Latest news with #1936
Daily Mail
20 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
It was a film filled with unsimulated sex, based on a real murder. But even the nudity and graphic depiction of severed genitals paled in comparison to one infamous scene that shocked audiences
Public sex, voyeurism, adultery, foodplay, orgy, domination, death. Nagisa Oshima's groundbreaking 1976 erotic drama In the Realm of the Senses was hugely controversial upon its release and left audiences speechless with an infamous scene, bizarre beyond imagination. Based on the gruesome real-life 1936 murder of Kichizo Ishida by his lover Sada Abe, who strangled him and cut off his penis, the arthouse masterpiece is one of the most explicit to come out of Japan. Upon its release, the adaptation of the Sada Abe murder was banned nationwide and its director Nags Oshima was called to a court of law on charges of obscenity and disturbance of society. And it's no wonder why. Also known as Senses, the movie uses vulgarity and smut to drive the themes of devotion, taboo, sex and violence into the audience. From the infamous eating of a boiled egg out of a vagina, to witnessing bodies embroiled in an orgy during a wedding, this raw work of erotica leaves no fetish untouched. Senses dabbled in hardcore pornography, testing the boundaries between desire and addiction, passion and obsession, and fantasy and reality. Throughout the provocative piece, Oshima presented a power dynamic which was not common in Japanese media at the time - a woman who takes agency over her own sexual pleasure, and a man who offers up his life in an act of submission. The haunting reality of this is expressed through the chilling words Ishida would speak before his brutal death: 'You'll put the cord around my neck and squeeze it again while I'm sleeping, won't you? If you start to strangle me, don't stop, because it's so painful afterwards'. In the Realm of the Senses At almost two hours long, Senses is a twisted and fictionalised retelling of the story of Sada Abe, whose affair with her master, Kichizo Ishida, turned obsessive and sadomasochistic. In 1936 Tokyo, Abe is a former prostitute who now works as a maid in a hotel. She appears on screen quiet and timid until around five minutes in she is performing a sex act on a homeless man in ragged clothes and covered in dirt. The hotel's married owner Ishida quickly initiates a torrid affair that consists of sexual experiments and a disturbing selection of self-indulgences. In one of the first scenes seen in the film between Abe and Ishida, she can be seen cleaning the floor in a hotel room before Ishida lifts up her kimono and performs a sex act on her. It is not long before the pair are having sex on screen, breaking through the barriers of critical inhibitions in a way cinema had never seen before. The pair's genitalia are captured on camera in a scene similar to something one would expect to find on an adult video website. Instead, Oshima works to depict the couple's growing obsession for one another and their insatiable appetite for sexual pleasure. Ishida ultimately leaves his wife to pursue his affair with Abe who becomes increasingly possessive and jealous of him - leaving the married man only more eager to please her. One scene captures Abe in heavy traditional geisha makeup using a bird-shaped sex toy, while another - and perhaps one of the most infamous - left audiences jaw-dropped. As the pair sat together on the floor of a hotel room, Ishida picks up a boiled egg and places it inside Abe's vagina before eating it from her body. During a wedding scene later on in the film, a man who had previously conducted the ceremony can be seen partaking in a celebratory dance. But in true Sense style, the camera pans upward so that he and his dance are the focus of the shot. It settles there for a minute as he continues dancing, before the camera then pans down to his feet where an orgy is taking place among the entire wedding party. Again, it is meant to shock and not titillate. Abe and Ishida's mutual obsession spirals until Abe discovers she is most excited by strangling him during sex, and he is later killed in this manner. During the harrowing scene, Ishida is seen on the floor with Abe straddling him, two ends of a pink sash in each hand as she pulls tighter around his neck. With his hands bound, he embraces Abe who sobs into his chest before they begin to have sex for what would become the final time. Wrapping the rope around his glistening neck once more, she closes her eyes and pulls on the two ends as Ishida's face becomes swollen and purple. Following a dream-like cut scene of a naked Abe being surrounded by a group of people, the audience are thrown back into reality as the killer is shown sawing off her lover's penis and testicles with a large kitchen knife. While she is depicted next to him naked in Senses, it is revealed she will walk around with his organ inside her for four days before being arrested, smiling. Words written in his blood can be read on his chest: 'Sada Kichi, the two of us forever'. A large majority of the film is made up of depraved scenes and disturbing imagery ranging from an elderly Geisha soiling herself after a particularly intense bout of lovemaking, to Ishida licking off menstrual blood from his fingers. Even though the description of Senses may sound like a hardcore pornographic movie - and in a way, it is - the masterpiece was created by one of the greatest classical Japanese filmmakers alongside Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu. Reviews claim the piece, although dark and twisted, has an artistry that lessens the stimulation. The videography, with close ups of lips parted in orgasm and breasts and buttocks on full display creates a sense of raw passion amid deluded sexual obsession. Critics over the years have claimed: 'Oshima's film widens and deepens the sensual realm'. Oshima, knowing Japan would never allow such a graphic movie to grace its screens, went through adventurous French producer Anatole Dauman to make the film, officially making Senses a French production and giving the director total creative freedom. 