[KineJapan] Pink director Mamoru Watana be RIP (1931-2013)

[Jasper Sharp]

Some very sad news just came in that the pink director Mamoru Watanabe
has passed away. Watanabe was the last surviving member of the pioneering
generation of pinku eiga filmmakers that also included Koji Wakamatsu, Satoru
Kobayashi, Kan Mukai and Kinya Ogawa.

 

Born 19 March 1931, Watanabe made his debut with the no-longer-extant Hussy (Abazure) in 1965, and his best known
work in the West is probably Slave Widow (Dorei mibôjin, 1967), which Synapse
Films released on DVD in the US about 5 years ago – I think this actually might
be his only film which has received a legit DVD release outside of Japan, and
it’s also notable for containing an early appearance by Naomi Tani. Watanabe
worked with Naomi Tani a number of times, and the image of her that appears on
the cover of Behind the Pink Curtain is in fact from his 1977 vehicle for her, Naomi
Tani: Tied Up! (Tani Naomi: shibaru!) 

 

My own personal recollections of him was
interviewing him for my book in Starbucks in Yotsuya, probably around 2004. He
said it was the first time he’d ever been interviewed by a foreign film critic.
I met him again some 5 years later when Nippon Connection in Frankfurt played
his last film as a director, Bed Partner (2009) and a newly subtitled copy of
his Secret Hot Spring Resort: Starfish at Night (Maruhi yu no machi: yoru no
hitode, 1970), a wonderful comic homage to the silent age focusing on a group
of pornographers who make and screen 8mm blue films in a onsen tourist town. It
was one of his best films, alongside Women Hell Song: Shakuhachi Benten (Onna
jigoku uta: shakuhachi benten), made the same year, a sort of sexy Lady
Snowblood variant. I remember Watanabe saying it was the very first time he’d
been to a foreign film festival, and he found the whole experience of
presenting his films to a new generation of filmgoers who had no knowledge or
preconceptions of what a pink film was totally energizing. I was very touched
that he singled out both Alex Zahlten and me for gratitude, for helping to
introduce his work outside of Japan. I later programmed Secret Hot Spring
Resort as part of the pink retrospective I put together for Fantasia in
Montreal.

 

I know a documentary on his work has recently
been produced, which Japanese readers can find out more about if they follow
this link: 

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/inazuma2006/20121215/p1

 

Personally he was one of my favourite pink
directors from its first few decades. His films were made with a style quite in
excess of genre requirements, paralleling Noboru Tanaka’s work in the 1970s for
Nikkatsu. It would be wonderful if more people both in and outside of Japan
could see them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/inazuma2006/20121215/p1





The Creeping Garden - A Real-Life Science-Fiction Story about Slime Moulds and the People Who Work With them. Currently in production, directed by Tim Grabham and Jasper Sharp. 
The Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema (2011) is out now from Scarecrow Press
Midnight Eye - Visions of Japanese cinema
http://www.midnighteye.com

Jasper Sharp, writer & film curatorhttp://jaspersharp.com/ 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/kinejapan/attachments/20131226/0c7415e5/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
KineJapan mailing list
KineJapan at lists.service.ohio-state.edu
https://lists.service.ohio-state.edu/mailman/listinfo/kinejapan