Love Bullfight: Pornographic Limit

Provocative rejection Ôshime Nagise almost all of Japanese cinema to that point was not just the rebellious pose of a young director fighting for his own identity, knowing that behind him stand the shadows of great masters, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Narusea i Kurosawe. Nor was it a necessary move aimed at dynamizing a scene that would profit from creative disagreements. This rejection is, in fact, a strategic position for Ôshima: abandoning established stylistic paradigms (no matter how good they were), opened the horizon for the inspiring variation of various signifier systems, for the proliferation of formal choices.

Usually, criticism looks for hints in the first works of a certain artist that will later turn into the 'authentic voice' of the author, which will indicate a homogeneous trajectory: Ôshima, however, bravely moved away from such convention and, instead of disciplining internal 'incoherence', insisted on stylistic pluralism within his own oeuvre. Each subsequent film was a different kind of challenge, a new opportunity to establish a different arrangement of signs: the worst option is for the petrification of form to occur. For cinema to be activist in itself, poetic action, activity and effectiveness must not be suppressed.

There are two reasons for this foundation of the director's strategies. In Ôshima's words, 'reality is always changing', which means that the very style that is supposed to 'capture' it, that is supposed to represent it, must be constantly and anew transformed. One kind of realistic parameters will apply to one story, another a completely different set of rules. Ôshima's alternation of 'mimetic' and 'artificial' procedures should not be seen as a director's indecision or uncontrolled indulgence in irrational impulses, but as the author's ingenious adaptation to the different connotative and semantic potentials of the narratives he deals with.

On the other hand, the director's refusal to 'self-define', to establish his 'recognizable' expression, suggests a perverted pleasure in multiplying his own script, in branching out his own message, in demarcating his own stance. It is not so much a desire to imitate other directors, to correct and improve their lessons, but rather an unexpected way to promote authorial subjectivity through a polyvalent approach, through a continuous interweaving of theses and anti-theses, a 'polemic' with someone else's and his own heritage. The author is the one who deals with different enunciatory visions, not the one who is completely in them. That is why Ôshima's engagement is intriguing and relevant: it is not ideologically but poetically founded, and as such avoids one-sided political assessments.

This longer introduction was necessary to emphasize the special context in which to place the director's most controversial film, I don't run (Love Bullfight, 1976), in which numerous sexual taboos are strongly and mercilessly problematized, and the perspective for noting numerous metapoetic implications when it comes to the representation of pornographic content outside the genre prohibitions was essentially opened. Namely, although Ôshima's scandalous art masterpiece was very easily accepted within the wider intellectual network - its international title, under which it was also shown in our country, The realm of the senses, is cleverly adapted from the famous Barthesove knjige The kingdom of signs (1970) - there is also a clear domestic framework within which the director wanted to intervene in multiple ways. Since Ôshima's intervention always refers to a specific Japanese cinematic heritage, what does the author 'reject' here, what does he argue with, in relation to what does he develop a critical edge, what does he try to 'transcend'? By the mid-seventies, Japanese erotic cinema had developed to a degree that was unprecedented in the West, since production functioned not only within the framework of low-budget logic, but also the oldest Japanese studio, Nikkatsu, devoted itself exclusively to the production of sex films, forming, moreover, a separate genre, Romani porn.

In this variation, Ôshima will operate from a position of deconstruction within an established and very profitable segment of national cinema. Just a year before I don't run, Nikkatsu made a film about the case Abe Said who in 1936 - a rare violent crime of passion - killed her lover. In Jitsuroki Abe Now (The True Story of Abe Sada, 1975) Tanaka Noboru opts for an interesting strategy: a 'true story' will be staged in the studio, often with long takes that refrain on principle from the possible glamorization of destructive Eros. In other words, for a 'docudrama' dealing with the famous passionate affair between Sade (Junko Miyashita) and Kichija (Esumi Hideaki) which will end in murder and castration, the mise-en-scène is unusually 'lowered' and coldly precise.

Given that Ôshima used the same event as the basis for his film, Tanaka's version has long been neglected or undeservedly underestimated: after all, how can you compare an iconoclastic and deconstructive author who tried to break numerous taboos (in his country and in general) in the field of sexual depictions in an avant-garde manner, and a director who worked almost exclusively in a despised genre that is no stranger to one-way exploitation and virulent misogyny? Someone who experimentally wants to debate social and cinematic censorship, and someone who 'duty' has to be on the sex film market? However, a comparison of these two films is more than desirable and instructive, not only to confirm Ôshima's superiority, but also to point out Tanaka's thoughtfulness: while the author's agenda in I don't run necessarily led to a disturbing 'pornographic' verism, Jitsuroku Abe Now is a 'restrained', almost alienating reinterpretation l'amour fou motivates.

It is precisely in the consistency of the author's agenda that the true, gradational character of the director's stylistic solutions is discernible. In the persistent development of his political obsessions, Ôshima naturally and openly engages in I don't run turned to sex as a territory in which ideological parameters determine the flow and permissibility of erotic desire: a controversy brought to a climax, since the already mentioned perverted pleasure in the formal sense 'harmoniously' passed to the level of expression and content. The transgression was complete, unconventionality manifested itself in the most questionable and guarded place: the director entered the tabooed space of explicit and unsimulated sexual representation.

However, Ôshima did not want to limit himself to the 'external' polemic, but decided to redistribute the accents within the gender configuration as well: I don't run is a 'pornographic' film about the dominance of female sexual desire, because as the 'narrative' draws to a close it is Now (Matsuda Eiko) increasingly dominant and Kichi (Fuji Tatsuya) increasingly passive, and so the 'balance' can only be maintained in a sado-masochistic relationship, when the erogenous zones expand to non-genital regions of the body. (Interestingly, the final castration in the film does not imply the complete annihilation of phallic power.)

Pleasure itself is inseparable from pain: enjoyment is in its ultimate consumption equated with death. A pornographic film in which everything is put on display, in which everything is recorded, a genre entirely dedicated to pleasure, thus reaches its representational limit, and the concreteness of sexual material in I don't run In Ôshima's adaptation, he de-eroticizes the pornographic image, which is just one aspect of the director's subversive work.