'This was the first hardcore pornographic film (in Japan),' he said in a 1976 interview, a fact that the Japanese government was not overly excited about. Upon its release, Senses was banned nationwide and Oshima was called to a court of law on charges of obscenity and disturbance of society. As headstrong as ever, he made a case validating his feature, claiming that by tackling obscenity head-on he rendered the word meaningless. He said: 'Nothing that is expressed is obscene; what is obscene is what is hidden. When we are free to see everything, both obscenity and taboo disappear'. The film's ban wasn't totally lifted and has yet to be shown completely uncensored in Japan to this very day, but Oshima's point remains groundbreaking for its time. The real-life murder of Kichizo Ishida by his lover Abe Sada In the Realm of the Senses is a retelling of the May 18, 1936, murder of Kichizo Ishida by the Japanese geisha and prostitute Abe Sada. The pair had first met in Tokyo on February 1, 1936, when she began working as an apprentice at the Yoshidaya restaurant, owned by 42-year-old Ishida. Not long after Abe started her apprenticeship, Ishida began making sexual advancements towards her. She happily accepted his attention. By mid-April, the pair had begun their affair that would end in fatality. The week of the murder the following month was one filled with passion after the couple had been repeatedly meeting in secret behind the back of Ishida's wife, who was also Abe's boss. Abe remembered in testimony the passion of their lovemaking in reflecting on one tryst at the Tagawa inn: 'We kept the bed out from the evening of the 27th to the morning of the 29th, and hardly slept at night doing every nasty deed possible. 'When I said I was tired Ishida would make love to me and even while sleeping he would massage my body very sweetly. 'It was the first time in my life that I had met a man who treated a woman so well and who made me so happy. I fell in love. I could never be separated from him'. The pair had been experimenting sexually for three months before Abe killed her lover. Following her arrest, she spoke in testimony about the sex play they engaged in prior to the murder in a revelation which stunned Japan. 'The evening of May 16 I got on top of Ishida and at first we had sex while I pressed his throat with my hands but that didn't do anything for me so I wrapped my kimono sash around Ishida's neck and I pulled it tight and then loosened it and so on while we were having sex, and while I was doing it I kept looking down there so I didn't realise that I'd squeezed too hard; Ishida let out a moan and suddenly his thing got small,' she said. 'I was shocked and released the sash but Ishida's face [and neck] had turned red and didn't return to normal so I tried cooling his face by bathing it with water'. Panicked at how close he came to dying Ishida suggested he return home to his wife for a while and make Abe his mistress. This deeply angered Abe, who seethed with jealousy at the thought of sharing Ishida with another woman, and on May 18, the lovers snuck off to the Masaki Inn, in what would become Ishida's final night on earth. Following the pair's sexual play that evening, Ishida began to doze off, and according to Abe, told her: 'You'll put the cord around my neck and squeeze it again while I'm sleeping, won't you… If you start to strangle me, don't stop, because it is so painful afterwards'. At around 2am, while Ishida slept, Abe wrapped the pink sash of her kimono around his neck, this time fatally asphyxiating him. She then used a kitchen knife to sever his penis from his body and carved in his left thigh Sada Kichi futari - 'Sada and Kichi, the two of us.' Abe left a similar sentiment on the bedding in his blood. This concept had a history in the Tokugawa period when used by courtesans who promised their loyalty to patrons by offering a token of their affection which in extreme cases was purported to be their own finger. Courtesans would even tattoo a sign of devotion on their upper arms. Abe reversed this practice of self-mutilation and inscribed Ishida's body with her love letter instead. Abe eluded the police by wandering the streets of Tokyo and the murder took Japan by storm, triggering a frenzy that would quickly be referred to as 'Sada Abe panic' by the Japanese media. As the hunt for the murderess became more frantic, reports from the public flooded in. There was an alleged Abe sighting in Tokyo, then Okinawa, then Kobe, with one false claim inciting a stampede in the Ginza district of Tokyo. Abe was finally arrested three days after the incident on May 21, 1936. The killer later told police: 'After I had killed Ishida I felt totally at ease, as though a heavy burden had been lifted from my shoulders, and I felt a sense of clarity.' She had planned to take her life one week after the murder, and admitted to practicing necrophilia in the days leading up to her arrest. 'I felt attached to Ishida's penis and thought that only after taking leave from it quietly could I then die,' she said. 'I unwrapped the paper holding them and gazed at his penis and scrotum. I put his penis in my mouth and even tried to insert it inside me… It didn't work however though I kept trying and trying. 'Then, I decided that I would flee to Osaka, staying with Ishida's penis all the while. In the end, I would jump from a cliff on Mount Ikoma while holding on to his penis.' Abe was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison on May 21, 1936. The sentence was commuted, however, in 1940. The murderess disappeared from the public eye in 1970. When Senses was being planned in the mid-1970s, director Oshima reportedly sought out Abe and after a long search, found her, with her hair shorn, in a nunnery in Kansai, southern Japan.
