Radley Metzger: The Auteur of Elegant Eros

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 13:00:00 +0000

If Russ Meyer was the erotic film as drive-in cartoon, Radley Metzger was the same decade’s answer in a dinner jacket. Where Meyer cut like a newsreel gunner and set his fever dreams in the dust of small-town America, Metzger built glossy widescreen comedies of manners in Italian villas, adapted French and Russian literature, filled his frames with mirrors and modern art, and treated desire as a subject for wit and sophistication. He is the great argument that the erotic film could aspire to the condition of the art house, and for a brief window in the late 1960s and early 1970s he made films that genuinely belonged there. That most people have never heard his name is one of the quieter injustices in film history.

In the Realm of the Senses: Ōshima's Art-House Provocation

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 12:00:00 +0000

In 1976 Nagisa Ōshima made a film in Japan that could not legally be shown in Japan, shipped the undeveloped negative to France to be processed, and premiered it at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, where it became the scandal of the festival. In the Realm of the Senses — Ai no korīda, literally “bullfight of love” — is the most notorious art film of the 1970s, and half a century on it remains the sharpest test case in cinema of where erotic seriousness ends and the law’s nerve fails. To write about it honestly you have to hold two things at once: that it contains unsimulated sexual content of a kind mainstream cinema had never carried, and that it is, in construction and intent, a rigorous piece of political filmmaking by one of Japan’s most intellectually combative directors.

Art-House - vo.rs

Radley Metzger: The Auteur of Elegant Eros

In the Realm of the Senses: Ōshima's Art-House Provocation