Adachi's first truly radical film, Gushing Prayer is a stylistically audacious mediation on sexuality and political consciousness quite literally embodied in a quartet of teenagers trying to simultaneously discover and disarm their own sexuality. Just as the youth interrupt their earnest, orgiastic sex with philosophical debates about desire and corporality, so too does Adachi's camera disavow traditional visual pleasure, abstracting and fragmenting the young bodies through avant-garde cinematography and montage. Dizzying, hallucinatory and bracingly intellectual, Gushing Prayer engages theories of Bataille and Freud to understand how the struggle between Eros and the unconscious defines gendered relations and power.