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.

In the Realm of the Senses - vo.rs

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