Eros + Massacre: Sex and Death in Japanese Cinema at the AGO
Showtimes magazine
July 5, 1991
An astonishing and extremely controversial film series will be screened from July 11 through August 9 at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Entitled Eros + Massacre: Sex and Death in Japanese Cinema, programmer James Quandt has culled two dozen films representing the intersection of sex and violence in Japan’s film culture.
That’s right. Sex and violence. Management training films may insist that the Japanese population is pleased with totalitarian repression on an almost unbelievable scale (complete self-sacrifice to the company, etc.), and our news media have made little effort to challenge this view. Ultimately, North Americans have been brainwashed into imagining a Japanese psyche concerned with nothing but work and cleanliness.
Eros + Massacre may change a few minds. It reminds us that Japan has gone through transformations in its film culture and society similar to ours. They too experienced great social unrest in the sixties and, like the United States and Canada, produced a set of filmmakers who sought to channel this anger into cinematic innovation, breaking down social barriers and the existing precepts of film culture in the process.
“This film series examines the ‘mass upheaval in the Japanese psyche’ that the cinema of Nagisa Oshima and his colleagues both provoked and documented,” writes Quandt in his introduction to the programme, “and asks whether the ubiquitous sex and violence of their films constitute purifying spectacle or repressive desublimation, cathartic fantasy or political critique.”
The range of work Quandt has gathered is impressive. From Oshima’s extremely erotic (some might say pornographic) masterpiece In the Realm of the Senses, to the enigmatic poetry of Woman of the Dunes, to Shohei Imamura’s licentious epic The Pornographers, a lot of territory is covered. Perhaps too much. With wide stylistic gulfs in the better known films presented, his open-ended introduction and the large number of rarely seen films included, it is difficult to get a handle on Quandt’s approach to the subject matter.
But perhaps this is a blessing. After having Japan exhaustively defined by untold numbers of experts, it will be refreshing to reach untutored conclusions. And reactions will undoubtedly be as diverse as the films presented.
Particularly contentious will be the role of women. On one hand, many of the female characters are proto-feminists, sexually liberated women making their own choices and aware of their own sexuality, albeit not in a politically self-conscious manner.
On the other hand, there is an unquestionably misogynist current running through this work. Women are constantly victimized, either physically (rape), psychologically (humiliation) or spatially (imprisonment). Although not resigned to their fates, they still sometimes exhibit extraordinary emotional leaps, like falling in love with their rapists.
That being said, some of the great names of Japanese cinema are on show here. Kon Ichikawa’s Kagi (“The Key”) and An Actor’s Revenge are legendary films which rarely appear in this city. A large contingent of films represents Imamura and Oshima, the Japanese New Wave’s most famous members on this continent. The programme will open with Chris Marker’s “essay- travelogue,” Sans Soleil, which provides an introduction to Japanese sexual culture (along with various other nations and their practices). Other tantalizing films in the series include a double bill from Seijun Suzuki, described by Quandt as “a cult hero for Japanese cineastes,” the spectacular film which names the series, Eros + Massacre, and Onimasa by Hideo Gosha, a 1983 film directly influenced by the New Wave directors.
—Noah Cowan