Take Two

The turn-off sex cinema of Koji Wakamatsu

Porn isn’t usually a topic of much interest to film buffs, being less an art form than a functional one—bearing the same relationship to cinema as, say, instruction manuals do to literature. In the heyday of the Sexual Revolution, when adult movies were still shot on film and shown in theaters, some makers got ambitious, or at least playful, with narrative and style—two things that rarely factor in today’s enormous, factory-style porn industry.

In Japan, however, hardcore content has been and remains illegal. (You may have seen Japanese-release versions of films in which genitalia are electronically “fogged,” even in merely simulated-sex or entirely nonsexual scenes.) The challenge of titillating without graphic imagery fostered the peculiarities of “pink film,” a still-extant genre unique to Japan that flourished in the mid-1960s through the mid-‘80s, when adult video (though still “fogged”) dealt its popularity a significant if less-than-fatal blow.

topics: directors, japanese cinema, yerba buena center for the arts

Platform

Seiji Horibuchi pulls back the curtain on VIZ Cinema

The opening of a new theater that isn’t a multiplex is an exceedingly rare event these days. Raise a glass to VIZ Cinema, a built-from-scratch venue located in the New People building in Japantown. The complex, opening Sat., Aug. 15, is dedicated to Japanese pop culture, from art to fashion to film. VIZ Cinema fills the bill with live-action movies and anime, highlighted by U.S. premieres, director retrospectives and special series. A free outdoor screening of Kamikaze Girls in the Japantown Peace Plaza Friday night, Aug. 14, launches the New People scene, while VIZ Cinema christens its downstairs screen the next night with 20th Century Boys: Beginning of the End. Seiji Horibuchi, founder and chairman of VIZ Media, offered his thoughts on the new venture via email.

topics: animation, anime, art film, bay area, genre films, japanese cinema, world cinema

Experience

Finding social fury "In the Realm of Oshima" at PFA

"Banish Green!" That was the self-imposed restraint director Nagisa Oshima put on himself when making his first color film (and second feature) Cruel Story of Youth (1960). Green, as Oshima goes on to explain in an essay recounting his decision, was the color he most associated with the symbolic center of Japanese domestic life: the tatami mat-lined living room, usually adjacent to a small, cloistered garden. This room had been long occupied by a previous generation of Japanese filmmakers such as Yasujiro Ozu (whose "pillow shots" couldn’t be greener) and Kenji Mizoguchi. For Oshima, it was a cage. "Characters, rooms, gardens were all utterly repellant," he writes, "and I firmly believed that unless the dark sensibility that those things engendered [was] completely destroyed, nothing new would come into being in Japan."

topics: critics, japanese cinema, pacific film archive, world cinema

Experience

Kiyoshi Kurosawa and a cinema of disaster

The wind is always blowing in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s films. Like the torrential rain of so many horror films that is only a road-sign for the creepy old house up ahead, the gusts that whip and toss Kurosawa’s characters are the sighs of a world in flux. Though his dizzyingly prolific filmography includes a wide cross section of genres—police procedural, family melodrama, yakuza revenge tale, supernatural thriller—the central drama of most Kurosawa films can be boiled down this: the world is changing—or has changed—and the measure of each character is how successfully or unsuccessfully they can adjust to the new parameters unfolding before them.

It is a simple conflict, in a way, but the choices and outcomes that face Kurosawa’s characters—however melodramatic or fantastic—are no less resonant with our own current political and economic climate of crisis. The choice of Kurosawa as the focus of a special retrospective by the S.F. International Asian American Film Festival, opening Thursday, is a timely one.

topics: actors, awards, bay area, center for asian american media, curators, drama, japanese cinema, sf international asian american film festival, world cinema

The List

Travel guide through Another Hole in the Head Film Festival

It’s summer—not that that means much if you live in SF proper—so you might be contemplating vacation travel of one sort or another. Or if work commitments, poverty and/or gas prices are keeping you home for the season, maybe passive travel via the wonderful world of available local cinematic entertainment will have to suffice. That’s a pretty safe way to get around, but beware nonetheless: Even movie tourism can be dangerous to your health. Certainly if you’re a movie character, at least.

This year’s edition of SF Indiefest-presented Another Hole in the Head, the two-week horror, sci-fi and fantasy fest, offers a plethora of destinations it turns out were a very bad idea to visit. We can’t guarantee fate will deal you cards as grim as it does the cast in these representative ’08 HoleHead titles. But one can never be too cautious, right? So, for the time being one might want to avoid the following top ten locations for terror:

topics: bay area, genre films, horror, japanese cinema, sf indiefest