All night Sasori at the Rio in Dalston on 24 Sept

There’s been a whole load of film-related news in our buzzing capital these past few days. Admittedly, the announcement of the London Film Festival programme yesterday slightly overshadowed my own announcement of the dates for Zipangu Fest (18-24 November at the ICA, if you can’t be bothered to scroll down a bit). Of course, we haven’t actually made  public any of our programming choices yet, which we’re keeping a closely guarded secret until nearer the time, but you might hear me let a few things slip out if you’re at the Female Prisoner #701 Triple Bill at the Rio Cinema in Dalston on 24 September. The event starts at 11pm and carries on through to daybreak, and I’ve been kindly asked by the organisers, Cigarette Burns Cinema, to stand up between screenings and deliver some patter about Meiko Kaji, Toei Pinky Violence, and other related topics. Perhaps I’ll crack under the pressure of sleep deprivation and end up revealing the whole programme…

The cool iconic beauty of Meiko Kaji, as Sasori

Anyway, my presence aside, this is going to be a wonderful night. If you’ve not seen any of the Female Prisoner #701 films (or Female Convict Scorpion, or whatever other titles you like to refer to them under), then you’re in for a rare treat – these aren’t your average Woman in Prison bits of exploitation fluff, but hypnotic, frequently surreal and dreamlike action titles with a logical progression between each of the various instalments and a captivating performance by the cool iconic beauty Meiko Kaji. I’ve not seen them for a while myself, and it’s going to be fab watching them on the big screen all at once.

The hypnotic Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972)

The films are being presented in association with the Scala Forever season currently running across a number of venues this Summer (although chiefly The Roxy Bar and Screen) in memory of the legendary repertory cinema up in Kings Cross in which so many of us had our viewing habits formed. In fact, I’m just looking at the programme and I notice that the ICA are showing my favourite Imamura film, The Ballad of Narayama, on the 28th and 29th of this month, which, as I wrote in the intro to Behind the Pink Curtain, proved a seminal experience when I first saw it on a Double Bill at the Scala with Koji Wakamatsu’s Violated Angels back in 1990.

Check out the Female Prisoner all-nighter Facebook page here and more info on this and Cigarette Burns’ other activites can be found here.

Nucleus Films' Video Nasties cover art by the legendary Graham Humphreys

I really can’t emphasise too much how great this release is, and for a number of reasons. Firstly, it provides a nostalgic parade of guilty pleasures for those who were around during the era. Secondly, it’s simply a wonderful piece of social history, focussing on a time when movies were increasingly more likely to be seen in one’s living room than in actual cinemas, resulting in probably the most dramatic shift in consumption patterns in film history – a fact hard to appreciate in these days when streamable live-video is readily available in the palm of your hand. One also forgets how utterly sleazy the early unregulated videotape industry was in terms of marketing its product, with fly-by-night distribution companies cropping up all over the country trying to make a quick buck out of films that had had little commercial currency theatrically with some deliciously lurid ad campaigns such as Go Video’s ones for Cannibal Holocaust and SS Experiment Camp that ultimately landed the whole industry in hot water. And finally, it presents a terrifying wake-up call as to the processes by which the media can whip up a hysterical panic around a certain phenomenon, around which careerist politicians swiftly rally like flies to a dog turd and hurriedly force through unworkable, impracticable, and, as it turns out, legally unenforceable legislation with little regard as to how it will be implemented, totally bypassing all existing systems in hope of easy political victories.

Go Video's infamous box art for Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust

It might seem overly dramatic comparing the suppression of cheapjack Z-grade horror videos with, as many have done, the Nazi party’s notorious book-burning sessions of the early 1930s, but let us not forget, numerous businesses were closed down and people landed up in prison during the 1980s just for renting out videos of films that even their makers didn’t take seriously. Given the numerous other civil liberty abuses during this last period of Tory government, notably the vulgar overuse of police power during the Miner’s Strikes, it’s no wonder that a good number of people were very concerned, and we forget history’s lessons out our peril.

Sergio Garrone's SS Experiment Camp, one of a number of Nazi-themed softcore woman in prison flicks from Italy that were far more offensive in concept than in practice

The final irony about this whole hysterical period was last year’s revelation that the Video Recordings Act of 1984 was never referred to the European commission, and thus legally unenforceable (you can read more about this in an article for the Guardian newspaper entitled ‘Video Recordings Act was a blank tape’ by Julian Petley, one of the talking heads in West’s documentary) – a cold crumb of comfort for figures such as David Grant, who from 3rd February 1984 was sentenced to 12 months in prison for distributing Romano Scavolini’s shoddy slasher Nightmares in a Damaged Brain (1981) through his company World of Video 2000, a title now readily available on DVD for less than a tenner. (Pornographer Grant unfortunately didn’t live long enough to hear the punchline to this bitter joke, dying in “mysterious circumstances” in 1991).

