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Pink Cinema Revolution: The Radical Films of Koji WakamatsuPost an Event »

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

October 8 - October 30, 2009

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http://www.ybca.org/
(415) 978-2700

701 Mission Street San Francisco, CA 94103

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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. 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) 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) US Premiere VIOLATED ANGELS  Thu, Oct 15, 7:30 pm   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) DOUBLE FEATURE (One ticket good for both films)   GO, GO SECOND TIME VIRGIN  Sat, Oct 17, 7:30 pm & Sun, Oct 18, 2 pm   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¬) 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) 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) One Show Only  UNITED RED ARMY  Thu, Oct 29, 7 pm    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)