Jasper Sharp : Koji Wakamatsu

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12
Apr

Japanese experimental films in London over next month

I’m gearing up for my trip to Frankfurt at the moment for a fun-packed and furious four-and-a-bit days of Japanese celluloid overload courtesy of those fine folks at Nippon Connection. By this time next week I’ll be back in Blighty again, but if I was anticipating a heavy film-festival hangover, then it looks like I’ll have a couple of rare screenings of Japanese films in London to ease me through the comedown. The first of these comes literally the day after I touch down in the form of an evening of experimental films from the legendary Takahiko Iimura. Observer/Observed – The Films of Takahiko Iimura is on the 20th April at the The Working Men’s Club, 44-46 Pollard Row, London E2 6NB.

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…

Posted at 21:27 on 12 April 2010

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16
Mar

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 3: Welcome to the Feelies

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

Posted at 19:59 on 16 March 2010

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18
Nov

Greece is the word: Mid-fest thoughts on Thessaloniki

It’s been quite some days since I touched down in Thessaloniki, and as is the usual case when you arrive at a new festival in a strange city, it has taken me a few days to find my feet and put some of my thoughts up. Well, this was always going to be something of a busman’s holiday so constant updates were never really on the cards, but I had intended to write perhaps a few posts at least.

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….

Posted at 17:51 on 18 November 2009

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