^ Case Study: L'Empire des Sens (In The Realm Of The Senses) Archived 13 January 2011 at the Wayback Machine, Students' British Board of Film Classification page.Archived from the original on 2 March 2016. ^ "Video: Op 17 november 1977 zond de VRT dit uit".Archived from the original on 25 January 2016. The film fell foul of censors in Germany, the UK and the US - where it was seized by customs officials ahead of a planned screening at the New York Film Festival. ^ "In the Realm of the Senses director Nagisa Oshima dies at 80".^ "Nagisa Oshima's Realm of Restraint and Precision".^ "In the Realm of the Senses: Some Notes on Oshima and Pornography".Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture. "In the Realm of the Senses: Some Notes on Oshima and Pornography". Berkeley: University of California Press. The Films of Oshima Nagisa: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast. Nudity in film (East Asian cinema since 1929).The website's critical consensus reads, "Sexual taboos are broken and boundaries crossed In the Realm of the Senses, a fearlessly provocative psychosexual tale." See also On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film currently holds a rating of 86% based on 36 critic reviews, with an average rating of 7.7 out of 10. Combined, the film sold 2,424,502 tickets and grossed approximately $7,649,782 in France and Germany. In Germany, where it was released in 1978, the film sold 693,628 tickets, grossing approximately €1,803,433 ($2,446,050). The film aired again on RTP2, almost unnoticed. Some deemed it inappropriate even for the watershed slot, while others appreciated its airing. However, in the Maritimes, the film was rejected again as the policies followed in the 1970s were still enforced.īecause of its sexual themes and explicit scenes, the film was the cause of great controversy in Portugal in 1991 after it aired on RTP.
It was not until 1991 that individual provinces approved the film and gave it a certificate. In Canada, when originally submitted to the provincial film boards in the 1970s, the film was rejected in all jurisdictions except Quebec and British Columbia. The film is available in uncut form in France, Germany, the United States (as part of The Criterion Collection), the Netherlands, Belgium and several other territories. The pornographic content of the production also caused it to be banned in Israel in 1987. In 2000, it finally became available in its complete version. In Australia, the film was originally banned, but a censored version was made available in 1977.
All of the adult sexual activity was left intact, but a shot in which Sada yanks the penis of a prepubescent boy after he misbehaves was reframed, zooming in so that only the reaction of the boy was shown. It was given an official countrywide cinema release in 1991, though the video release was delayed until 2000 when it was passed with an "18" certificate (suitable for adults only).
The film opened at the Gate Cinema Club in 1978. The ban was lifted in 1994, and Belgium has not censored a film of any kind since.Īt the time of its initial screening at the 1976 London Film Festival, the British Board of Film Censors recommended that it be shown under private cinema club conditions to avoid the need for heavy cuts, but only after the Obscene Publications Act had been extended to films in 1977 to avoid potential legal problems. The film was not available on home video until 1990, although it was sometimes seen uncut in film clubs.Īt the time, the only European country in which the film was banned was Belgium. It was also banned because of a scene in which Kichi pushes an egg into Sada's vulva, forcing her to push it out of her vagina before Kichi eats the egg. In the United States, the film was initially banned upon its premiere at the 1976 New York Film Festival but was later screened uncut, and a similar fate awaited the film when it was released in Germany. At its premiere in Japan, the film's sexual activity was optically censored using reframing and blurring. This obstruction was bypassed by officially listing the production as a French enterprise, and the undeveloped footage was shipped to France for processing and editing. Strict censorship laws in Japan would not have allowed the film to be made according to Ōshima's vision. The French title was taken from Roland Barthes's book about Japan, L'Empire des signes ( Empire of Signs, 1970). and the U.K., and under L'Empire des sens ( Empire of the Senses) in France. The film was released under the title of In the Realm of the Senses in the U.S.