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Considering Koji Wakamatsu's most significant output percentage, that dealt with pinku films that still managed to appear avant-garde despite the sex and violence presented in them, and the way Art Theatre Guild gave essentially complete freedom and a more significant budget than what they had in the particular type of films to its directors, the collaboration of the two was a great “experiment” from the get go. It seems, however, that the two reached an equilibrium of sorts, with “Eros Eterna” being one of the most artful and even spiritual and sociopolitical on occasion, erotic/exploitation films Wakamatsu ever shot.

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In a style that reminds of de Sade's “120 Days of Sodom”, the movie revolves around a priestess who believes she is the reincarnation of the Happyaku Bikuni-sama, a legendary nun who lived for eight-hundred years but retained the...

Many have probably heard about the scandal surrounding Nagisa Oshima’s 1976 feature “In the Realm of Senses”, a story based on an incident involving a woman named Abe Sada, which has been adapted many times in the past as the case sparked quite a lot of controversy at the time. Knowing the film industry of his home country all to well, especially its link to the censors, Oshima decided early on to find producers outside of Japan, and eventually found them in France in order to make his vision of the story, which, upon its release and screening during international film festivals, was banned in many countries due to its explicit sex scenes. However, if one was to approach this feature, it is necessary to look beyond singular scenes or images and take a look at the context, the deeper message Oshima is after, since “In the Realm of Senses...

Review by Roger Carpenter

Kinji Fukasaku is probably best known for his Battles without Honor and Humanity and New Battles without Honor and Humanity series and, perhaps, for Battle Royale, made shortly before his death. Shin’ichi “Sonny” Chiba may be best known for his violent karate Street Fighter series here in the U.S. The prolific director and actor teamed up numerous times to make some truly classic Japanese action fare, but Doberman Cop, lensed during a time when Japanese cinema was undergoing massive change, was not a huge hit for the duo.

Like dozens of other films in the seventies, Doberman Cop (1977) got its start not as a screenplay but as a popular manga (or gekiga, a darker, more realistically-drawn and adult-oriented form of manga) that was then turned into a film. While yakuza films had been immensely popular for many years, their popularity was on a downturn...

Nagisa Oshima: In the Realm of the Senses (Truly) Iconoclastic Filmmaker dead at 80 Nagisa Oshima, best known as the director of the sexually charged 1976 psychological drama Ai No Corrida / In the Realm of the Senses, died of pneumonia on Tuesday, Jan. 15, at a Fujisawa hospital, near Tokyo. Oshima, who in the last 15 years had suffered a series of strokes, was 80. (Photo: Eiko Matsuda, Tatsuya Fuji in Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses.) Some refer to the likes of Quentin Tarantino or Spike Lee or Martin Scorsese or Terrence Malick as "iconoclastic filmmakers." Those people clearly haven’t bothered learning the definition of the word. Having said that, "iconoclast" is the perfect label for Nagisa Oshima. For once, in fact, laudatory obituary headlines — those announcing the "iconoclastic" Oshima’s death — perfectly reflect the personal and social standing of the deceased. Really, if Tarantino, for one, were a true iconoclast,...

The Japanese director, who has died aged 80, deserves to be known for more than In the Realm of the Senses. He was a brilliant satirist who took aim at hypocrisy and confirmity

The last time the director Nagisa Oshima came into my head was while watching Bobcat Goldthwait's World's Greatest Dad. A teenage boy kills himself in a failed auto-erotic strangling experiment and his father (Robin Williams), a failed writer, disguises it as a heart-wrenching suicide and writes a sucrose bestselling "memoir" of his tragic son.

Without Oshima's sensational 1976 masterpiece Ai No Corrida – known to English-speaking audiences as In the Realm of the Senses – none of that could exist. Western audiences were stunned at the film's dark and fanatical intensity, its violence, its fusion of eros and thanatos, and of course its erotic choking scenes, that black mass of ritualised sexuality with which a woman kills her lover. Many...

★★★★☆ Claimed by many to be a film that blurs the boundaries between art and pornography, Nagisa Ôshima's In the Realm of the Senses (1976) - starring Tatsuya Fuji, Eiko Matsuda and Aoi Nakajima - is certainly a piece of cinema that presents the viewer with a visual and emotional challenge, pushing the limits of what might be acceptable or appealing to some and remaining vulnerable and wide-open to judgement.

Based on real events, the film follows the life of a maid and former prostitute, Abe Sada, who becomes involved with her married boss Kichi in an obsessive love affair that transcends the carnal and crosses limits that society has imposed. Their sexual obsession only grows stronger and more dangerous and they enclose themselves in that world of passion, making love compulsively, randomly, endlessly, alone or in front of others. Life outside the doors of the chamber, where they share their intimate moments,...

Today sees the hi-def release of two of the most controversial and sexually explicit films of the 1970s, both of which came courtesy of Japanese New Wave auteur Nagisa Oshima – later the director of the more widely seen David Bowie-starring WWII movie Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (incidentally itself coming to Blu-ray next week… we are giving copies away Here).

In two tastefully presented “double play” Blu-ray/DVD sets from StudioCanal come 1976′s In the Realm of the Senses and 1978′s more restrained thematic follow-up Empire of Passion. Both films share the same leading man, Tatsuya Fuji, but whilst the former was either banned or heavily censored upon released due to its many graphic scenes of “unsimulated sex”, the latter (less explicit) work earned Oshima a well deserved Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

In the Realm of the Senses

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Oshima’s most critically significant text,...

