As part of our commitment to dredge the outer-reaches of respectable cinema for those oft overlooked pearls, maddog magazine has spoken to renowned critic and programmer of Japanese film Jasper Sharp, founder of the excellent www.midnighteye.com, about his new book on the bizarre world of the Japanese Pink film. Read on if you have a taste for something completely different…

MD: First off what exactly is a Pink film?

Jasper: Strictly speaking, these are low budget erotic films from Japan which are shot on 35mm film and intended for specialist adult cinemas, as opposed to being distributed on video/DVD/satellite etc – this is a unique situation, as no other country has an industry dedicated to theatrical adult film production any more. This all died out in Europe and America in the 80s. There are about 5 companies remaining who produce these type of films in Japan now, and between them they make about 80-100 films a year. Between 1971-88 you also had Nikkatsu making its Roman Porno line of films, but these aren’t really pink films, as Nikkatsu was a major studio with a history reaching back to the very beginning of Japanese cinema, and the company owned its own cinema chain, as well as having a permanent staff of directors, contracted stars and other technicians.

MD: Behind the Pink Curtain is the first proper study of this genre. Why has this subject been ignored for so long? And why did you decide to tackle it?

Jasper: The Internet and DVD have made it far easier to find out information about all aspects of Japanese cinema. Sadly though most of the info that was coming out about the pink film genre was misleading or just plain wrong, with people using the term broadly to describe any film from Japan with a bit (or a lot) or flesh and ignoring its unique production and distribution system. No one really knew anything about its history or industrial context, and because of the rather salubrious venues where these films were screened and the fact very few were ever distributed abroad, no one had really taken any time to explore the genre further.

The other reason why I wanted to write about it was because there were clearly some interesting films coming out of this sector. Directors were using the format not just to make sex films, but proper films on a low budget that just happened to contain sex. So even if you took out all the sex, in the best films you still had politics, social commentary, humour, stylistic experimentation and loads of aspects that were of wider interest. Pink film is essentially a sub-industry of the main industry, with a slightly subversive, punkish attitude, where people who want to make a career making films to be screened in cinemas are able to do so a lot easier.

The other reason is that during the time I was in Japan between 2002-5, I was researching Japanese cinema more generally for the website I co-edit Midnight Eye; for example, trying to find out the history of genres like anime, horror, silent films etc, the structure of the various major companies, how Japanese film reflected the country’s history. Pink was just one aspect of that, but through various bizarre happenstances, I ended up meeting quite a lot of filmmakers who had or were still working in this sub-industry, and over numerous meetings in bars or film screenings or whatever, got a far better idea of who watched them, who made them, why they made them, and what these films were really about. As no one outside of Japan had really looked into this before (although there’s quite a few books in Japan on the subject), it seemed a good subject to explore more fully.

MD: The book strongly argues that there is something more to the films than titilation.

Jasper: Actually most of them don’t have anything more to them than titillation, but even those that do are pretty well made within the limitations of their budget and market. They have real stories and real performances and the Japanese backdrops are always interesting for foreigners. Because hardcore pornography, and up until recently even the depiction of pubic hair, is effectively illegal in Japan, I think there is a market in the West, as there are plenty of people who might want to watch something a little steamy without being confronted with interminable in-out sequences filmed in grueling close-up.

The key films of interest for me mainly come from the 60s, when the genre just began, and the films did manage to reflect a fascinating political reality that most foreigners are barely aware of. The movies of Koji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi for example, depict Tokyo overrun by student radicals burning American flags because of the Vietnam War and hurling Molotov Cocktails at the police. Adachi was originally an experimental filmmaker with strong leftwing beliefs, who made pink films because it was a great way of reaching a new audiences and pushing subversive political ideas in their faces. He was pretty well respected at the time, also as a film critic and theoriest. He traveled to Cannes Film Festival in 1971 with the internationally renowned Nagisa Oshima, who was essentially the Jean-Luc Godard of Japan. On his way back home he shot a pro-Palestinian propaganda documentary in the Middle East, and eventually returned to the area for 30 years, where he rubbed shoulders with guerillas and members of the international terrorist group the Japan Red Army.

He came back to Japan around the same time I first arrived there, and when I saw his films, I was bowled over. When I heard a little about his life story though, I was intrigued, and it made me realize how little I knew about the political situation, not only in Japan at this time, but in the rest of the world too. How did a Japanese sex filmmaker end up in Palestine? In fact, both Adachi and Wakamatsu have gone on to make non-pink films now, even though they are in their seventies; Wakamatsu’s own story of the Japanese leftist movement, The United Red Army, played at London Film Festival this year.

MD: How long did the book take to write, how many pink films did you have to watch and (most importantly) are you feeling alright?

Jasper: I researched it for about 2 years, interviewing the directors, watching a lot of films (literally hundreds, but I couldn’t tell you exactly how many, and it wasn’t as fun as you might think!) and trying to track down Japanese sources. Writing was also about 2 years, pretty much non-stop. It took far longer than I expected, but there’s so many fascinating stories and characters behind the scenes that I wanted to get as much down as possible.

MD: What's your favourite pink film or director and why? (keep it clean please)

Jasper: Koji Wakamatsu is basically the big name from pink in the 60s, and you genuinely can’t go wrong with his films, even though, because of their age, they’re pretty tame if you’re looking for quick thrills. Maybe my favourite film is Abnormal Family, made in the 80s by Masayuki Suo, who later had a big mainstream hit with Shall We Dance?, remade with Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez. It’s a hilarious pastiche of the ‘Golden Oldie’ films of the classic Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. I also like Yuji Tajiri’s Rustling in the Bed a lot, which is a really sweet love story about an office girl who falls in love with a younger man who refuses to commit to her.

MD: Tell us more about the programme of films you are touring to accompany the book launch?

Jasper: The problem with a lot of the earlier more retro and more interesting pink films is that most of them are considered lost now, or in such bad quality you can’t screen them, so I luckily managed to get two totally new prints made up of one of the first colour pink films: the totally psychedelic Blue Film Woman, and Adachi’s Gushing Prayer, which is a dreamlike and experimental mix of colour and black and white. We played these first in the Austin Fantastic Film Festival in Texas, along with some slightly harder more modern stuff, like the utterly outrageous S&M Hunter, but in England these are going to be premiering at the BFI in December, and will be accompanied by a whole load of classics from the 60s and 70s, including quite a few Nikkatsu Roman Porno films. These are then going to tour around selected venues across the UK. I think it’s going to open quite a few eyes!

Words > Dean Bowman

Buy the book here: