Pop Avant-Garde Violence: The Films of Koji Wakamatsu
Author: Jack Hunter
Date: 2012-10-23 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Film
Description: Koji Wakamatsu's revolutionary politico-porno films of the 1960s and early 1970s remain the most powerful examples of their genre made in Japan. Wakamatsu mixed radical idealism (he was a known sympathiser with terrorist factions such as the Red Army), sexual violence, and underground film techniques to devastating effect in such classic films as Violated Angels, Shojo Geba Geba and The Angelic Orgasm. "Pop Avant-Garde Violence", updated from Jack Hunter's seminal film study Eros In Hell, is an illustrated and annotated appreciation of Wakamatsu and his enduring body of work, with 30 rare film
Publisher: SCB Distributors

POP AVANT-GARDE VIOLENCE

BY JACK HUNTER

AN EBOOK

ISBN 978-1-908694-67-6

PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS

COPYRIGHT 2012 ELEKTRON EBOOKS
www.elektron-ebooks.com

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THE FILMS OF KOJI WAKAMATSU

Born 1936 in Miyagi Prefecture, Koji Wakamatsu dropped out of Agricultural College in second grade, came to Tokyo and went through a succession of jobs including apprentice craftsman, delivery boy, and would-be gangster with the Shinjuku-based “Yasuda-gumi” mob – the latter activity landing him a spell in prison. Released at the age of 23, he finally became an assistant director for TV films, and in 1963 broke into cinema by directing a proto-pink (erotic) movie called Amai-Wana (Sweet Trap). He soon became renowned as a pulp director, his projects already distinguished by vivid and violent scenes. These early films include Hageshii Onnatachi (Savage Women, 1963), Mesuinu No Kake (The Games Of Bitches, 1964), Hadaka No Kage (The Naked Shadow, 1964), and Akai Hanko (Red Crime, 1964). In Red Crime, the chaste wife of a public attorney is raped by an escaped convict, and the film examines in detail the sexual relations between the three protagonists. Here we can already trace the seminal motifs of Wakamatsu’s cinema: hatred, disgust for authority, and psycho-sexual disturbance.

By the time Tetsuji Takechi’s controversial erotic films Daydream (1964) and Black Snow (1965) were released, [1] Wakamatsu had already produced almost 20 films ranging in content from one flavour of the month to the next. Evidently inspired by Takechi’s revolutionary sex movies – and the “New Wave” films of his spiritual mentor, Nagisa Oshima [2] – Wakamatsu, like Seijun Suzuki before him, now decided to indulge these influences within the confines of a Nikkatsu production. The results would have profound repercussions on his career.

The film that Wakamatsu produced – Kabe No Naka No Himegoto (Secret Acts Within Four Walls, 1965) – was a radical departure. [3] The original project was supposed to be a film on middle-class students, the pressures of their lives as they prepare for important examinations [4], their social interactions etc. Wakamatsu hijacked the basic framework and filled it with a shocking psychodrama of scopophilia, rape and murder. In this new version, the protagonist is a teenaged student facing his college entrance exams in the knowledge that he is doomed to fail due to his previously poor education. Frustrated and maddened by his inadequacy in the eyes of society, he becomes a compulsive voyeur, masturbating as he spies on various women. One of the objects of his gaze is a rich, middle-class housewife who represents the very society which has scorned him, and which he hates with psychopathic intensity. He breaks into her house and brutally rapes her (despite – or perhaps because of – her willingness to fuck him). The woman is apparently so jaded, so numbed by her bourgeois existence that his assault barely seems to affect her; so the youth kills her, as he might have killed a sick animal.

Eirin, the censorship board, were plainly disturbed by this film and wavered over whether or not to pass it. Nikkatsu went ahead and submitted it to the Berlin Film Festival, despite government pleas to withold it – presumably fearful of presenting a negative image of Japan to the Western world. At some point in the ensuing outcry, Nikkatsu apparently had a change of heart. Possibly fearful of a Black Snow-type prosecution, they opened the film for domestic release with muted publicity. Wakamatsu, feeling that his studio had betrayed him by this volte-face, quit and went off to form his own film company, Wakamatsu Productions. A few months later he had already directed and produced his first independent movie. [5]

In Secret Acts Within Four Walls, Koji Wakamatsu had sown the seed of his “Cinema Psychotica”, a seed which would flower spectacularly over the next few years with the release of such stunning, controversial works as Taiji Ga Mitsuryo Suru Toki (The Embryo Hunts In Secret); Okasareta Byakui (Violated Angels); Yuke, Yuke, Nidome No Shojo (Go, Go, Second Time Virgin); and Shojo Geba Geba (Geba Geba Virgin [6]). These films at the core of Wakamatsu’s Cinema Psychotica comprise a brutally experimental/primal apocalypse which easily transcends the limitations of exploitation yet still impacts with a visceral force unequalled by any comparable sequence in Western cinema. [7] At implosion point, Wakamatsu’s films transgress into that zone of pure cinema inhabited by Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou, Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration Of The Pleasure Dome and a handful of others, a zone where logocentric notions of narrative are immolated and infernal meta-texts combust in the right brain like neural napalm.