Written & Directed by Nagisa Ôshima, the UK Blu-Ray Premiere of In the Realm of the Senses with a new uncut version will be available as a Double Play disc on 17th October. We have three copies of the Double Play Blu-Ray & DVD to give away.

Based on a true story set in pre-war Japan, a man and one of his servants begin a torrid affair. Their desire becomes a sexual obsession so strong that to intensify their ardour, they forsake all, even life itself.

In The Realm of the Senses has been passed uncut by the BBFC for the first time.

Starring

Tatsuya Fuji, Eiko Matsuda and Aoi Nakajima

Blu-Ray Extras:

- Recalling the Film: 2003 Program featuring interviews with consulting producer Hayao Shibata, line producer Koji Wakamatsu, assistant disrector Yoichi Sai and distributer Yoko Asakura

- Panel discussion at Birkbeck College with Japanese film scholars

- Once Upon a Time:...

To mark the release of Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (1983), In the Realm of the Senses (1976) and Empire of Passion (1978) all from Writer / Director Nagisa Oshima and all of which are all making their way to Blu-ray on 17th October, Studio Canal have given us 5 copies of each movie to give away!

Scroll down for more info on each:

Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (1983)

Written by Nagisa Ôshima Starring: David Bowie, Tom Conti and Ryûichi Sakamoto Available in Double Play disc set

In 1942 British soldier Jack Celliers (David Bowie) comes to a Japanese prison camp. The camp is run by Yonoi (Ryûichi Sakamoto), who has a firm belief in discipline, honour and glory. In Yonoi’s view, the allied prisoners are all cowards after choosing to surrender in the war instead of committing suicide. When one of the prisoners, interpreter John Lawrence (Tom Conti), tries to explain the Japanese way of thinking,...

Revived now as part of an Ôshima season at BFI Southbank, this uncompromising film has not dated one iota, perhaps because films that are really about sex are still such a rarity, despite the supposed sexiness of everything that surrounds us. Eiko Matsuda plays Sada, a serving girl who comes to work for an innkeeper, Kichi (Tatsuya Fuji), and they begin an obsessive affair. Sada and Kichi have sex compulsively, variously, all the time, and this is filmed by Ôshima with untroubled candour. The couple never undergoes anything as banal as a traditional storyline arc, and their love is never subject to any of the usual retributive narrative corrections: Sada does not get pregnant or sick and they never break up and make up. Most importantly, they are utterly incurious about each other's background - it is part of their ecstatic indifference to anything other than the present moment. The...

DVD Playhouse—May 2009

Paramount Centennial Collection Paramount Studios releases two more classic titles from its library on special edition DVD: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is John Ford’s last masterpiece (although he would go on to direct two more very good films) from 1962: about an Eastern lawyer (James Stewart) who travels west only to find primal brutality in the form of sadistic bandit Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin, great as always) and pragmatic brutality in local rancher Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), each two sides of a coin that represent a way of life slowly dying out as Stewart’s modern brand of civilization tames the West. A perfect film, period. Howard Hawks’ El Dorado is essentially a remake of his earlier classic Rio Bravo, with John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and a young James Caan as lawmen joining forces against corrupt cattle barons. Great fun. Two disc sets.

The Criterion Collection version of Nagisa Oshima's controversial "In the Realm of the Senses" that came to DVD and Blu-ray this week is listed on Criterion's web site as running 108 minutes long. That number corresponds with the length of the film's "original version" given by IMDb, though the site also lists a 109-minute version from the U.K., a 107-minute version from Australia, and a 98-minute version from Argentina. There seems to be a different cut for every country that's willing to show the film (unlike its native Japan, where it remains banned). The movie is almost an indecency Rorschach test -- it'd be fascinating, if a little horrifying, to compare all the different cuts side-by-side, to see what each culture found unacceptable by its moral standards. (By the way, IMDb does not mention a 95-minute cut, which is the length of the film on the previous DVD edition...

In the Realm of the Senses (Blu Ray) Directed by: Nagisa Oshima Written by: Nagisa Oshima Starring: Eiko Matsuda, Tatsuya Fuji “Wake up the kids, In the Realm of the Senses is on!” is a sentence you will never hear when In the Realm of the Senses is on. Even though the title might evoke images of a magical world of wonder and mystery, this film is definitely not for the kiddies. In fact, it’s probably not for most adults either. Anyone with an aversion to the consumption of pubic hair, beware. The story is quite simple; set in 1936 Japan, an inn owner and one of his maids – a former prostitute – fall head over heels for each other and engage in a lust driven sexual journey, fucking in multiple positions and in front of multiple people for practically the entire running time of the film. It’s sort of like Pretty Woman,...

Chicago – It’s interesting that Criterion has chosen to give their unmatched treatment to two films in the same week that were drastically censored upon their initial releases - “In the Realm of the Senses” and “The Wages of Fear”. The latter was edited for issues of perceived anti-Americanism and for issues of length. The former was censored for, well, everything.

Blu-Ray Rating: 4.0/5.0 “In the Realm of the Senses” is the kind of film that the modern ratings system has deemed impossible to make and distribute. It is a very adult movie. A film with a lot of unsimulated sex, including close-ups of graphic sexual acts that were not faked in any way. To many, it would be deemed straight-up pornography, but that’s not a word usually associated with The Criterion Collection and it would be doing a disservice to the film. This is proof that there is a...