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The Naming of Lions and Tigers: Nagisa Oshima blurs the edges

By Clifford Hilo

Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses and Empire of Passion are two sides of the same breathtaking blur between the pornographic and the artful.

"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. When we feel that everything has been revealed, 'obscenity' disappears and there is a certain liberation. When that which one had wanted to see isn't sufficiently revealed, however the taboo remains, the feeling of 'obscenity' stays, and an even greater 'obscenity' comes into being. Pornographic films are thus a testing ground for 'obscenity', and the benefits of pornography are clear. Pornographic cinema should be authorized, immediately and completely. Only thus can 'obscenity' be rendered essentially meaningless."  --Nagisa Oshima (1976)

In Katsushika Hokusai's famous woodcut above, there are two sets of eyes that see two very different things -- one perceives the lurid, the other perceives the ornate, all within the scope of the same, shared reality. What occurs here is that age-old distinction between the separate universes of the artistic and the pornographic, that moment where the aesthetic turns to the ethical assignment of values and judgment, where boundaries and divisions suddenly emerge within the matter of the artistic object.

Thus it is troublesome when it comes to Oshima, because it is very often that people fall into this hard-dialectic of art and pornography, and continually contest the separation of the two. In his excellent essay for Criterion's DVD release of In the Realm of the Senses, Donald Richie outlines several reasons why the rationale of pornography is different from that of art -- primarily, that pornography aims for mere sexual gratification. Elsewhere, an older Cahiers du Cinema article by Yann Lardeau tells us that the formal mechanism of pornography relies specifically on the use of the close-up in order to dissect bodies without organs for our viewing pleasure. But the problem that continues within these debates is not necessarily the evidence of their arguments but in the very act of contesting the difference between art and pornography. Writers like Richie and Lardeau seem so prepossessed with the act of clearly naming out the qualities of art and pornography as two distinct aesthetic realms. They act as if they want to make certain that nobody in the future will ever absentmindedly confuse the qualities of Penthouse with that of Botticelli, and vice versa.

Distinguished Animals

It has always struck me as curious the difference between lions and tigers. The alligator and the crocodile. Or the difference between poetry and prose. Experts on these topics have always sought to create a taxonomy of differences between these things, but one should recognize that it is more often the matter of similitude than the matter of difference that lies between. Like a child who has not yet learned too much about the world, and who groups things together broadly and not yet by specificity, Oshima looks at the world with this same confusion. He cannot read the difference between the lion and the tiger. Nor the difference between art and pornography. The true majesty of Oshima is that he has created an object of art that is strong enough to place the pornographic next to the image of the artistic.

There is a scene in Realm of the Senses that begins with a curious, bawdy, classical mode of Japanese dance. A gentle old man twists and gestures like a clown in his movements.  The camera pulls away from him to reveal that the stage of the dance extends outward into a world of flagrant sexuality, of the main characters and a series of geishas all chained together by their genitalia in an outright orgy. For Oshima, the camera is the space of the bridge where one can practice this act of addition: art + pornography. He puts the two things side-by-side, forcing the viewer to read one against the other. Then it is the relative closeness of the pornographic and the artistic that creates the possibility of amnesia. One forgets where the lurid begins and the classical ends, the circular chain of the orgy and the dance consumes itself like a snake swallowing its own tail. Which is which? This is what Oshima does: he deprives us of the concept of essence. He snatches these young infants of different backgrounds from their cradles and exposes them both to the public without an identity or namesake. And without a name there is no essence. Oshima confuses us; the space between the artistic and pornographic convene on the same sublime ground.

Oshima also resembles the Marquis de Sade in several ways (least of all sexual), but it is in the most supreme sense of this conservation of matter. Sade believed that the natural world could care less of the acts of violence, of goodness, of hatred, of divinity that humanity enacts against one another. Simply, the world was a constant exchange of energy and matter, a world without morality, judgment, or consequence. These movements are simply ways of fulfilling appetites. Oshima also belongs to this same universe. In the Realm of the Senses constantly intermarries the beauty of a mirror reflection with the pleasure of the sexual act. One cannot separate this dual strand of beauty-pleasure. Oshima belongs to the realm of congruence, where confusion arises between the lion and the tiger.
 

From Shadow to Light, or... Romanticism and Endurance

"Hide what the spectator wants to see the most."  --Yasujiro Ozu

The true art of cinema makes time seem longer. A very good movie has the force to make one feel as though one has traveled along a very long journey. It is as if its art traps real time within a web of suspension. Oshima is very good at this act of suspension. One of his greatest works is Cruel Story of Youth, a film about the stubborn virulence and mayhem of youth. It sees the sexual and the criminal as the truest sources of emancipation of the 1960s. But it is also a very prudish film, in that it is a film about the desire of the lower hemisphere of the body, but as described through an almost Catholic abstinence of the camera's look. One never drifts below the chest of the body. Oshima always hides the things that we want to see most, and by the conclusion of the film has held us at bay with a great sense of unfulfilled desires.