Yahoo
08-07-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Another calamity: The closest forerunner in San Angelo's history of floods was decades ago
The July Fourth floods in San Angelo will go down in the record books as the wettest day in the city's history. The only other days that came close were recorded nearly 100 years ago in 1936. In mid-September of 1936, the city of San Angelo experienced downpours for multiple days, resulting in massive flooding from rainfall — an estimated 25.22 inches, according to Standard-Times archives. The rain began Sept. 15 with 11.75 inches, the most recorded in a single day for San Angelo at that point. Then the rainfall continued for another three days: 1.18 inches Sept. 16 4.64 inches Sept. 17 7.64 inches Sept. 18 More: Waking up to disaster: How San Angelo is weathering a flood. What happened and what now? As a result, the North Concho River overflowed with water on Sept. 17, 1936, wiping away entire blocks of houses and flooding most of the downtown area. Some estimates reported that nearly 300 homes were washed away in the flood. Water levels were reported to reach 10 feet in the lobby of the Naylor Hotel. In response, the city built two reservoirs: O.C. Fisher Dam and Lake on the north side of town inside the San Angelo State Park and Twin Buttes Reservoir in the south, mainly to control the water levels for both the north and south Concho rivers should the area see that much rainfall again. According to the Standard-Times archives, the 1936 flood claimed two lives and left over 2,000 people homeless. It destroyed two of the three bridges in town, wreaking damage of over $5,000,000. The July Fourth rainfall did not overflow the North Concho River as it did in 1936. But the reported 14 inches on Independence Day is the most recorded rainfall in a single day the city has seen since then. More: What to know about getting help after the flood, making donations in San Angelo area Paul Witwer covers high school sports and Angelo State University sports for The San Angelo Standard-Times. Reach him at sports@ Follow him on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, @Paul_Witwer. This article originally appeared on San Angelo Standard-Times: San Angelo July Fourth flooding draws similarities to 1936 disaster
Yahoo
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Only known colour footage of extinct Toolache wallaby revealed after 90 years
The film shows one of the female marsupials fenced in a paddock, likely the last living representative of her species when the footage was shot in 1936. This is the only known colour footage of a living Tulla wallaby taken almost 90 years ago. The film shows one of the female marsupials fenced in a paddock, likely the last living representative of her species when the footage was shot in 1936. A digital copy of the film has been held at the South Australian Museum for 20 years, but that version is entirely in black and white. What's incredible about the newly digitised National Film and Sound Archive copy is that it contains 34 seconds of colour footage at the end while the colour section of the film has deteriorated and turned a deep magenta in colour, it still helps viewers imagine what this fascinating creature was like to see in real life.
