Zipangu Fest 2011 design by Michael Lomon

If you want to read the original press releases, you can find them on the press section of our website here, but if you want more basic details about the lineup, you can find the full schedule either on the ICA website or on the Zipangu Fest website.

Basically we’ve divided the programme into four sections, all of which overlap and inter-link in various cunning ways that I’m about to outline: Sounds of Zipangu, Experimental/Animation, Zipangu Retro, and Nuclear Reactions. The first section consists of two European-produced documentaries that look at Japanese avant-garde/experimental music and the traditional, religious and contemporary cultural forces that inform it, with We Don’t Care About Music Anyway… and KanZeOn both looking as good as they sound.

We Don't Care About Music Anyway... (Cédric Dupire & Gaspard Kuentz)

The latter film, which also screened over this summer at Shinsedai in Toronto and EvA in Estonia, provides the inspiration for our opening party, which features an astounding line-up of DJs and performers, not least in the form of tat2mi, the beat-boxing Buddhist monk featured in the film in his first ever London performance. The event, to be held in the ICA’s bar, boasts a live remix of the visuals by Amoeba.Av with director/cinematographer Tim Grabham (aka Cinema Iloobia).

I’ve already posted the flyer for this party just below this entry on my blog, so do feel free to circulate, won’t you!  You can win tickets for our marvellous opening screening and party via this competition on the Japan Centre website.

All of this links rather nicely with another film in this section, Abraxas, about a former punk musician turned Buddhist monk who finds himself drawn back to give just one more performance. Not only is the soundtrack by Yoshihide Ohtomo, a towering figure in Japan’s avant-garde scene who is featured in We Don’t Care About Music Anyway…, but coincidentally the film was shot in the rural Fukushima region devastated by the earthquake and tsunami on 11 March of this year.

Set in Fukushima and featuring a soundtrack by Yoshihide Ohtomo and a starring turn by Suneohair, Naoki Kato's Abraxas.

The earthquake of course can’t help but cast a long shadow over any Japan-related events this year. Zipangu Fest will be doing their bit to raise awareness and hopefully a bit of money to help those affected when we move temporarily out of the ICA on Tuesday 22 Nov for a special charity screening of experimental films at Cafe Oto in Dalston. The two Nippon Re-Read programmes, as announced previously on this website, are part of a touring programme curated by Kinema Nippon (Aily Nash and Nine Yamamoto-Masson) and cover key works in the history of Japanese experimental film from the 1960s to present.

If you’re interested in either experimental film or Japanese cinema, the Nippon Re-Read: Radical Fragments and Abstractions from Japan I & II night on Tues 22 Nov presents a unique chance to watch these works placed within an informative yet fun context at one of London’s funkiest venues (worth visiting for the okonomiyaki and decent bar prices alone). It’s only £5 to get in, although you are free to pay more as all profits will go to the Japan Society Earthquake Relief Fund, and you can also buy advance tickets via WeGotTickets. As if this wasn’t amazing enough value for money in its own right, legendary London-based Japanese psychedelic rockers Bo Ningen will also be in attendance to perform a live soundtrack to Tatsuo Sato’s surreal animated classic Cat Soup from 2001.

Experimental films and a live performance from Bo Ningen at Cafe Oto on 22 Nov

This provides me with two ways to segue back into the other parts of the programme, but I’ll take the Experimental/Anime route. Alongside Abraxas on Saturday we have the Beyond Anime: The Outer Limits programme which, to whet your appetite for Cat Soup, will provide a wonderful and revealing glimpse of the innovation and creativity in Japan’s independent animation scene. This is a truly amazing sample of works covering a wide range of ground, but I’ll say it now, Sayaka Oka’s mesmerising Melting Medama is about the closest thing to a religious epiphany I’ve experienced this year.

What eyes are made for - Sayaka Oku's Melting Medama, part of the Beyond Anime programme

On a similar tack is the Enter the Cosmos programme of three works by that maestro of cinematic abstraction, Takashi Makino. His recent film Still in Cosmos will be screened as part of Tuesday’s Nippon Re-Read earthquake appeal night, but here’s a unique chance to immerse yourself in the full experience, with Makino himself there to introduce the films. Linking back to the Sounds of Zipangu section, Makino’s films are collaborations with some of the the foremost international talents of noise and soundscape music, including Jim O’Rourke and Machinefabriek. Another connection is that both Makino and KanZeOn’s Tim Grabham have served some time under the Quay Brothers, an influence that will become all the more clear when you see the Death of Phonebook animation made by Tim (under his customary handle of Cinema Iloobia), the honorary gaijin included in the Beyond Anime section.

