people who are titillating each other. For this it was necessary to create a manner of filming, a style that showed everything and at the same time encouraged empathy. Oshima, however, was directing a different kind of film, one that he said “broke taboos” by using eroticism not as something for its own sake, as in the “pink film,” but as a vehicle for exploring and demystifying Japanese culture and the resultant Japanese character. As the director himself has written, films such as Tanaka’s take sex as subject matter but not as theme and harmlessly inhabit the soft-core pinku eiga category, which was built to contain them. The reason that the Oshima film has experienced such difficulties in the country of its origin is that it challenges conventional Japanese opinion, and in so doing confronts and defies the political rationales that rest upon it. Equally, in Japan, two other films of the Sada Abe story, Noboru Tanaka’s A Woman Called Sada Abe (1975) and Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Sada (1998), had no distribution problems. It was shown without difficulty in France and elsewhere. An extreme example would be the aptly titled L’amour fou, Jacques Rivette’s 1968 film, where the love-maddened couple destroy not only each other but also the apartment house where they live. The story is that of two people very much in love, consumed by it-what the French call l’amour fou. She still had it when she was apprehended, and she was later convicted. ![]() Fleeing the police, she cut off and took with her the very member that had connected them. A woman named Sada Abe notoriously, if accidentally, killed her lover during the act of love itself. Consequently, though elsewhere acknowledged as a major film, now freely screened in other countries, the true work remains unknown to the Japanese audience. Though In the Realm of the Senses was made nearly thirty-five years ago, it has never been shown uncensored in Japan. Nagisa Oshima, from “Theory of Experimental Pornographic Film” (1976) Only thus can “obscenity” be rendered essentially meaningless. Pornographic cinema should be authorized, immediately and completely. Pornographic films are thus a testing ground for “obscenity,” and the benefits of pornography are clear. When that which one had wanted to see isn’t sufficiently revealed, however, the taboo remains, the feeling of “obscenity” stays, and an even greater “obscenity” comes into being. ![]() When we feel that everything has been revealed, “obscenity” disappears and there is a certain liberation. The concept of “obscenity” is tested when we dare to look at something that we desire to see but have forbidden ourselves to look at.
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