When we feel that everything has been revealed, “obscenity” disappears and there is a certain liberation. As Oshima later wrote in Theory of Experimental Pornographic Film: "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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Oshima's own explanation of the obscenity, however, and his defence of it, if you want to frame it in those terms, is a very common argument among transgressive artists for doing what they do. Oshima was even hauled up on obscenity charges over it. If that sounds rather obscene, then you'd not be the only one who has thought that of the film. The film is available uncensored in most parts of the world now, but not in Japan, and that's because of one particularly notorious scene where Abe's lover takes an egg and puts it inside of her in its entirety. Early on it's tame enough stuff - standard oral sex (complete with the result) and the like - but as the film gets closer to its climax the sex games that Abe and her lover play certainly go places. Oshima decided to show this on film through a lot of unsimulated sex - in fact all the sex scenes were unsimulated. The film is fictionalised, but checks off the key points in Abe's story and the descent into destructive sexual obsession. She got a rather lenient prison sentence (five years or so), and went on to become something of a celebrity for her story. She was eventually arrested, and the media frenzy around "Japan's Sade" (Sada was a really convenient name) fascinated a nation that was deep within the throes of nationalism and war, and really needed the scandal that Abe's story gave them. In The Realm Of The Senses is a dramatised take on the story of Abe Sada, a real-life figure who accidentally erotic asphyxiated her lover to death, before decided to cut off his penis and testicles and carry those around with her. Even among that company though, Ohsima's In The Realm Of The Senses pushes boundaries hard.
IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES MOVIE ONLINE CRACK
History's greatest film maker (don't fight me on that one), Stanley Kubrick, also took a crack at the question with Eyes Wide Shut.
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For a more contemporary example, Ang Lee's Lust, Caution certainly turned heads. Tinto Brass' Italian erotic drama, Caligula, is possible the best known, if only because it had Hollywood A-list talent including Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole and Malcolm McDowell involved. There have been plenty of films that have challenged the boundaries between art and pornography. Oshima Nagisa was perhaps not as well known in the mainstream as Fukasaku, but he was every bit as important to Japanese New Wave, and In The Realm Of The Senses is his masterpiece. Japanese New Wave cinema was a major art movement from the 1950s to the 1970s, and it's most notable because it made embracing taboo material central to its themes. From the modern auteurs such as Sono Sion and Miike Takashi, through to the great master of the form, Fukasaku Kinji, Japanese filmmaking and transgression have been so closely linked that the people have even given the loose collection of filmmakers and their work a genre.
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Japanese cinema has had a long tradition of embracing transgression.