Shasyo, one of several of Ryu Furusawa's films included in the Beyond Anime section

On the other side of the Sounds of Zipangu musical spectrum lies the sickly sweet strains of J-pop teeny band Momoiro Clover, as featured in Koji Shiraishi’s hilariously cruel J-horror mockumentary Shirome. Watch the tribe of teen songstresses agree to sell their souls for fame and fortune, and remember, nothing about their performance is faked for the camera!

Horror also lies at the heart of one of our Zipangu Retro screenings, and I am absolutely delighted that we have managed to make this come together, in partnership with the National Film Centre of Tokyo and the Japan Visualmedia Translation Academy. Never seen before in the UK, the 1938 supernatural chiller Ghost Cat and the Mysterious Shamisen is going to shake up a few preconceptions about the development of the horror around the world during is early decades, revealing that the genre was alive and kicking in Japan long before the films of Nobuo Nakagawa for Shintoho in the 1950s. Pioneering director Ushihara went to Hollywood to study filmmaking under Charlie Chaplin in the 1920s, so it is no surprise that he kept more than one eye on other developments in American cinema throughout his career. Personally I think that with its well-deployed arsenal of kaleidoscopic lenses, double-exposures and slow-mo sequences, in the expressionistic stakes Ghost Cat is easily abreast of, if not ahead of the Universal horrors of the period. Zipangu Fest have especially arranged to get this film subtitled and available for English speaking audiences, so make sure you don’t miss it while it is screening over here – the film gets its UK premiere ahead of Zipangu Fest at Leeds International Film Festival on Tues 8 and Thurs 10 Nov, and will be playing in Bradford in December and Newcastle in March. More details as they come, but if anyone out there reading this is also interested in showing this rare gem anywhere else, then drop me a line!

Vintage chills in our UK premiere of Ghost Cat and the Mysterious Shamisen

And our second Zipangu Retro screening takes us into our final section, Nuclear Reactions. Lucky Dragon No. 5 is a little-seen work by a pretty well-known director, Kaneto Shindo. One of the most important figures in the history of independent cinema in Japan, Shindo is primarily known in the West for his two horror films Onibaba and Kuroneko (another film about a ghostly black cat!), but also for a number of films on the subject of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and the director’s own birthplace of Hiroshima, beginning with the first fictional work from Japan on the subject, Children of Hiroshima (1952) right up to his latest film Postcard (2011), realised at the age of 98. I have no idea when was the last time this film was shown in the United Kingdom, if ever, but suffice it to say, you probably won’t get another chance to see it soon. The film is a docudrama based on a real life incident in which the crew of a fishing trawler were caught in the vicinity of American atomic bomb testing in the Pacific during the 1950s. The incident is pretty well-known today, if only because it inspired the original Godzilla.

Shinpei Takeda's poignant documentary road trip, Hiroshima Nagasaki Download.

Lest we forget, the legacy of the atomic bomb is the subject of our second film in the Nuclear Reactions section, with Hiroshi Nagasaki Download detailing a road-trip by the Mexican-based Japanese artist Shinpei Takeda, who will be coming as a guest of Zipangu Fest to introduce his film, as he and his college friend embark on a road trip across North America to interview a number of the survivors of this tragedy who have now made their homes outside of Japan.

The Nuclear Reactions section is our attempt to remember the potentially lethal destructive power of atomic energy, whether used militarily or to provide our energy needs, with a series of four films produced in a country that has suffered the most from its misuse. The nuclear power debate in Britain seems to have already died down in the wake of the catastrophe at the Fukushima power plant, a power plant that politicians repeatedly told the Japanese public was completely safe. In Japan, Hitomi Kamanaka has made several films that have attempted to delve beneath the claims of the politicians long before the disaster, and her findings in the two films that we are screening at the festival, are both chilling and yet also provide hope for those who are prepared to engage with the issues more fully. With the director travelling to Sellafield in the first of these two films to investigate a radiation leak that already seems to have been forgotten by the British media and public, the films offer little in the way of cold comfort for those still convinced by the “can’t happen here” argument.

