Here are some excerpts from critic Freda Freiberg. If you wish to read the entire article, just google In the Realm of the Senses and look for "The Unkindest cut of all." It will provide some excellent insights into this film. As far as some scenes being unneccesary sex, apparently most of you must be getting laid way too often! IN THE REALM OF THE CENSORS.
If the various titles of the film were designed to tempt, tease and titillate a variety of audiences, through a kind of insider trading in dominant cultural myths, the film's full frontal nudity and graphic depiction of pubic hair were designed to provoke and affront the Japanese censors. They constituted an in-your-face attack on Japanese censorship laws, which allowed graphic representations of violence, including rape, but forbad the explicit display of sexual organs and pubic hair. This taboo originated in the Meiji era and was connected to the campaign of the Japanese state to be accepted by the Western powers as a modern civilized state. Prior to the so-called Meiji Restoration, the pornography industry flourished in the cities of Osaka and Edo (the old name of Tokyo) both in literature and art. So sexual Puritanism was allied with national imperialism and the abuses/excesses of state power in the minds of New Left and libertarian Japanese social critics, artists and intellectuals, who regarded flouting the censorship laws as an attack on the state, a radical political act.
Early in Oshima's film, Sada is propositioned by an impotent old man. She responds by flaunting her pubic hair; he desperately masturbates himself but his penis remains limp. It is tempting to read this scene as a malicious attack on the old guys in the government censorship offices who designated pubic hair obscene throughout the 20th century.
The film was not screened in Japan in an uncut version until this year. Not only was the film deemed obscene, but the publisher of a book of stills from the film was charged with obscenity. Oshima, who studied law at the prestigious Kyoto University before taking up filmmaking, ridiculed the notion of obscenity at the trial, with some fine hair-splitting, but concluded sagely with the pronouncement that the obscene is what cannot be seen; once something is seen, it is no longer obscene. That is, it is a matter of law, not morality.
The film is set in 1936 and is based on an actual historical event, referred to in the end titles. But reports of this sensational event were suppressed at the time; when NHK newsreaders began to report it, the government censors cut off NHK radio transmission. The militarism and ultranationalism of the time intrude into the film in only one brief scene when Kichi (the star stud temporarily AWL from sexual service) goes for a walk in the street, oblivious of a passing military parade cheered on by flag-waving youngsters. It is hard to read this scene in political terms, even harder to see it as a political protest. Kichi is so self-absorbed, so pre-occupied with his private life, that he has no interest in the public sphere; therefore he cannot function as an active political agent. One may read the scene as saying that if young men devoted their energies to making love, they would not be interested in going to war. But it could equally be saying that total immersion in private life is politically irresponsible for it precludes political activism. Maybe the scene is included just to remind viewers that this was the time of militant nationalism and imperialism, and that the behaviour of Sada and Kichi was aberrant, transgressive of dominant values but quite beyond public concerns. If one gives attention to Kichi's body language, one notes that here he is dejected and brooding, not at all proud or confident, offering no optimistic alternative to militarism. He is in another world altogether. It is not necessarily posited as a better world, for he will soon voluntarily embrace his fate as will the young soldiers, will give his life for the satisfaction of a stronger power, the desire of a woman. Like the soldiers, he is destined for death.
But in general the film does celebrate the pleasures and varieties of sexual intercourse. It does so by drawing on the artistic heritage of the pornographic Japanese wood-block print of the Edo era (17th - 19th century), known as shunga. The debt is evident in the close-up focus on sexual organs in states of arousal and in coition, surrounded by colourful expanses of kimono fabrics; in the staging of the sexual event as a beautiful composition; in the athletic contortions of the lovers; in the constant presence of onlookers and intruders (serving women, inn-keepers, geisha); in the encyclopaedic variety of sexual positions and acts (horizontal, vertical; him on top, her on top; vaginal sex, anal sex, oral sex; lesbian sex, group sex, sado-masochistic sex; masturbation and auto-eroticism; savouring of genital fluids; violation by penis and by dildo). The film cannot reproduce the fantastically inflated size of the sexual organs in the prints, but makes use of the close-up shot in its place; and the lovers' conversations are spoken instead of being decoratively added to the scene, above or below the lovers, in cursive calligraphy.
When I began my research on the Edo woodblock prints, in the mid '70s, shunga prints were only available to male collectors in under-the-counter sales. The British Museum had a collection, as did other European and American museums and galleries, but you did not see them displayed in public, either in Japan or abroad. The scholarly specialist print journals in Japan used to reproduce them with large excisions, all whited out, in the places where the genitals and pubic hair should have been.
In the mid '70s, when this film was produced, it created a storm of controversy, and encountered censorship problems in several countries, not just Japan. Its explicit treatment of sexual intercourse and its bloody castration scene outraged and disturbed viewers brought up on Hays Code morality. It was an international sensation, provoking packed houses and lively debate at the 1976 Melbourne Film Festival.
Now, 25 years later, its re-release in the original uncut version has passed almost unnoticed by viewers in Melbourne, despite the plaudits of film critics. It has become a classic, but not a cult classic apparently. That is the unkindest cut of all. The public's lack of interest serves to remind us of all those clichés about yesterday's sensation and the ephemerality of fame. Saddest of all is the evident lack of interest in challenging cinema, cinema that challenges the viewer aesthetically, politically, emotionally and intellectually. Oshima at his prime was one of the few filmmakers in the history of cinema to produce such cinema.
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© Freda Freiberg, January 2001
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