The tape inlay for the video that saw its distributor David Grant spend a year in prison

Sprawled out on the sofa with a bottle of red wine, wilfully submitting myself to the deluge of grainy trailers of films largely long-consigned to the dustbin of history, took me right back to my teenage years. It also highlighted to me just how many film critics and film makers active today were seduced into cinephilia by the alluring illegality of such films as Last House on the Left, The Gestapo’s Last Orgy and The Werewolf and the Yeti. For someone growing up in the cultural backwaters of North Devon, where I recall one Summer the single screen of Barnstaple’s Astor Cinema (my only one within a 20 mile radius) was occupied for several months by the Arnold Schwarzenegger/Danny DeVito vehicle Twins, the frisson of trawling around second-hand record shops and car boot sales and coming away with films such as Zombie Holocaust or Nightmare Maker, acquired for a few quid to be sold on through the underground subcultural network of pre-cert VHS traders for around £20-30, was irresistible. From a chance encounter with a guy in my local video shop in the mid-80s who was rumoured to posses an original Vipco release of Fulci’s Zombie Flesheaters (the cut version minus the eyeball-skewering, alas…), I was hooked.

Nasty or silly? Paul Naschy's wolfman hits the Himalayas in this obscure Spanish monster movie banned for "obscenity" in Britain during the 1980s

It wasn’t long before I was immersed within an underground sub-culture of tape-trading and fanzines such as Shock Xpress and, my own personal fave, Samhain, produced just down the road in Exeter. Rather than the blood-crazed, semi-literate gorehounds one might have been led to believe contributed to such publications, their writers were unexpectedly literate, incisive and often political too. Many of them, such as Kim Newman and Stephen Thrower, are now very well-known even outside genre circles, and can be seen offering their opinions and observations in the various documentaries on the Nucleus Films disks. Through such writers I learned about auteur theory by way of the films of Dario Argento and Mario Bava; I was introduced to the films of Nagisa Oshima and Pier Paolo Pasolini; and was even slipped such highbrow concepts as Brechtian distantiation techniques through analyses of faux-documentaries such as Cannibal Holocaust. In short, I learned about the history of whole new cinematic cultures previously unacknowledged by mainstream critics. My other bible was The Aurum Film Encyclopedia of Horror, edited by Phil Hardy, which sat proudly alongside the battered copy of Dennis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies bequeathed to me when I was about eight.

William Asher's Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (1983), released in the UK as Nightmare Maker, and actually a pretty decent film from what I remember.

I developed a ‘gotta-catch-them-all’ approach to horror cinema due to these books and magazine, in particular the seventy or so titles on the Video Nasties list, which in turn led to an exploration of the wider world of uncertified, pre-Video Recordings Act exploitation releases. Should I wear it like a badge of honour that I’d trawled though 75% of SF Brownrigg’s oeuvre before I got round to watching Citizen Kane? Probably not. Or that I could reel off whole filmographies, complete with original Italian language titles and years, of directors such as Bruno Mattei and Umberto Lenzi (I can’t any more, sadly, and probably the reason I fared so dismally in my A-levels), or that I can attribute a large part of my current fascination with Japanese cinema after being lured to a double bill of Violated Angels and The Ballad of Narayama at the Scala in 1990 only due to the fact that the former was included, rather curiously, in Hardy’s book (even then I had a sneaking suspicion that Imamura’s was by far the more superior film…)

Unhinged (Don Gronquist, 1982) - a real snore

My tastes moved on pretty quickly in the early 1990s, away from cinema altogether for a brief few years if I’m honest, mainly due to the difficulties in finding kindred spirits during my flat-sharing (and by extension, VCR-sharing) university years. My completist goal of trawling through all of the nasties came to an abrupt end after forking out £25 for an original of Unhinged, a film that, like so many on the list, had little to recommend it beyond a few brief scenes of unconvincing splattery bloodshed. I did manage to stumble across an original of Terror Eyes, the UK retitling of an undistinguished slasher movie originally released as Night School starring Rachel Ward and helmed by Ken Hughes (the director of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), which I picked up for a couple of quid in Leamington Spa in 1993, but by this time I’d long lost touch with my old trading partners and was unable to liquidise this asset.

I think that it shortly after this point that I threw away my entire VHS collection and embarked on a new globe-trotting stage of my life. Outside the repressive censorship climate of the UK, I found many of the forbidden fruits of my youth freely available to rent from video stores in Canada, Holland and Japan, but by this time my interests had more or less wandered elsewhere.