So what do you do with nuclear waste? Hitomi Kamanaka's Rokkasho Rhapsody provides a chilling answer.

So there’s a guide through our programme for this year’s Zipangu Fest. No doubt there are even more links between the films if you look for them, and we really hope this years festival succeeds in fulfilling our goal of bringing people together to enjoy these films, and to talk about them and other related matters. I’m certainly looking forward to it myself!

Almost forgot too, just a few days before the festival, me and Julian Ross will be at the Horse Hospital near Russell Sq at the invitation of Electric Sheep magazine for An Evening of Subversive Japanese Cinema. Electric Sheep and Strange Attractor will present a screening of Koji Wakamatsu’s anarcho-pinku Sex Jack (1970) to tie-in with their recent book publication The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology, while Julian and I will be there to provide some cultural background to the film as well as another screening of one of the top hits from last year’s Zipangu Fest, Naoyuki Niiya’s ero-guro kami-shibai animation Man-eater Mountain.

Yumehiro Imanari's highly entertaining documentary short The Student Wrestler, playing alongside Hiroshima Nagasaki Download

In the meantime, here’s a link to an interview I did with Zoe Baxter on her Lucky Cat show on Resonance FM last Saturday (29 October), in which I talk a lot more about the films and a few other things besides.

Parts of Zipangu Fest’s programme will be touring to the Bradford Media Museum on 10-12 December, and the Star and Shadow Cinema in Newcastle in January.

More news as it comes, and again, if there are any venues out there in the UK that are interested in hosting parts of the Zipangu Fest programme, then do drop us a line.

And in the meantime, you can sign up to our press list, our Facebook page and our Twitter feed.

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.

Where: Barbican Centre, London

When: 4 May 2010, 8.30pm.

“This rarely seen work is a milestone in militant filmmaking and vital testimony to an era of global revolutionary beginnings. Renowned, already notorious Japanese filmmakers and activists Masao Adachi and Koji Wakamatsu stopped in Beirut on their return from the Cannes Film Festival in 1971. There, in collaboration with a newly-emerging Japanese Red Army (JRA) cadre and leaders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) including Ghassan Kanafani and Leila Khaled, they produced this newsreel-style depiction of the everyday activities of Palestinian fighters so as to call for a worldwide Maoist revolution.”

View Larger Map

Takahiko Iimura's On Eye Rape, 1962

Barely a fortnight after that on 4th May comes a really rare chance to see the Koji Wakamatsu-produced, Masao Adachi-directed The Red Army / PFLP: Declaration of World War , as far as I know the first ever screening of this inflammatory work in the UK, almost 40 years since it was made – in fact, one of a tiny few English-subtitled showings of the film ever. The film is showing at the Barbican as part of the London Palestine Film Festival and is a must-see for anyone with a serious interest in Japanese film. I write about this film in some detail in Behind the Pink Curtain , but if you don’t know anything about it, here’s a quick excerpt from the Barbican website:

“This rarely seen work is a milestone in militant filmmaking and vital testimony to an era of global revolutionary beginnings. Renowned, already notorious Japanese filmmakers and activists Masao Adachi and Koji Wakamatsu stopped in Beirut on their return from the Cannes Film Festival in 1971. There, in collaboration with a newly-emerging Japanese Red Army (JRA) cadre and leaders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) including Ghassan Kanafani and Leila Khaled, they produced this newsreel-style depiction of the everyday activities of Palestinian fighters so as to call for a worldwide Maoist revolution.”

Wakamatsu and Adachi's The Red Army / PFLP: Declaration of World War

I’ll just end by giving the heads up on another event coming up at the Barbican at the end of May, which I’m involved in, a screening of prewar Japanese animation. Watch this space for more details…

Avatar in 4D

You know, I hate to keep harping on about Avatar, but it seems you just can’t get away from the film at the moment. I managed to catch some of this year’s Academy Awards ceremony on the morning of Monday 8th while I was still in Tokyo, and was somewhat relieved that it didn’t pick up as many plaudits as first anticipated. The Hurt Locker, after all, was in most respects a far superior work, even if it didn’t make as much money.

