In the spring of 1936, Abe Sada strangled her lover Ishida Kichizo during erotic strangulation games and severed his penis, which she then carried around in her handbag. The case became a morbid sensation and was used artistically several times in Japan. Nagisa Oshima notorious film adaptation of the event achieved almost as much scandalous status as the act itself.
Above all, the erotic drama In the Realm of the Senses also made waves internationally – including on our doorstep when the film premiered at the Berlinale last year Confiscated by the public prosecutor in 1976 became.
In the realm of the senses: Scandalous art film, pornography or both?
Motivated by the BZ headline “The Greatest Porn of All Time,” the public prosecutor’s office and police attended the Berlinale screening and confiscated the film, which was labeled “hard pornography.” And in fact you won’t miss anything in In the Realm of the Senses when Eiko Matsuda and her co-star Tatsuya Fuji are in unsimulated sex scenes absorb themselves in their roles until their (then simulated) death. But Oshima is not just any dirty guy, but one of the biggest names in the Japanese Nouvelle Vague – socially critical filmmakers who took a reckoning with society and explored the limits of the art form.
Film journalists attested that the film was in the slipstream of confiscation “high artistic quality as well as important political and aesthetic insights”while the film rating agency even gave it the rating “particularly valuable” awarded. A lot of this can be found, among other things, in the book No Youth Approval! Film censorship in West Germany 1949 – 1990 * read by Jürgen Kniep (via Wikipedia).
After the Grand Criminal Chamber also agreed in 1977 that it was In the Realm of the Senses no pornography the film was finally released in cinemas nationwide the following year. In other countries, too, the film was either banned or shown with strong artistic compromises. This was also the case in his home country of Japan, where the director even got into legal trouble.
Even more scandal films:
A scandalous filmmaker has to go to court for his art
In the realm of the senses, the film was initially only released in Japan in a heavily censored version with blurred scenes. Filmmaker Nagisa Oshima then had to go to court because of an accompanying book for the film, which included, among other things, scenes. He said the following sentence on the witness stand before he was acquitted:
Nothing depicted is obscene. What is hidden is obscene.
A lot has happened since then: in the realm of the senses is now considered… sensual, transgressive masterpiecewhich has been available in a largely uncut version since the 2010s at the latest. With certain cuts, which were approved by Oshima himself, these are, according to editing reports, available as a so-called producer’s cut.
The film cannot be streamed in Germany, but Concorde has released a home cinema release in a double pack with Oshima’s follow-up film In the Realm of Passion on DVD and Blu-ray.
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