pinku films 2

[Roland Domenig]

> Nevertheless, I am afraid that I can not recommend the film. There have been
> a few enthousiastic reviews of this film, but my feeling is that this rather
> means that it is fairly interesting within its genre. Although the pink
> cinema offers young Japanese directors a training school, the genre usually
> is too limited (in the sense of budget, actors, story, etc) to produce
> really good films.

Pink eiga, as part of the probably most commercialized segment of the
Japanese film industry, are of course restricted by low budgets, bad working
conditions, a closed distribution system, the conventions of the genre,
etc., but this does not necessarily make them the worse films.
Most of the annually produced pink eiga are in fact not particularly
interesting, but so is the bigger part of the gereral film production, too,
whether mainstream or independent films. There always are a few pink eiga
every year, however, that are really good. They are good not only within the
boundaries of the genre, but good as films and they deserve more attention.
Whether Tandem falls into this category is open to debate. Personally I
liked the film, although Sato Toshiki did make better films.

> The Rotterdam Film Festival very admirably tries to show us each year that
> notwithstanding the harsh circumstances Japanese cinema is still alive and ,
> kicking, but especially in the year when it presented the pink movie special
> the audience was clearly not convinced.

The problem is, that even in Japan, it is very difficult to get information
on the films. Thanks to the (indeed admirable) efforts of festivals like
Rotterdam, a few pink eiga have been introduced to a Western audience. I am
convinced, however, that the ambivalent reactions to the pink eiga special
presented in Rotterdam (and there were similar reactions in Vienna, too)
were mostly due to the misleading and exaggerated announcements and press
reports that resulted in wrong expectations by the audiences. True, it is
not easy to describe pink eiga properly, because they don't fit into the
categories we know in the West. Many people were clearly expecting something
different and were disappointed by what they saw. Had the films be presented
in a less sensational and exaggerated way, I am sure that the reaction would
have been different.

What was presented in Rotterdam and at the Viennale was only a very small
fraction of the enormous pink eiga production. Moreover, it looks as if it
was a singular event, for no other pink eiga have been shown in the West
thereafter, although Sato Toshiki and Zeze Takahisa did a lot of very
interesting and good films. So did the other shitenno-directors Sato
Hisayasu and Sano Kazuhiro as well as directors of the younger generation,
like Ueno Toshiya, Imaoka Shinji or more recently Tajiri Yuji and Sakamoto
Rei. Why have their films not been shown at film festivals?
The reasons, I believe, are very simple: first there is a lack of
information. Many film critics still ignore pink eiga and regard watching
them as a waste of time. Not only Japanese critics ignore them but also
most Western critics. Mark Schilling's otherwise very detailed book on
Contemporary Japanese Film, for example, does not mention a single pink
eiga. This is all the more deplorable, since the emergence of the so-called
shitenno or (to borrow from Fukuma Kenji) the "Pink Nouvelle Vague" was one
of the most important developments in Japanese Cinema of the last decade.
The second reason is a lack of money. Production costs are very restricted
(on average 3.5 million Yen) and there is very little or no money for
advertising or promoting the films, not to mention a subtitling. While the
budgets of most independent productions are very tight, too, it nowadays is
almost customary for them to have subtitles, a prerequisite for the films to
be shown abroad. Films like "Oshimai no hi" or "Gekko no sasayaki" are thus
on the International film festival circuit, while for example Tajiri's "Love
Juice" is not, although it is an altogether much better and much more
interesting film.


Roland Domenig
Institute for Japanese Studies
Vienna University