Still, though I guess I’ve made my feelings pretty clear about the film itself by now, there’s other interesting aspects to the Avatar phenomenon. While in Yubari, I heard from some of the Korean guests that Cameron’s film had just been released in Seoul in 4D (more here). What, another dimension, I hear you ask? But which one? Have they perhaps added ‘time’ to the equation, so that the 162 minutes doesn’t seem to stretch for an eternity? Or maybe some actual depth has been added to the characterisation? No, actually these special screenings at selected venues have instead opted for juddering moving seats, wind and water effects and synthetic smells. This is all very interesting, this attempt to draw viewers into cinemas for the type of all-round sensory experience that you could never hope for at home, although personally I have my doubts as to whether Pandora and its population of noble savages could ever smell quite as good as they look.

I’m not sure if the moving seats will ever be more than a novelty either. I remember a couple of years back at Puchon Festival there was a guy attempting to corral all the foreign journalists into having a go on a prototype of this new gimmick. I was subjected to about five minutes of being vibrated along to some suitably brash Hollywood action movie – I’m not sure if it was Con Air or Black Hawk Down, but it was something of this ilk- and the impression I was left with was that unless the film was specifically made with such technology in mind, it didn’t really add much to the viewing experience, and was actually more of a distraction. I felt a little queasy afterwards.

Putting the cynical old curmudgeon in me aside for one moment, I should say that if this kind of cinema floats your boat, Avatar seems tailor-made for such auxiliaries in that it is ultimately about creating an all-immersive viewing experience. As I’ve mentioned in my previous posts, it trades in what we might call cinematism rather than realism. The viewer is pitched headlong through Cameron’s world at a dizzying velocity to create an exaggerated hyper-reality of the type that we could never experience in real life, with an emphasis on dynamic movement throughout all three dimensions.

Another Avatar pic

I’ve always preferred my viewing experiences to be of a more contemplative nature myself, but still, different horses for different courses; one can’t deny that Avatar is lighting up the exhibition sector in a way that hasn’t happened for quite some time. If only because of this, it is of great historical significance. In any measure, it’s pretty clear that the 3D boom isn’t going to go away anytime soon, so I was intrigued to hear of a recent Japanese film that attempts to get in on the act, the second release I’ve heard of from the country after Takashi Shimizu’s Shock Labyrinth 3D (Senritsu meikyû 3D), soon to be unveiled in the UK.

J-horror in 3d: Takashi Shimizu's Shock Labyrinth

I’m actually pretty bloody amazed no one else has been talking about it either, as it seems pretty much tailor-made for the overseas midnight movie circuit. The film in question is the latest instalment in the Perfect Education (Kanzen naru shiiku) series that began some ten years or so back (I reviewed the first entry for Midnight Eye back in the early days), although which largely seems to have slipped beneath the radar of most foreign observers, for perhaps fairly obvious reasons. Despite the first being scripted by living legend Kaneto Shindo, the Perfect Education films are to the world of Japanese softcore what Friday 13^th is to the horror genre. Still, their largely formulaic narratives revolving around solitary men capturing comely young beauties and ‘grooming’ them until they fall in love with them seems to have attracted some interesting directors in the past, including Bashing helmer Masahiro Kobayashi (Perfect Education 5: Amazing Story), and Koji Wakamatsu (Perfect Education 6 : Red Murder). Neither of these filmmakers are strangers to the world of erotic cinema – you’ll find plenty of references to them in my Behind the Pink Curtain. The latest offering, however, is the work of Kenta Fukasaku, best known as the son of Kinji, who took over the reins of his father when the latter died during the early stages of shooting Battle Royale II.

Kenta Fukasaku's Perfect Education: Maid For You

Perfect Education: Maid For You already has a pretty irresistible hook in that its victim is a worker in an Akihabara maid cafe. Not content with this, the producers have gone that one step further by utilising 3D in a similar manner to how pink films from the 1960s livened up their saucier sequences by bursting into colour. Unlike Avatar, Maid For You’s application of the third dimension clearly prioritises volume and form over movement, and it’s somewhat comical to picture the viewers donning their polarised specs and extending their hands while grope towards the shapely torso of the main actress and Gravure model Ayano every time she disrobes.

Maid For You

I should add that I’ve not seen the film as yet. It ended its brief single-theatre run only a month before I got to Tokyo, so I can’t really vouch for how the 3D scenes worked out, but my curiosity has been piqued. What is interesting is why a title like this, part of a series that is ultimately targeted at the home-viewing market, should adopt such a cinema-specific approach. How many times will it ever be seen in this way? Although, of course, 3D HDTV’s are already there on the market, so perhaps its films such as these that are going to provide one of the impetuses for upgrading to the new equipment.