Upon the release of his first autonomous production The Embryo Hunts In Secret (1966) [8], Wakamatsu was quoted in the Western press as proclaiming: “For me, violence, the body and sex are an integral part of life”; as borne out by the film and its successors, this proved to be less an artistic defense than a genuine manifesto. Palpably still enraged by the adverse reaction to Secret Acts, Wakamatsu throws into Embryo every sexual psychosis, cinematic gut-punch and accompanying outrage his revolutionary imagination can spew forth.

The “plot” of Embryo is simple; a disturbed man imprisons his girlfriend in his flat and subjects her to days of sadistic torture. But this simplicity is belied by the film’s complex execution, its restless experimentation and fathomless undercurrents of spiritual anguish. Wakamatsu’s Embryo is film as a physical weapon, a razor through the eye of the beholder. The short title sequence – images of a foetus in utero set to choral music – instantly sets a tone of quasi-religious regression. [9] Cut to a rainswept night scene, a man making love to a girl in his car. Soon he takes her into his building, carries her upstairs, and they enter his apartment – and she enters a nightmare. The man’s apartment is small (perhaps just two rooms), gloomy, oppressive – the typical Wakamatsu mise-en-scène, a static space in whose confines a psychosexual rite inexorably unfolds, inevitably leading to death.

The man undresses the girl, again we see him making love to her but already the tone is far from that of a conventional pink movie; the odd musical score, unflattering close-ups, raw camera movements suggest alienation, hatred. Before long he has tied her wrists together then, fetching a bullwhip from a closet, he proceeds to attack her in a vicious, prolonged flagellation sequence, his laughter suggesting sadistic glee in the assault, until she lies bloody and striped with livid welts on the floor. For the remainder of the film he subjects the girl to similar whip onslaughts, various types of bondage, and, most disturbingly, torture with a straight razor. These scenes of intense cruelty are intercut with flashbacks in which the tormented man remembers his father abusing his mother in the same way; superimposed by images of religious martyrdom, the torture of women; and fragmented by Wakamatsu’s trademark freezeframes, bleaches and still montages. Wakamatsu sculpts fear from the viscosity of the rooms, their mausoleum shadows and textures, and also utilises their structure to compartmentalise his screen space. The man’s sadistic reveries give shape, organic form to the film’s flux.

Typically, Wakamatsu inserts some scenes of perverse tenderness; the man brushing the girl’s hair, applying her make-up even when she is bound, and later breaking down and weeping, curled up like the foetus of the film’s title, head in her lap as she sings a haunting lullabye.

But finally, the man’s preordained death, the release he craves, is delivered. The girl cuts herself free of her bonds and, in a scene she has already fantasised, brutally and repeatedly stabs her captor to death. Our last glimpse of her is as she sits on the bed, traumatised, singing the lullabye to herself while the man’s blood-spattered corpse reposes on the bedroom floor.

Chicago, July 13, 1966. Around midnight Corazon Amurao, a young nurse of Filipino origin, hears someone knocking on the door of her dormitory. She opens up sleepily, and a young pockmarked man strongly smelling of alcohol violently enters the house. It is 25-year-old Richard Speck, a man whose life has been determined by misogyny and sexual offences. Speck threatens the young female residents with a gun, ties them, and finally drags one after the other into an adjoining room. Muffled screams emanate as the deranged intruder brutally strangles or stabs his helpless victims. One of the nurses seems to remind him of his hated ex-wife (she was 15 when they married); he rapes her both vaginally and anally before mutilating her. All in all, the violator claims the lives of eight girls. Corazon Amurao alone survives the massacre hidden under a bed and identifies Speck later, above all because of the distinctive tattoo on his arm – “Born to raise Hell”. [10]

Legend has it that Wakamatsu, inflamed by this provocative news story from the West, conceived and executed his extraordinary film Violated Angels (released in 1967) within a week of hearing about it. Apparently it was not the slaughter itself so much as the fact that one nurse survived, which appealed to Wakamatsu's sensibilities. [11]

Violated Angels opens with a series of still images, intercutting street scenes of the film’s lead player, the actor/playwright Juro Kara [12], with nude women in provocative poses taken from commercial pornography. This establishes Kara’s character as a disaffected individual with potentially unhealthy obsessions, an impression compounded by the first live-action scene, which shows him at night, discharging a handgun into the ocean. The immediate, obvious associations of gun as phallus and sea as maternal are deliberate and sustained powerfully throughout the remainder of Wakamatsu’s hour-long, sado-sexual death trip. Like the torturer in Embryo, this is a dangerous young man: mother-fixated, impotent, only able to express himself sexually through violence. A man who seemingly wants to fuck, kill, annihilate all women.

