PINK CINEMA REVOLUTION: THE RADICAL FILMS OF KOJI WAKAMATSU
More than any other Japanese films, those made by Koji Wakamatsu in the '60s and '70s are deeply rooted in the political and social upheavals of the era. One of the leaders of ‘pink cinema,’ Wakamatsu has always been obsessed with the history of student protest movements. The term ‘pink cinema’ or ‘pinku eiga’ comes from the English word ‘pink’, and the Japanese word ‘eiga’, meaning cinema. The pinku eiga—or Japanese sexploitation—were independent film productions that from the mid '60s to early '70s experimented with a new form of filmmaking that blended sex and violence.
Inspired by the narrative processes, aesthetics and production means of the French New Wave, pink films and their makers are inseparable from the history of the Japanese revolutionary left. This film movement, certainly the most extreme that developed at the time in industrialized countries, is nonetheless comparable to the cinema of Pasolini or Fassbinder, distilling the same subversive tendencies and denunciation of “bourgeois morality.” (Michaël Prazan)
Thu, Oct 8: ECSTASY OF THE ANGELS
Sat, Oct 10: SECRETS BEHIND THE WALL
Thu, Oct 15: VIOLATED ANGELS
Sat, Oct 17: GO, GO SECOND TIME VIRGIN & VIOLENT VIRGIN
Thu, Oct 22: SHINJUKU MAD
Sat, Oct 24: SEASON OF TERROR
Thu, Oct 29: UNITED RED ARMY
ECSTASY OF THE ANGELS
Thu, Oct 8, 7:30 pm & Sun, Oct 11, 2 pm
The '60s are definitely over in this outrageous look at the Japanese radical movement. A group of oversexed militants (named after days of the week) tries to steal weapons from a U.S Army base. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are killed. Slowly, the surviving group members realize they've been betrayed by their own organization, and begin to wreak sexual and political anarchy on everything in sight. (1972, 89 min, 35mm)
Miryam Sas, Ph.D, will introduce the Oct 8, 7:30pm screening. Sas is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Film at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism (Stanford University Press).
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SECRETS BEHIND THE WALL
Sat, Oct 10, 7:30 pm
A stifled housewife makes up for the lame relationship with her union boss husband by having an increasingly unsatisfying affair with her old flame from student days. Scarred by Hiroshima and once an aggressively leftist activist, her lover is involved in an irony so unlikely it would make Godard smile: He now makes his money in the stock market off the Vietnam War. He comes over to the cramped apartment of the housewife less for the past shared as rabid leftists than for a series of almost abstract sex scenes … What Wakamatsu does here is intrinsically link sexuality with political livelihood, entwining the idealism, desires, and utopias of one with the other …” —TheAuteurs.com (1965, 75 min, 35mm)
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US Premiere
VIOLATED ANGELS
Thu, Oct 15, 7:30 pm
Watch a clip:
Wakamatsu’s most famous, sadistic and coldest work is based on the mass murder spree by Richard Speck in 1966, and is a portrait of paranoid psychosis like no other. Though buried under layers of dread, sections of the film imply that the institutionalized violence of authority is no different than that of a serial killer. (1967, 57 min, digital video from new HD master)
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DOUBLE FEATURE (One ticket good for both films)
GO, GO SECOND TIME VIRGIN
Sat, Oct 17, 7:30 pm & Sun, Oct 18, 2 pm
Watch the trailer:
The story of two damned and abused teenagers who meet and fall in mutant love on
Tokyo rooftop. Their only hope is to cement their love with an escape into oblivion in
this haunting, and haunted film. (1969, 65 min, 35mm)
US Premiere
VIOLENT VIRGIN
Sat, Oct 17, 8:50 pm & Sun, Oct 18, 3:20 pm
In one of Wakamatsu’s most unusual and nihilistic films, a gang of men and women bring a virginal couple into a barren landscape. Surreal madness mixed with Christian symbolism erupts as a yakuza watches from afar. (1969, 66 min, digital video from new HD master¬)
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US Premiere
SHINJUKU MAD
Thu, Oct 22, 7:30 pm & Sun, Oct 25, 2 pm
A desperate father searches for the killer of his son in the filthy gutters of Tokyo. He meets some pothead hippies who knew his son, but won't cooperate. Eventually, he discovers that "Shinjuku Mad" killed his son for the sake of an uncertain social revolution, and begins to track down this man and his group. (1970, 66 min, digital video from new HD master)
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US Premiere
SEASON OF TERROR
Sat, Oct 24, 7:30 pm
Two police put a student militant under surveillance, but nothing seems to be happening except a lot of sex with his two girlfriends. They give up, too early it appears, as the student begins a revolutionary act far more extreme than anyone expected. (1969, 78 min, digital video from new HD master)
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One Show Only
UNITED RED ARMY
Thu, Oct 29, 7 pm
Watch the trailer:
Wakamatsu brilliantly reconstructs the most troubling episode in the bloody history of Japanese student-radical extremism through the true story of the United Red Army faction, which had its roots in the '60s when Japanese students protested America using Japan as a staging base for its war in Vietnam. In 1972, 14 members of the United Red Army faction lynched each other during group “self-criticism” sessions, which quickly degenerated into a ten-day stand-off with the police that is one of the pivotal moments in Japanese history, as famous in Japan as Martin Luther King’s assassination is in America. This gut-wrenching docudrama is underlaid with electrifying psychedelic rock music by Jim O’Rourke. (2007, 190 min, 35mm)
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