Britain's first 3d feature, Pete Walker's Four Dimensions of Greta (1972)

Maid For You is certainly not the first sex film to make use of 3D. I recently heard something about a pink film released by Shintoho in the 1980s (ok, so I missed this one in the book!), although I’m not sure what its title was. In America, Al Silliman Jr. gave us the Stereovision spectacles of The Stewardesses as early as 1969, touted as one of the most profitable releases of all time (you can see the trailer on youtube, flat version only I’m afraid), while Britain’s first ever 3D feature came in 1972 in the form of Pete Walker’s Four Dimensions of Greta (also known as Three Dimensions of Greta – not sure where the other dimension came from). And before I sign off, here’s a link to a piece about Tinto Brass’ plans to remake Caligula (1979) with the new 3D technology – without the smells, wind, water and juddering chairs, one assumes…

Links to the rest of these articles:

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 1: Avatar

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 2: Paradoxes of Visual Knowledge

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 4: 3D or not 3D?

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 5: A Joyride to Nowhere?

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 6: Changing our Focus – StreetDance 3D

I’m here for the full 10-day stretch, and aside from a few introductions, don’t have many duties, so it’s a great excuse to watch films that I usually wouldn’t get a chance to experience and to enjoy a new city. I’m feeling a bit discombobulated at the moment, as most of the filmmaking guests are only staying a few days, so for example Koji Wakamatsu has already gone after appearing over the weekend to promote United Red Army here, and several of the lively group of Philipino directors, including the charismatic Khavn de la Cruz, also departed in the small hours of the morning. I guess a fresh load of new faces will be arriving over the coming days.

I think the relatively relaxed atmosphere of the city has encouraged a certain lethargy in me after such a hectic couple of months, and while I’m catching a lot of films, I’m also catching up on a fair amount of sleep too, despite the fact that the screenings for the Beyond Pink sidebar I helped with all begin after midnight – things keep going pretty late here, and though its a bit of a pain having to stay up so late while remaining relatively clear-headed, its no real hardship and I’m really impressed with the level of interest these films are getting. For example, last night saw Wakamatsu’s Secret Acts Behind Walls playing alongside Noboru Tanaka’s Watcher in the Attic on two of the five screens used by the festival, and both were more or less full, making this the most successful by far of all the pink retrospectives I’ve worked on across the world since the book came out.

Thessaloniki International Film Festival is the first time I’ve ever been to Greece, something that’s always been of a mystery to me as having grown up reading the books of Lawrence and Gerald Durrell, and John Fowles’ The Magus, the country has always seems cosily familiar without my ever having visited. Somehow I always knew I’d love it, the food, the relaxed pace of life (the Rough Guide to Greece describes it as ‘sybaritic’), the sense of such a deep-rooted underlying history and culture. The city feels at once familiarly European, but somehow slightly more exotic than other Mediterranean countries I’ve visited like France, Italy Spain, for example. I guess Thessaloniki’s geographic situation, right in the northeast of Greece in the region of Macedonia accounts for its rather special atmosphere, reflected in its strong programming of Balkan cinema. Its the country’s second largest city and a major port, yet not too touristy. The people are very friendly, with some of the most striking-looking women in the world, and the prices are cheap. Festival or no festival, I know I’ll be back to this part of world pretty soon.

Time prevents me writing too much about the actual films at the moment, and I’d also wanted to post some of my photos, but annoyingly forgot to bring my connection lead to download them to my computer, so this will have to wait till I get back to London next week. One thing that did dawn on me though was that in the first few days, most of the films I’d seen were from Germany. There’s a complete Werner Herzog retrospective, with Herzog arriving in town for the next weekend, allowing me to catch up on some of his lesser-known documentaries that I’d probably not get a chance to see elsewhere. Fatih Akin’s Soul Kitchen was quite an inspired choice for the opening screening. True, it’s comedy was fairly laboured at times, but its easy going charm and story of a Greek immigrant in Germany’s attempts to keep his restaurant going against all odds went down well with local audiences here while presenting a positively multi-cultural image of Europe that would have had Robert Kilroy-Silk weeping. Another very powerful German film was The Day Will Come, a story about a former 1970s activist who disappears underground after abandoning her daughter, and finds her past catching up with her and her new family who run a vineyard in Alsace, by the German border. This film received its premiere hear in Thessaloniki, and was a really pleasant surprise.

