Sex and Cinema

I am curious to know which auteurs have best to treat sexuality.

For me :

Bruno Dumont – L’humanité – Twentynine Palms – Flandres
Carlos Reygadas – Japon – Battle in heaven
Nagisa Oshima – In the realm of the senses
Leos Carax – Pola X
Vincent Gallo – The brown Bunny
Kanito Shindo – Onibaba

Oshima is more than just In the Realm of the Senses… he deals with sexuality in Cruel Story of Youth, Sing a Song of Sex, Death by Hanging, and The Man Who Left His Will on Film (from the little I’ve seen so far). And his treatment of sex is pretty dark. Men are generally very forceful, and women generally accept this as an inevitability. Men rape, women are raped; it’s very dark… but also rather nuanced. In the Realm of the Senses certainly doesn’t see things the way his earlier films do; it’s still dark, but the woman is placed firmly in a place of dominance. Oshima’s career is essentially about the connection of political ideology and sexual identity (and in the lack of political identity we see either forceful or anemic sexual identity). Constantly we see political ideas becoming intertwined with human sexuality (there’s even a discussion of this connection in Sing a Song of Sex; that peasants cannot find a political identity and the only way they can create an identity that is separate from the “powers that be” is in bawdy sex songs).

But

The Japanese New Wave’s treatment of sexuality represents some of the most complex treatments of human sexuality in cinema. Woman in the Dunes, Insect Woman, The Man Who Left His Will on Film, Double Suicide, Eros Plus Massacre, etc are all films that give women a strong sexual identity and some of them even actively place men in a totally helpless position sexually (as well as in many other realms), but it’s not a picture perfect position for women or men. They give us strong feminist messages, but never reduce these things to simple forms, or ideas.

The filmmakers of the Japanese New Wave are my collective pick for the “best treatment of sexuality” for how complex they represent sexuality, and how diverse they show it to be.

Tinto Brass

John Derek

Bernardo Bertolucci’s films are quite sensitive and open about sexuality.

Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs deals with sex primarily, and very intimately (where others would say explicitly, which is also true but it is not mere pornography in my eyes).

Paul Schrader’s Hardcore, American Gigolo, Cat People, and Auto Focus deal with sexual issues of more shady and rather dangerous sorts.

Lars von Trier’s Antichrist deals with sex-as-personal-escapism only leading to more problems, though that’s only one aspect of the film. Other films of his, such as Dogville, Manderlay, and The Idiots also feature sexual situations (which can be quite dark, so to speak).

Thanks you very much. It’s very interesting to read you.

The Asian cinema seems not to be afraid to treat the question of the sex in all its complexity. The American cinema seems poorer. True or wrong ?

Sex and Lucia is a beautiful film and I thought handled the sex scenes in amazing ways.

I am not a fan of In the Realm of the Senses, it is one of the most painful films I have ever seen.

Jean Rollin, Jess Franco, Harry Kumel and Juan-Lopez Moctezuma.

Kim Ki-young is the man when it comes to sex and death.

“I am not a fan of In the Realm of the Senses, it is one of the most painful films I have ever seen.”
It’s supposed to be.

Cantin -
I think there are American filmmakers that deal with relationships with more honesty (Cassavetes, for example), though there are numerous reasons why they may not broach the subject of sex with as much blatant and difficult honesty and the filmmakers in the Japanese New Wave. It would take a lot of research to find out why this may, or may not be true… but…

American filmmakers in the studio system were certainly hampered for decades by a production code that prevented them from discussing sex in any direct sense. It doesn’t mean there isn’t anything there (Preston Sturges’ work, for example… and Lubitsch’s). But overall I think Americans just have such a disparate ideological (and ethnic) landscape that no one filmmaker can explore sexuality (or many other subjects) as it pertains to Americans. There is just such an enormous difference between what we are and what we think we are that honesty is too difficult to find.

As far as why Japanese filmmaker deal so unflinchingly with sexuality… The Japanese New Wave was built upon looking at Japan in a totally different way from how the filmmakers of a previous generation saw Japan. So if Naruse never directly mentions sex then Oshima is going to make a film that never stops talking about sex. If Ozu makes a film about marriage and love then Imamura makes a film about a destructive sexual relationship out of marriage purely for personal gain. If any of the older generation filmmakers show men as loving then the new wave shows them as pigs… It’s obviously more complex than that, and Japan is probably one of the few nations more sexually repressed than the U.S., but that was the basis for the surge in sexually charged cinema in Japan in the 1960’s and onward.

