La película prohibida
In the Realm
Por Adrian Martin
In 1977, I was 17, not yet old enough to legally attend the Melbourne International Film Festival. And certainly not old enough to view the uncensored print of Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (1976), a Japanese film already notorious for its unbridled — and sometimes unsimulated— sex scenes. But there I was, unaccompanied, bravely queuing up with thousands of strangers outside the enormous, old-style Palais theatre, very early on a Saturday morning, to see this ultra-special event.
The feeling of engaging in an illicit adventure both before and during the screening was overwhelming; I was convinced that the cops would bust in at any second and drag me —only me— whimpering from the theatre.
Near the end of the session —as the genitals of Kichi (Tatsuya Fuji), voluntarily strangled to death, are tenderly severed and brandished by his enthusiastic lover, Sada (Eiko Matsuda)— we all heard a bloodcurdling scream, issuing from a distressed audience member up in the highest seats of this picture palace. Emergency service was required for this suitably transgressed spectator.
Afterwards, in the nearby back streets of this suburb along which I walked home in a daze, an even stranger apparition seized the world —this one more in tune with the Georges Bataille-style surrealism and eroticism of the film just witnessed—. Parked cars, with no one visible in any seat, rocked gently or violently back and forth, as if seized by a magical will. Clearly, some spectators, unfazed —or perhaps incited— by the final castration scene had raced to their mobile bedrooms to live out the movie before its credits had even stopped rolling.
I made it home safely that day, avoiding police arrest for my crime against state restrictions over my delicate consciousness. But I had to wait twenty-three years before seeing In the Realm of the Senses again in any form but the pathetically dubbed and cut video version that circulated everywhere for decades. On screen, fully restored and re-released, I saw that Oshima’s film had lost none of its hushed, riveting power.
But in 2000 there was no scandal: no public figure made a fuss over it; the cops were not called in; nobody screamed; the empty cars in nearby alleyways sat forlornly still.
As a wise man said: “Only those who lived before the revolution know life’s sweetness”.
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In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no korîda, 1976) | Nagisa Ôshima