Lots more other strong works too: I’ll write later about Samson and Delilah, this year’s Australian contender for the Best Foreign Language Oscar (although its Aboriginal characters actually barely speak at all), the polished Egyptian indie Heliopolis, and Dennis Villeneuve’s Polytechnique, a Montreal-based equivalent to Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. Right now I’ve got to dash and watch a film….

Koji Wakamatsu's United Red Army

The buzz surrounding Koji Wakamatsu is spreading across the globe at quite a pace at the moment. I’d like to think that Behind the Pink Curtain had something to do with all this, but the reality is that it is the other way round – I have benefited immensely due to the release of the finest film of Wakamatsu‘s career, and arguably the most important Japanese film of the decade, United Red Army, coinciding roughly with my book’s publication last October. The film is screening in the Cinemafamily theatre in LA this very evening, to be followed by a handful of  classics from his pinku eiga period in the 1960s, and French viewers already have the first in a series of box-sets of his work out there on DVD.

Masao Adachi's Gushing Prayer

My next Wakamatsu-related announcement is something I have had a hand in though, a special selection of pink and Roman Porno films that will be screening at the 50th Thessaloniki International Film Festival. The eleven chosen titles will be shown as part of the PINKU EIGA: BEYOND PINK programme in the Independence Days section, which I put together with critic and festival programmer Lefteris Adamidis. Films to be screened include Kan Mukai’s Blue Film Woman (1969), Masao Adachi’s Gushing Prayer (1971), Mamoru Watanabe’s Secret Hot Spring Resort: Starfish at Night (1971), Tatsumi Kumashiro’s Woods Are Wet (1973) and a selection of Noboru Tanaka films, including the rarely-screened Beauty’s Exotic Dance: Torture! (1977).

Kan Mukai's Blue Film Woman

I’m going to be heading over to the festival at the end of the next week, which I’m really looking forward to, as I’ve never actually been to Greece before. I hope to pop up a few posts while I’m there. Most exciting of all is that Wakamatsu himself will be coming to introduce United Red Army and three earlier films, Secret Behind the Walls (1965), Running in Madness, Dying in Love (1969) and Shinjuku Mad (1970). I’ve met him on several occasions before, twice at Frankfurt’s Nippon Connection, who have long championed his work, and one particularly surreal night over a drink in a bar in Tokyo’s Golden Gai – I think by now he’s realised I’m not the same person as that certain French Wakamatsu fan who directed Irreversible!

Koji Wakamatsu's Running In Madness, Dying In Love

Anyway, its going to be really interesting to see how these films go down with a Greek festival audiences. Several of the programme’s titles I’ve already screened in London, Montreal and Frankfurt, but this will be my first chance to see the new prints of Running in Madness, Dying in Love (1969) and Shinjuku Mad (1970) on a big screen, to me two of his most interesting works, (they’re also playing in LA – so if you see them, feel free to post your comments on them)  and am looking forward to catching United Red Army again.

Koji Wakamatsu's Shinjuku Mad

Hopefully this is the first of many airings of Wakamatsu’s films across the world, now that they’ve been newly subbed for foreign distribution (one of the reasons the director was so woefully underrepresented at last years Wild Japan season of Japanese erotic films at the BFI in London). And I’m sure some bold English-language DVD distributor will pick up on them before too long too.

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/wakamatsu-in-greece-for-50th-thessaloniki-international-film-festival-13-22-november-2009/feed/ 6 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/koji-wakamatsu-films-at-the-cinefamily-los-angeles/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/koji-wakamatsu-films-at-the-cinefamily-los-angeles/#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:27:04 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=145

Koji Wakamatsu's United Red Army

Some great news for LA-based Wakamatsu fans, courtesy of my old mucker Nick Rucka of Maboroshii Productions. Starting this Wednesday at the Cinemafamily with Wakamatsu’s recent United Red Army, one of my favourite Japanese films from the past few years, there’s a month full of screenings from Japanese cinema’s original subversive, including your first ever chance to get to see subbed prints of Shinjuku Mad and Running in Madness, Dying in Love, two of his lesser-known masterpieces from his 1960s heyday. Full details on the Cinefamily website, but the basic schedule is as follows:

Nov 4th: United Red Army
Nov. 6th: Shinjuku Mad & Ecstasy of the Angels
Nov. 13th: Go Go Second Time Virgin & Running in Madness, Dying in Love
Nov. 20th: Violated Angels & Violent Virgin

This is the first of many posts I hope to give you about Wakamatsu’s films – I should have another announcement ready for you tomorrow. Great to see all these works finally getting out there anyway, and I’d imagine by the end of next year, Wakamatsu’s name is going to be pretty firmly on the lips of all decent cinephiles. Don’t miss ‘em!

