More reflections on pink films and other popular genres

[tetsuwan@comcast.net]

see Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto's great book on Japanese film for a great critique of the auteurist approach. However in terms of the point you make here, that approach also might make you miss several gems.

As to the rest I tend to agree  . . . though on Aaron's question and your answer there's something missing. Critics and academics haven't been *the* gateway for Western interest in Japanese pop culture in some time. We've got all sorts, US military, foreign language teachers, etc, and the digital revolution has speed up that process considerably and made those folks more powerful than traditional gatekeepers. Seems to me that Western critics, at least the minor ones and younger ones, have come quite late to the party. It is important to note that "civilians" have been driving the interest in Japanese pop culture in the West lately, and at the risk of generalizing they aren't going to gravitate towards Mizoguchi, etc. Younger people who are up and coming academics and critics seem to be looking for something more than genre offerings.

However, the interest in genre films and the trumpeting of cats like Tarantino has opened up opportunities for great retrospectives of Japanese cinema legends, and I'm envious of anyone who lives in NY, LA or Chicago these days. I know some people do take on the older films as pieces of work rather than historical artifacts, however the latter view seems to be how some want to operate. One of my editors wanted to know the "significance" of an older masterpiece that was making the art house rounds here and would rather that I shy away from just writing about the film itself. I suppose if you want to try and interest people in seeing the film (as he did) that's an acceptable approach.

It could well be, as you point out, a corrective at work here, one that I'd welcome.



I tend to be ambivalent towards pink cinema, if someone points out something worthwhile I'll definitely take a look if I can without suffering slings and arrows of my wife pointing out how I am contributing to a shallow, negative view of Japan (heh). 

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Dear all,

At the risk of coming across like an naive reactionary, I'm delighted to admit to being not at all interested in pink films and only very slightly in generic action or horror films. The wonderful thing about a traditional auteurist approach is that it means we can spend our time watching good movies, whereas approaching it from the generic side means we have to spend a lot of time watching bad movies - indeed, that routine, ordinary and predictable films come to seem more important than creative and unusual ones, because they are assumed to express the culture more directly. This assumption is actually not at all flattering to the culture in question but it seems to be widespread. Personally I think we learn far more about the culture and society of postwar Japan from (at different time periods) Mizoguchi, Oshima, Ita! mi or Koreeda than we do from more generic films. This is because the artists who created them (which includes, of course, screenwriters as well as directors)!
  adopt a reasoned critical perspective on that culture and society, whereas the interest of pink or yakuza films is usually symptomatic at best.

The fact that so many pink films are made of course is interesting per se; I suppose it's related to the fact that the Japanese are, in general, less embarrassed about the human need for sexual gratification than most Westerners. On the other hand, if a lot of Japanese pornography is violent and demeaning towards women, I'm not sure if we should be giving it any more publicity than it already has.

In response to Jasper's question, "So why do directors like Zeze or Meike choose this particular avenue to make their personal statements? There just appears to be this huge gulf between intentions of the director and the demands of the audience"  - it's possible I suppose that they haven't been able to gain finance to address their personal concerns in more respectable films? It's like asking why Joseph H. Lewis chose to make his personal statements in B-movie Westerns and films noirs. He didn't; the choice wasn't open to him. He made the best possible use of the material he was assigned to. He was a talented director and he had ideas, so his films were better than most B-movies at the time; but he was working in restrictive circumstances, so his films were less good than those made at the time by Hitchcock or Hawks, Minnelli, Sirk or Ray.

As for Aaron's sensible question, "What kind of Japan is being constructed by fans and  researchers of those phenomena? What desires are being fulfilled by 
that image?" I think that depends very much on the individual writer, but in general I'm not sure that the answers are particularly flattering. If we agree that pink films are an interesting cultural phenomenon, there are, nevertheless, many interesting cultural phenomena in Japan - why, precisely, is so much attention lavished on the more tacky, crude and ugly aspects of Japanese culture by both specialist and non-specialist writers? This may I suppose be intended as a corrective to the tendency of other writers on Japan, mostly of an older generation, to focus on more elitist phenomena such as kabuki, ikebana and suchlike; but I can't help feeling that in some hands the result is rather patronising - Japan is perceived as comical, and the writer ends up conveying his own sense of superiority to the culture he is discussing. I am not, incidentally, aiming that comment at anyone specific on this list; there are some writers who can discuss these phenomena, as phenomena, with!
  intelligence and without seeming patronising.

It's worth observing that the pink films are fairly specific to Japan, where the yakuza and horror films aren't. I think that the original models for yakuza films were American gangster thrillers; the yakuza genre was virtually non-existent before the Occupation and flowered as Japan became more Westernised. It strikes me that whatever explanations there are for its popularity among Japanese audiences, Western cinephiles like yakuza films because they are basically very similar to Western gangster movies and require minimal cultural context to understand. The same can be said of the modern wave of Japanese horror films, whose fundamental compatability with conventional Western tastes is demonstrated by the fact that Hollywood is greedily remaking them. I suspect also that these films tend to appeal to people who enjoy experiencing the basic emotional stimuli associated with the onscreen portrayal of sex and violence, but also wan! t to appear intellectually respectable. Simp!
 ly, it sounds better for one to profess an interest in Japanese horror films than in Hollywood slasher movies, or J-porn than Europorn (notice how we happily borrow the term "pink film" since it sounds less crude than "pornography"). In terms of the actual content of the films, however, I don't see much difference. (This paragraph, by the way, is also not intended to be insulting to anyone - I accept that each of these genres has produced some films of aesthetic interest in Japan, as comparable genres have elsewhere; there are writers who acknowledge this, and who, rather than concerning themselves with the symptomatic interest of the genre, single out individual pink films, horror films and yakuza films as worthy of serious aesthetic appreciation.)

What worries me is how shy serious writers on film (especially academic ones, but some intelligent journalists) have become of making aesthetic judgements. This means that it's usually left to popular journalists, many of whom have little or no sense of film history, to make or break the reputations of films. To read some journalists, you'd not guess that Ozu or Mizoguchi had ever existed; to read many academic writers, you'd think that Ozu or Mizoguchi were of no value except in so far as they shed light on historical circumstances or social realities, which is going to leave the general reader wondering why they should bother to watch their films. So I think we do indeed need a middle way, and I hope it would involve studying the cultural context as a way of defining the aesthetic merit of works and explicating their present relevance to film viewers today.

ALEX


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