CNN
14-06-2025
- General
- CNN
He once rebuked billionaires for not paying enough taxes. Now this historian says we need ‘moral ambition' to fight tyranny
It is one of the most inspiring photographs in modern history, one that reveals the worst and best of human nature with a click of a camera shutter. It is a black-and-white image of a crowd of workers at a shipbuilding factory in Nazi Germany. It shows hundreds of them tightly packed in virtual military formation, extending a Nazi salute to Adolf Hitler — all except for one man. He stands in the middle of the throng, coolly defiant, with his arms folded across his chest and a sour look on his face. Historians have debated the identity and fate of the man in the photo, which was taken in 1936. But the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman uses the image in his new book to ask two questions: What innate characteristic enabled that man to resist the fear the Nazi state instilled in so many of its citizens? And what can people today learn from him, and others who are fighting new forms of state-sponsored fear? Bregman says one antidote to that fear is 'moral ambition.' It's his term for people who blend the idealism of an activist with the ruthless pragmatism of an entrepreneur to make the world a better place. In his new book, 'Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference,' Bregman uses the example of that German shipyard worker and other ordinary people to critique what he sees as a common failing of people on the left: They fall for the 'illusion of awareness,' a belief that simply exposing people to injustice will inspire them to act. 'Awareness doesn't put food on the table. Awareness won't keep a roof over your head,' writes Bregman, a vegan who has spoken out against animal factory farming. 'With awareness, you don't cool down the planet, you're not finding shelter for those 100 million refugees, and you won't make a bit of difference for the 100 billion animals at factory farms worldwide. Awareness is at best a starting point, while for many activists, it seems to have become the end goal.' Bregman has built a global audience by making others face uncomfortable truths. He shot to prominence following his 2017 TED talk about overcoming poverty by offering a universal basic income. Two years later, he went viral at a 2019 Davos panel discussion for his scathing rebuke of billionaires for not paying their fair share of taxes. ('Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullsh** in my opinion,' he said). In a conversation from his home in New York City, Bregman spoke to CNN about why the Black Lives Matter movement failed to generate transformational change, why he gets most of his criticism from the left, and how his parents — Peta, an activist and special needs teacher, and his father, Kees, a minister — inspire his work. His remarks were edited for brevity and clarity. As a young boy, I was already obsessed with the Second World War. The country in which I grew up, the Netherlands, was occupied by the Nazis. I always wondered, what would I have done? There's huge literature around the people who actually did something. I was interested in the psychology of these resistance heroes. I thought that they were more altruistic, or maybe more extroverted, or maybe they have had certain privileges in the sense that sometimes you need resources to do the right thing. But none of that turned out to be true. It turns out that resistance heroes were really a cross-section of the population: rich, poor, young, old, left-wing, right-wing. A group of researchers looked at the evidence and said, hey, wait a minute, there is actually one thing that seems to be going on here. In 96% of all cases, when people were asked to join the resistance, they said yes. And then I had a epiphany. This (the resistance) was actually an idea that was spreading, almost like a pandemic. People were inspiring each other. This also explains why the resistance was a very local phenomenon; it wasn't evenly distributed over the country. People gave each other courage. That's super simple, but I think it's a quite profound lesson for us today. We often imagine that people do good things because they are good people. But it's exactly the other way around. You do good things, and that makes you a good person. You just got to get started or be inspired by others, and that's how you get there. Resistance is incredibly important. My fellow historian, Timothy Snyder, always says that we should not obey in advance, right? We shouldn't, even before the order goes out, start behaving as if we live in an authoritarian system. I was very glad to see Harvard show some courage, especially after the very cowardly behavior of some of the big law firms. Acts of resistance can be highly contagious, just as cowardice can be contagious. As a historian, I'm reminded of other periods in our history. It's often said that we live in a second Gilded Age (a tumultuous period of shocking income inequality and concentration of corporate power in the US). And if I look at the first one in the late 19th century, I see very similar things. I see an incredible amount of immorality and amount of political corruption. I see elites that were utterly detached from the realities of ordinary people's lives. But what gives me hope is that after the Gilded Age came the Progressive Era, with people like Theodore Roosevelt, a Harvard graduate (and a powerful progressive reformer), someone who grew up in a privileged environment. And then so many things happened in such a short period of time that were unthinkable: the (introduction of) income tax, labor and environmental regulations, the shorter work week, the breakup of big monopolies and corporate power. It was quite incredible. I'm not predicting that this will happen or anything like that, but I do think it is time for a countercultural revolution. It should be led by people from the bottom up, but also very much by elites who have a certain sense of noblesse oblige (the belief that people with wealth and power should help the less fortunate). This is really what you see in the progressive period. Take Alva Vanderbilt. She used to be this pretty decadent woman who was married to Cornelius Vanderbilt. She wanted to get into the Four Hundred, the most wealthy and elite families in New York. But then her husband died, and she did the same thing as MacKenzie Scott (the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. She turned into an activist and became one of the main financiers of the women's rights movement. This (the Progressive era) was very much a revolt among elites who were just