EXCLUSIVE LIMITED RUN! NEW 35MM PRINT!

“Perhaps Oshima’s greatest” (Donald Richie). Banned, butchered, debated, and denounced when it was released – it caused riots at Cannes, was forbidden in Ontario, and severely censored in its home country – Oshima’s ferocious tale of sexual obsession now takes its place as a classic of world cinema.“Is it pornography or is it politics?” – Godard’s question about his own film Numéro Deux – applies just as well to In the Realm of the Senses. An exquisite spectacle that links various kinds of bondage and subjugation – between man and woman, master and servant, individual and state (note the historical backdrop of war preparations) – Senses is based on an incident that took place in 1936, in which Abe Sada, a hotel maid, murdered and castrated her employer after several days of sequestered love-making with him. The film portrays an erotic abandon so absolute that it creates its own world. One can veritably smell the room in which the lovers isolate themselves, its mats soaked with saké, sweat, semen, urine, and, in the final shocking sequence, a sluice of blood. Hard core sex, hard core politics, thrilling cinema. “One of his most profound films, one as complex and rich an exploration of the Japanese consciousness as any of his earlier works. . . . A revolutionary moment in the cinema of Japan” (Joan Mellen).

Special ticket prices apply.