Poor White Trash II (1974), a.k.a. Scum of the Earth by the archtypal obscure exploitation auteur S.F. Brownrigg. I don't think this ever made the official list, but you wouldn't get away with a cover like this nowadays!

(to be continued….)

More details about this wonderful package on Nucleus Film’s website, or grab yourself a copy from Amazon here.

Original covers for Video Nasties can  be found on this website here.

Ballad of Narayama

Back at home after a week dashing round the country for various reasons, not least of which was the Imamura retrospective at the Arnolfini which I had a hand in. After the punishing routine of Raindance, I was rather grateful to be afforded the opportunity just to sit in a cinema over a long weekend and binge on the six wonderful films in the programme in relative peace and quiet. Imamura was the one director who really stood out when I first started exploring Japanese cinema. There was something about his sense of humour and his general world view that struck a chord with me, the notion (some might call it cynical) that humans are essentially animals whose primary motivations are the satiation of basic needs such as food and sex, and their every other action is merely an attempt to rationalise these drives.

But it’s been almost ten years ago since I looked at the director in any depth, and I’d not revisited many of these films since. It was funny, because I thought the basic concept of the season, to reassess Imamura’s legacy, was slightly odd, being as his status as one of the key figures in Japanese cinema, and of the 1960s in particular, hardly needed emphasizing. But it became clear talking to several of the members of the audience that while Imamura’s name might be well known in Japanese film fan circles, the general public in the UK really haven’t had a chance to see many of his films, and by and large they loved them. It occurred to me how little of his work is available on DVD in comparison with other directors such as, say, Seijun Suzuki. It just goes to show how much a director’s currency can change over time. The last retrospectives on Imamura in the UK, I believe, were just after his Palme d’Or win for The Eel, and that was well over ten years ago. Clearly people do need to be reminded of this director after all.

Pigs and Battleships

Watching the films back to back it struck me, while there are certain uniform themes and ideas explored in his films, individually they are all very different in style and tone. I’d never actually seen Pigs and Battleships before, for example, which was one of the standouts of the programme, a more obvious commercial piece which bore some similarities with Sun Tribe films such as Crazed Fruit and Cruel Story of Youth, yet also signalled the direction that Imamura would pursue, with its bawdy humour, really vibrant style, and that wonderfully surreal ending as the pigs stampede through the streets of Yokosuka. Ballad of Narayama I’d not seen for years, but it has a special place in my heart as one of my first encounters with Japanese cinema in a screening at the Scala in the late 1980s (with Wakamatsu’s Violated Angels). Watching it again really spelled out for me what an amazing achievement it is, perhaps the quintessential Imamura film. The film isn’t well-known at all in Britain with modern audiences, but there is a US DVD. But one of the main treats of this program was finally getting to see Profound Desire of the Gods on a big screen, and what a bizarre film it is. If Ballad of Narayama is Imamura’s masterpiece, then this title is his folly, inviting comparisons with Herzog at his most ambitious, or Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain. It has its more digressive moments, it must be said, but the sheer scale and energy behind it really signals this out as an essential piece of cinematic history which will never be repeated. It is simply bewildering that this film is not out there on DVD anywhere, and I can’t work out why, because it’s handled by Nikkatsu, so obtaining the rights shouldn’t be too problematic. Someone rectify this situation, please!

Profound Desire of the Gods

Anyway, the main Arnolfini session is over, though there’s still a double bill of Vengeance is Mine and The Eel on Sunday 8^th November. Those in the UK who couldn’t make it to Bristol will be heartened to here that the films are now up in London and screening at the ICA this very weekend, before moving to the Glasgow Film Theatre next week. Go watch them all. Who knows when you’ll get a chance to see them on the big screen in the UK again.

Shohei Imamura

I promised back in my posting about the BFI’s Oshima season that I had some more news about an upcoming season focused on another New Wave director. Well, this is is – a retrospective and symposium on Shohei Imamura that will be hitting the Arnolfini in Bristol at the end of October. The details aren’t up online yet, though a look at the Arnolfini website will give you an idea of just what a cool venue it is – wish I could make it down for the Aelita: Queen of Mars screening… Bristol sure is an exciting place to be a film fan, I sometimes don’t think they know how lucky they are.

This season was organised with Patrick Crogan of UWE university with some assistance from myself and the Arnolfini’s Al Cameron. I’m enclosing the schedule below from the Arnolfini’s own press release, but I should add the proviso that this info may be subject to change – we’re still working on the guests for the symposium, though you can bet I’ll be there.

Here are the details.

THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA (18)

THU 15 OCT, 7.30pm
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1983, 2h 10m, Subtitled

The Ballad of Narayama

In an isolated mountain region, austere village laws to ensure survival dictate that, despite her good health, matriarch Orin must shortly ascend the sacred summit of Narayama where her soul must be laid to rest like all who turn 70. But before she goes, she has much family business to attend to. One of the greatest Japanese films: a haunting, poignant meditation on human nature, existence and death that won Imamura his first Palme d’Or.

INTENTIONS OF MURDER (CTBA)

FRI 16 OCT, 7.30pm
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1964, 2h 25m, Subtitled

Intentions of Murder

Bold, expansive and intriguing, this tale of a low-caste household drudge who runs off with the burglar who breaks into her house and assaults her, marks the most complete consolidation of the themes that inform Imamura’s initial cycle of features in the late 50s and early 60s. Beautifully photographed and technically perfect, a faultlessly constructed model of sophistication.

PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS (CTBA)

SAT 17 OCT, 6.45pm
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1961, 1h 17m, Subtitled

Pigs and Battleships

A cruelly comic movie, set in Yokosuka, a coastal city dominated by vice and a U.S. military base, where gangs kill each other over the right to control the black market in US Army food scraps — here, Imamura emerges as Japan’s incarnation of Buñuel, omnisciently satiric and utterly cynical. Irreverent and unabashedly human: a defining self-portrait of Japan in the post-war moment.

BLACK RAIN (PG)

SAT 17 OCT, 8.30pm
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1989, 2h 3m, Subtitled

Black Rain

A deeply affecting study of the uncalculated tragedy of nuclear holocaust, as a couple try to marry off their niece after Hiroshima. In contrast to Imamura’s usual subversively bawdy cinema, this is a spare and tonally muted masterpiece of dignity and human resilience, its carefully composed monochrome reminding us that Imamura began his career as an assistant to Ozu.

PROFOUND DESIRE OF THE GODS

SUN 18 OCT, 2.30pm
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1968, 2h 52m, Subtitled

Profound Desire of the Gods

A crystallization of Imamura’s ideas, transported to an island so secluded its inhabitants have evolved into animalistic, incestuous nutcases. Into this hothouse, full of superstition and hungry wildlife, comes a mainland civil engineer, looking for a fresh water source so a factory can be built. A hair-raising, richly imagined epic, filthy with unforgettable images and, by its end, beautifully mysterious.

THE INSECT WOMAN (CTBA)

SUN 18 OCT, 6.30pm
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1963, 2h 3m, Subtitled

Insect Woman

A beetle labouring up a tiny mound opens the film, symbol of a woman named Tomé’s slow rise through poverty, servitude, and exploitation to become one of Tokyo’s top brothel-keepers, in a time of profound national change under the repressive influence of a patriarchal society. This objective yet sympathetic portrait of Imamura’s archetype – the sensual, primal, and strong-willed heroine – celebrates the resilient soul of a marginalized national identity.

PIGS, EELS & INSECTS: SYMPOSIUM

SAT 17 OCT, 10am – 5pm, £5/£3

Pigs and Battleships

A one day event bringing together experts including Professor Tadao Sato of the Japan Academy of Moving Images, to explore and celebrate the career of Shohei Imamura. The panel will examine his incisive insights into the lives, loves and experiences of everyday people in post-war Japan. His characters move in a fascinating zone between documentary and fiction, navigating between private desires and public duty, tradition and modernity, and local and westernizing forces. Mark Bould, Reader in Film Studies at UWE, and Jasper Sharp, editor of Midnight Eye, are among the symposium presenters.

DOUBLE BILL

SUN 8 NOV, 2.30pm

THE EEL (18)
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1997, 1h 57m, Subtitled

This quirky, surreal and affecting film, following the attempts of a convicted murderer to reintegrate himself into normal life – with the help of his eel friend – after a prison sentence for murdering his philandering wife, won Imamura his second Palme d’Or. A flash of quiet brilliance that resonates long after the images have faded from the screen.

+

VENGEANCE IS MINE (18)
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1979, 2h 20m, Subtitled

Based on the true story of a cold-blooded sociopath, this morally-ambivalent story unfolds using the killer’s confessions and reconstructed testimonies to retrace his past in an attempt to discover what made this monster. Exploring the problems inherent with reconstructing real-life events within a fictional format, Imamura once again proves himself ahead of the game.

SEASON PASS: ALL FILMS & SYMPOSIUM: £20/£15
SCREENINGS: £6/£4.50
SYMPOSIUM: £5/£3

With generous support from The Japan Foundation, The Daiwa Foundation and UWE Film Studies Research Group. Film prints supplied by the Japan Foundation.