The first is the long anticipated Nagisa Oshima season curated by James Quandt of the Cinematheque Ontario that has been doing the rounds internationally over the past year. The season played the Cinematheque last October-December, and it has now finally reached London. The second is the Sexploitation season, which I’ll deal with in another post.

Nagisa Oshima, the man himself.

Nagisa Oshima is a director who’s rather fallen out of fashion in recent years, not only because much of his work, especially from the 1960s, has been very difficult to see, nor because Oshima’s own poor state of health has prevented him form being as vocal about his important status in the history of Japanese cinema as other directors from his generation. The main reason that I can see why Oshima doesn’t enjoy the same level of appreciation nowadays as some of his contemporaries like Shohei Imamura or Koji Wakamatsu is that his films are so much part of the political and intellectual discourse of the era that those coming to them cold are probably going to be left in the cold. Oshima came from the same “filmmaking as political process” philosophy as Jean-Luc Godard in France, which is not to say necessarily that he shared the same politics. But it does mean that at times his works can be pretty abstruse, unless you’ve done your background reading (and what better place to start perhaps, than my own Behind the Pink Curtain…) On the plus side however, it means that no two Oshima films are alike, in terms of form, tone or content, even though it is possible to detect threads running through his work.

The Catch (1961)

I’m pretty excited however, because the season is a more-or-less complete retrospective, which means there’s quite a few titles showing that I’ve not even seen, namely The Catch, Shiro from Amakusa: The Christian Rebel and Three Resurrected Drunkards. I’ll also make a point of heading out to see my own personal favourite of his films, Boy, on the big screen. The season will of course feature his best-known work, In the Realm of the Senses, which the BFI are putting out on an extended run across the country, no doubt in preparation for an upcoming DVD/Blueray release.

Anyway, here’s the BFI press release, and more details can be found on the website:

Boy (1969)

Throughout September and October, BFI Southbank will celebrate the astounding films  of Japan’s foremost modern master Nagisa Oshima, with a full retrospective of his films including an extended run of In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no Corrida, 1975); plus a rare opportunity to see a selection of television work from the ‘outlaw’ director who spearheaded Japan’s new wave.

One of the crucial differences that sets Nagisa Oshima apart from other great Japanese film-makers is that he has never accepted that he is defined merely by his own cultural identity. Constantly swimming against the tide, Oshima doesn’t accept consensus views on anything. Instead, he faces up to contradictions and insists on thinking his own way through them. This contrariness is reflected in his films as,  in the 1960s and fired up by his earlier experiences as a student radical, he quickly established himself as a one-man ‘new wave’ in Japanese cinema.

Initially obsessed with the idea of revolution, many of the early films deal more or less directly with the failure of the Left, and ask why campaigns often miss their targets and why some movements tear themselves apart. Gradually, as his faith in revolution faded, he turned to other ways of attacking Japan’s body politic, focusing on the plight of the country’s most discriminated-against minority, Korean immigrants, and taking a more direct approach to the two issues which disrupt the cohesive surface of Japanese society: sex and crime.

This two-part season will include all of his feature films as well as some of his equally personal TV work. Part One kicks off with the four incendiary movies he made  for Shochiku in 1959/60; A Town of Love and Hate (Ai to Kibo no Machi, 1959), Cruel Story of Youth (Taiyo no Hakaba, 1960), The Sun’s Burial (Taiyo no Hakaba, 1960) and Night and Fog in Japan (Nihon no Yoru to Kiri, 1960) before examining his achievement as an independent film-maker with work including Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (Senjo no Merry Christmas, 1983) and climaxing with Gohatto (1999), the  ‘gay samurai’ movie he willed himself into recovery to make after suffering a debilitating stroke. This retrospective includes many of the electrifying movies which helped shape our sense of what cinema is – and should be.