utterly fed up with the total decadence, immorality, and also frankly the unseriousness of the people who were in power. I see the exact same thing today. At some point, it's time to get fed up with it and provide an alternative. But that really starts with doing the work yourself. I'm too much of a historian to be a real optimist. I know that things can go downhill very quickly. If you study Germany in the 1930s or the 1920s, you see a society that is one of the most civilized and technologically advanced countries in the world. There was this idiot named Adolf Hitler, but most people didn't take him seriously. We are living through an extraordinary moment. The next five to 10 years are going to be incredibly important for the future of the whole human race. The Industrial Revolution in 1750 was the most important thing that happened in all of human history. We are living through a similar moment. It's easy to see the dystopian possibilities, and I really do not want to dismiss them. But at the same time, some of the utopian possibilities that I sketch out in my first book, 'Utopia for Realists,' which were often dismissed as quite naïve — they become more realistic by the day. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, says that 50% of entry-level jobs could be gone five years from now (because of AI). We are going to have to rethink so many basic aspects of the social contract. This whole idea that you have to work for your money, that you're not a valuable human person if you don't have a job — we have to get rid of that idea quite soon, because it's going to be very cruel to hang on to that if we keep automating our jobs so quickly. All of this could lead to some wonderful utopian possibilities. We will finally be able to ditch the whole idea that you have to work for a living. Then we will finally be able to figure out what life is all about. Will we get it right? I don't know. Yes, I'm afraid so. I spend a lot of time studying the civil rights movement, and what really strikes me about that movement is just how effective it was in translating awareness into tangible results. They got these huge packages of legislation through Congress that made such a massive, tangible difference in the lives of real people. And then look at Black Lives Matter. It's incredibly impressive on one hand — it was the biggest protest movement in the history of the United States. But then look at the actual results. It's not nothing — some police forces changed a little bit. But compared to the amount of energy around that movement, it's been pretty disappointing. Prev Next This is not true for BLM alone. It's true for many protest movements of the last two decades. And this is probably because in this online era, it's easy to start up the empathy and the anger. We see it in Los Angeles (where people are protesting the Trump administration's sweeping immigration crackdown) right now. You get people out in the streets very quickly. But is there an actual plan, an actual strategy? Changing the world is very difficult. It takes enormous perseverance, and coalition building, which is quite difficult. You have an online environment where people are calling each other out all the time over purity politics. I often find it funny but also depressing that I get the most criticism from my friends on the left. It can be all kinds of things. I'm currently building an organization called the School for Moral Ambition. We are building fellowships for ambitious, talented people to take on some of these very pressing global issues, whether that's animal factory farming or tax avoidance by billionaires. But that stuff needs to be financed. So we work with groups like Patriotic Millionaires, for example — wealthy people who say, hey, tax me more. But for some on the left, it's like, ewww, you're working with rich people. In my book, I talk about the noble loser, those people who like to say, 'I stood on the right side of history. We didn't vote for Kamala (Harris), because Kamala was pro-Israel.' Well, look what that got us. Whether we're talking about people who are currently suffering in Palestine, animals who are suffering or people who are being oppressed — they don't care if you're right. They want you to win. I think so. I've always been very proud of my dad. I remember very well sitting in church, looking at my dad, and thinking he has the coolest job. I looked at my friends, and one's dad was an accountant and another was a marketer. And my dad is a minister, who talked about the biggest questions of life. I don't give the same answers (as him) to all those questions, even though I think we've become closer philosophically and spiritually as I got older. But I've always believed that those are the right questions to ask. We have only one life on this precious planet, and it's very short. No matter how rich we get, we can never buy ourselves more time. A lot of my secular and progressive friends love to dunk on religion, and sometimes for good reasons. But I've always appreciated those parts of religion that force us to reckon with the bigger questions of what life is actually about. My mother is an incredible woman. She is the only one who keeps getting arrested in our family. The other day she was arrested again as a 68-year-old climate activist. For her, it's always been very natural and logical to live in line with your own ideals. A lot of people think certain things, but they don't act on it. Many of my friends on the left care so much about poverty and inequality, and then I'll ask, 'How much do you donate to effective charities?' and very often, the answer is nothing. What I've learned from my mother is that you can just do what you say. She's also never been afraid to use the power of shame. A lot of people say that shaming is toxic, and I tend to disagree. I think there's a reason why we humans are pretty much the only species in the whole animal kingdom with the ability to blush. They thought it was hilarious. Those are the moments when I make my mother proud. John Blake is a CNN senior writer and author of the award-winning memoir, 'More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.'
Washington Post
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Berlin wants to host the Olympics again as 100th anniversary of 1936 Games looms
BERLIN — Berlin is making a bid to host the Olympic Games again, possibly 100 years after the city hosted the 1936 edition under the Nazis. Berlin mayor Kai Wegner is to present plans to bid for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, with help from four other German states, on Tuesday at Berlin's Olympic stadium.
