Japanese distributors, working largely in the realm of photo-illustrations, were adept at movie poster design during the 1960s and 1970s. To promote Western films, emblazoning the English word “sex” on the art was a common technique, which we’ve explored before in collections here and here. This poster was made for the 1969 Italian arthouse flick Nerosubianco, which starred Swedish beauty Anita Sanders. The title is a portmanteau of “nero” for black and “bianco” for white—“black on white.” That should tell you what one of the central themes is. The Japanese title 白/黑 means basically the same thing. In the U.S., though, the film premiered as Attraction, and was also promoted as The Artful Penetration of Barbara.
Despite its x rating, artful would be the key word with this Tinto Brass directed vehicle, which via only the thinnest narrative thread follows an upper class wife played by Anita Sanders through a disjointed series of vignettes as she challenges the constraints of her unsatisfying life, an exploration symbolized by her interracial attraction to co-star Terry Carter. Brass flexes his avant garde muscles, using montages, still frames, ironic juxtapositions, comic book art, single-word dialogue, historical footage, assorted voiceovers of sociological, political, and religious nature, and a psychedelic rock soundtrack from Freedom, performed onscreen by the band at intervals in Greek chorus fashion.
What’s it all ultimately about? It’s an indictment of social control, especially of the sort brandished by the church and political establishment. He makes a good point. Holy texts were written by men who thought the Earth was flat, the sun moved over it, the stars were holes in a dome or sheet, meat spontaneously produced maggots, bloodletting cured illness, good health derived from balanced humors, and hundreds of other ideas that are objectively wrong. So it’s easy to decide they were also wrong about how humans should treat each other or feel about sex. Yet beliefs dating from that time still rule societies around the planet and serve as useful tools for political control.
The point of Nerosubianco is crystal clear: love, nudity, and sex aren’t obscene no matter the race or gender of those involved; hatred and violence are the real obscenities. Those who are fearful of the former and embrace the latter are profoundly sick. Brass, now aged ninety-one, must be incredibly disappointed that this lesson still hasn’t been learned. But he did his part to help. You sort of get the sense of actors participating in a project with only a fuzzy idea of what he had gotten them into, but they more than served his purpose. Nerosubianco has no premiere date for Japan. It opened in Italy today in 1969.