Well, I do believe American cinema is rather timid when it tries to be serious, and overzealous when it tries to be expressive. We’ve confused sex with any other physical activity it’s merely complex mutual masturbation to us. The spirit and the intimacy are becoming faded and absent. The films have been treating sex the same way for years now; just enough to show what is happening, maybe to titillate just a little, but not so much to offend or to be rebuked. The European cinema today feels quite similar, whilst in Asia (as most recent I’ve been able to see, Immamura’s 2002 film Warm Water Under a Red Bridge) it seems to be depicted with a passion, though I feel the Western influence slowly beginning to strangle it as well.

We get too caught up with the physical rather than examining the driving forces behind those actions. It just becomes another act, something to do.

Thanks you very much. It’s great !

I realize that I like the Asian cinema because it shows bodies in a unique way. I remember the shock Rashomon.

I love Bruno Dumont and Carlos Reygadas because they manage to film people, but also the bodies in their intimacy.

I like this question: how to film the intimacy ?

Everything Lord Quas has said about Oshima in the above post is great information for anyone looking at getting into Oshima’s filmography. Oshima was quite a revelation to me as I never saw sex in film as something that could be used in a meaningful way. His films can be quite potent and shouldn’t be overlooked.

“We get too caught up with the physical rather than examining the driving forces behind those actions. It just becomes another act, something to do.”
I think the most important thing a filmmaker (or audience member) must remember in making (watching) a film about sexuality, or relationships is to remember the difference between human sexuality and the physical act of sex. This is what filmmakers like Oshima, Imamura, Shinoda, Teshigahara, etc really capture (even documentary filmmakers like Kazuo Hara).

In the Realm of the Senses may be the linchpin of the New Wave’s films on sex, but I find it to be one of his more simplistic treatments of politics and sex. Death By Hanging deals with similar ideas, and the ending is as sexual (though, “sexual” is an odd term for the film as the only sex acts we see are those of rape, and incest (again… the difference between sex and sexuality)) as any film, but its meanings and the complexity in how presents these ideas far outreaches In the Realm of the Senses, and there isn’t a single bit of nudity in Death by Hanging. For most of the filmmakers in the new wave the more complex the treatment of sexuality the less nudity there is (as just a general rule of thumb).

I’ll give another example; the new wave’s resident genre filmmaker; Yasuzo Masumura. Specifically his 1966 war drama Red Angel, and his 1968 film Blind Beast. In the former film we see some incredibly complex issues being raised. We see a character, a nurse, that is raped, and seems to fall in love with two men; one being a love based on her pity of a patient, and the other seemingly being a genuine love. But the film constantly positions these tender emotional moments (or sometimes purely sexual acts) in the middle of a horrid war. We are unable to separate love, sex, and death. Any emotional action created in the film seems to just be an ‘of the moment’ feeling; a need for a genuine connection in the midst of horrible deaths. The film question the very ability for humans to form attachments in war, but at the same time the film says the need for some form of connection is absolutely necessary to survive. Humans can’t form real relationships, but can’t live without them. All of this is treated with little nudity, and mostly just hints at sex.

In Blind Beast we see something more physical, but ultimately more simplistic. The film is about a blind man searching, again, for a genuine tactile relationship (real or otherwise) so he kidnaps a somewhat popular nude model to make a sculpture of her. The film follows a somewhat predictable line of disinterest, genuine love, and then love destroying itself in sadomasochism. Suggesting that a love built on violence and sex ends in either violence, sex, or both. The problem is the film focuses so much on the purely physical parts of the relationship (nudity, and sex) that the ending seems placid, predictable, and ultimately shallow.

So, yeah, any filmmaker has to realize how to separate sex as an act and sexuality. I think many filmmakers do this from all nations do this (in America I would point to John Cassavetes (Shadows, Faces_), in Canada David Cronenberg (_Naked Lunch, Crash), etc.), but think the Japanese New Wave has tested my views more than any other.

the first that comes to mind when discussing sex and the cinema is Breillat.

Filming intimacy is much different than filming plain sex. Sex can be involved but it would not be your usual kind of cinematic sex, it would have its own life and not just rehearsed manuevers we get from divorcing the spirit, the mind and the emotions from sexual expression. It would not just be another activity like standing around or talking on the phone or having lunch, it would be something with a meaning all its own. In this culture of ours so horrendously and overwhelmingly influenced by the pornographic industry, the fast food for the libido (momentary satisfaction, nil nourishment) we find that sex is thrown in quite carelessly and merely as a selling point (at it’s worst, to keep people watching). Thus, it reflects in America our depravity and detachment from sex. It’s no longer sacred, in having been repeatedly demonized and misunderstood, and now ignored and neglected from any serious and revelating thought.

Sex, when done properly, leads to many amazing things. When mishandled, as it is quite frequently in today’s world, it becomes a draining bondage, nothing more than an abnormal exercise of parts and processes. That’s the degradation, the cold machination upon love-making (i.e. mere “fucking”).