Oshima with In the Realm of the Senses becomes his opposite. He begins to show the most blatant of sexuality, a most erotic of cinema that seems without the trappings of modesty. Everything is visible for the eyes: vaginal penetration, fellatio, sado-masochism. It is as though the design of the film is to inspire the impulse of censorship. (To this day, it is impossible to find an uncensored version of Senses in Japan.  All the portions of explicit images have been pixilated.) Oshima grows tired of the shadows and desires to expose everything. He desires to engage within a politics of the visible. He embodies Goethe's dying words, "More light!" But Realm of the Senses is really a film about the over-exposure of things, about the maximum intensity of an image. It is about the turning of the shadow into light.

One can say that the story behind this film is the transition from the private to the public. It recalls the most infamous sex crime in Japan's history, where the femme fatale prostitute Sada Abe fatally choked her lover with her obi sash after practicing sexual asphyxiation. Then, after she killed him, in an act of bizarre amour fou, Sada used a sushi knife to cut off her lover's penis and testicles, which she carried around in her hand bag for the next four days until she was apprehended. When asked why she had killed her lover that she had only known for eight days, she explained that he had treated her like no other man had treated her and that she had instantly loved him. Out of jealousy, she didn't want her lover to return to his wife so she murdered him and stole the part of him that had connected them together best. It's truly a perverted story, but it's grounded in the most honestly private of passions.

Since 1936, this story has since become one of the most sensational crime stories in Japan, frequently adapted and re-adapted, Oshima's film being one among several. Here, then, is the story of private passions becoming the great spectacle for everyone to pay witness, the most sensuous and secretive of acts becomes the image of the tabloid. Like Bernini's sculpture of The Ecstasy of St. Teresa that undergoes the transmutation of the private and divine experience of pain and pleasure into the great fixed drama for the world to see. But like Oshima and also with Bernini, there is the complaint that too much has been revealed to us, too much unhidden. For Oshima, there is the illumination of the skin and organs, and also for Bernini that the electric lights of Cornaro Chapel are supremely unforgiving of the mystery of Teresa of Avila's secret, divine pleasure. Light leaves no trace of the mysterious. But Oshima is a creature of the theater, and one must remember that theater was born at the theater of the Acropolis underneath the rays of the sun. Everything is visible in the theater because one must pay witness to the energies of the spectacle.

What keeps us awaiting the end of Oshima's film is certainly not mystery. It is the dissipation of energy, the act of eventually stumbling upon a limitation or boundary. There is no story to this film, just more of an athleticism that constantly begs the questions, "When will they stop fucking!?" And the ending arrives at the most conclusive of boundaries: a death. Oshima's film is about romanticism and its endurance, of two beings pushing so hard upon one another so as to become fused together as one entity.

But they eventually fail, as all love cannot truly be eternal. Like Romeo and Juliet have failed. Like Tristan and Isolde. But the greatness of the lovers of Oshima -- what makes the lovers of Sada and Kichizo such remarkable specimens for all the philosophers of love -- is that the only enemy of their desire is the raw intensity of their desire. Essentially, In the Realm of the Senses is the retelling of that old Greek myth where the Gods create man and woman. Yet instead of functioning in the human, everyday capacity of self-preservation, the man and woman starve to death locked in a lover's embrace. All they want is to be near one another. Sada and Kichizo are just the same. They embrace one another beneath a Japanese snow-covered inn, refusing sake, food, and the samisen-playing Geishas just to be with one another. 

Empire of Passion: The Other Side of the Coin

While not as scandalous as the former film, Empire of Passion reveals another side of Oshima. Empire was released two years after Senses in 1978, but one sees a continuation of the themes originating in Senses develop more fully in Empire.  If Senses was the passion play of two lovers like Romeo and Juliet, Passion is the reincarnation of the haunted ghosts of Macbeth. The story follows an illicit love affair between a young village roustabout and an older woman who is married to a traveling rickshaw driver. The young man convinces his lover to strangle her husband, and they throw him down a well. But, as in Shakespeare, murder outs the guilty. The ghost haunts the village and the two lovers struggle to keep sane as the blanche white face of her dead husband stalks through their dreams.

Because of their very strong similarities in themes, tone, and plot, Senses and Passion form a kind of unofficial diptych. One helps the understanding of the other. Senses is more radical while Passion seems conservative in comparison. And this is a distinction that one must truly grasp about a director like Oshima, a product of the tumultuous moments of the 1960s that has been always and overly stereotyped as a moment of radical breaks. Filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin has continually commented that the great artists of the various New Waves, like Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, or Marco Bellochio were hardly of the genus of the revolutionary, and more of the type so steeped in classical training and culture that they exude the unavoidable influence of Jean Jacques Rousseau or Dante Alighieri. It takes the school boys who best know their grammar and history to shake off the dust of the past.

Oshima is much the same. A film like Empire is the reversion from the radical 60s to turn-of-the-century Japanese modernity, a celebration of the ancient themes of the borrowed Chinese ghost story (Kwaidan), and a flavor of literature that cuts close to the grotesque of Ryunosuke Akutagawa or Junichiro Tanizaki, and the inverted Japanese villages that Oe Kenzaburo is so fond of revisiting over and over again. One must turn the coin to better understand the complexity of Oshima. He is both heads and tails. The paradox of the radical and the classical simultaneously.

 

Date Posted: 5/1/2009