ART OF EUROPE

Oshima Nagisa - In the Realm of the Sense (1976)

[In the Realm of the Sense ] While a lot of the guys making pink films out of Japan did have communist|socialist sympathies, that's not where the name comes from. The story goes that, to this day, full frontal nudity is illegal in the Japanese media (though an underground market for it does exist, by which I mean you can buy it in any subway station in the aptly-named Kinki region) and this fucker is fulla money shots—which is why the opening titles're in French, insteada wago to kango.

( ...incidentally, nine in ten frenchmen who saw senses turned japanese, if only for a little while, and that too soon and not again for quite the while, as the french are wont. )

some day americans will pine their fallen empire as much as the french, rather than memorializing it with sex allegories and castration sequences (in this movie there's this guy who kept trying to get his rocks off on this hyperorgasmic japanese bird, who eventually breaks down and resorts to the most literal of options to see it done) like the Japanese as embodied in Oshima.

I saw this girl at Mizzou one day who looked just like Matsuda Eiko, and of course after I got over just how fucking beautiful she was, spent quite some time giggling over the thought of just what part of just what guy she may or may not have had upon (read: in) her person.

The thing this thing does, though, besides make guys realize they have a dick, then forget, then remember again all too suddenly and all too violently, is to collapse|reconcile the downward spiral (we're talking plot paradigms here) of self-destruction inherent in all addiction movies - which for the most part means drug movies, but obviously the addiction should count, even though we shall never speak of it or vampires in general again - with the escalation in action operatively integral to porn (or kung fu or horror -- see nabakov's intro to lolita on this) into a single movement towards a single telos, iconographically represented as the failed assemblage-hermaphrodite Sada wandering the Earth (or a confined section of Honshu thereon) while, o yeah, there's a war going on.

speaking a which....



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