Cut to a house where six student nurses are lodging. At the back of the house, two of the young girls are engaged in lesbian sex. Another nurse, who cannot sleep, sees them and rouses her friends. Soon all the girls – as well as we, the viewers – are spying on the naked couple and their lewd display. Then the young man with the pistol arrives at the house. One nurse sees him lurking outside, and innocently lets him in. For a while he joins in the voyeuristic game, watching the two nurses making love; but then, suddenly inflamed, he rushes into the room and shoots one of them dead at point-blank range.

From this moment on, the film becomes a fugue of claustrophobic ritual terror, the back room of the house an oneiric torture chamber from which we may not – dare not – avert our gaze. After this shocking assassination the five remaining nurses huddle together in terror. Wakamatsu’s camera lingers sadistically on their sobbing faces, he captures their swelling hysteria by multi-tracking their mewling. The young man’s sexual derangement is shown by visions of them in the nude. Finally one girl tries to escape, he guns her down. Another stands up and strips naked (close-ups of her breasts, his impassive face); she tries to make love to the boy, at first he is immobile but finally mounts her. Then he hesitates again – we assume due to impotence – and she starts to laugh at him. He imagines the others joining in the ridicule, their mocking laughter multi-tracked and distorted, their faces in swirling expressionistic close-ups, nude bodies superimposed. In the film’s most explicit equation of the boy’s gun to his phallus, he thrusts the barrel into the girl’s vagina and pulls the trigger. A pattern of murderous gunfire (ejaculation), stasis, then psychotic arousal leading to further shooting is thus established, and persists throughout the film giving it the rhythmus of a bad wetdream.

Another girl starts to plead with the boy. All the while Wakamatsu’s camera prowls about the charnel quarters, dwelling on the bloody corpses, sweeping back to the girl as she puts on her nurse’s uniform. He ties her to a pillar, then uses a cut-throat razor to strip away the white cotton exposing her back and buttocks. Now follows perhaps the most harrowing sequence in the film, as the young psycho commences to slice her flesh to ribbons with the razor, virtually flaying her alive, casually whistling as he goes about his work. Close-ups of her tortured face are intercut with scenes of the ocean crashing ashore and the nude bodies of the remaining nurses, emphasising both the fantasy of maternal mutilation and the sexual ecstasy he derives during this hideously extended scene. Finally the girl’s screaming subsides, and the young man unties the next nurse. He leads her over to inspect his handiwork, and Wakamatsu inserts a few seconds of colour as we view his last victim’s ruined and blood-drenched body, her lifeless head wreathed in flowers. Hysterical, the untied girl tries to hide; the boy coldly shoots her once, twice, three times dead.

Now just one nurse survives. Surprisingly calm and impassive, she speaks gently to the boy, seeking to communicate with him while still in his “post-orgasmic” state. As he fondles her breasts she sings him a lullabye, he settles his head in her lap (in a direct reprise of a scene from Embryo); cut to a blue-tinted ocean scene, symbolising the maternal chord she seems to strike in the confused young killer. Wakamatsu now enters an extended colour sequence. We see the two running naked along the shore as a couple, shots of sunrise, family, a montage of palliative imagery. On the soundtrack, a repetitive electronic treatment of the girl’s lullabye.

Cut back to the house. The young nurse is now kneeling naked in the centre of the room, the boy curled in a foetal pose in front of her, also naked, head in her lap. The corpses of the slaughtered girls are arranged around them radially like the spokes of a pentagram, bright with blood, the damaged petals of a flesh flower. Wakamatsu surveys the carnage, then cuts to a shot of the boy as a happy child.

When we cut back to the room, the nurse has vanished – the killer is alone, curled in the midst of the five murdered girls, the female death star he has smashed from its scorpionic axis. The colour segment ends. Next, armed police arrive, the frame freezing as they are about to smash down the door of the house with batons. Wakamatsu now alternates this suspended image with other still shots of rioting, protest, military action, revolution: a terminal elegy for youth/freedom.

It remains uncertain whether the nurse – the maternal archetype – has betrayed the boy and summoned the police, or whether she was in fact a figment of his imagination all along. Such details are perhaps irrelevant compared to the main thrust of Violated Angels, a work of primitive genius in which Wakamatsu reveals the ineluctable sexual pulse of the universe, and the cycles of birth, death, and rebirth that govern all matter. Violated Angels aligns this catamenial compulsion with the melancholy of the exposed embryo, the unbearable isolation in time and space that drives us to our daily rites of annihilation, and in doing so becomes perhaps the ultimate expression of Sadean cinema. [13]

1968 was a relatively unproductive year for Wakamatsu, as he only directed four movies [14]. But by 1969 he was back in full swing, with nine films to his credit including the bleak and violent Go, Go, Second Time Virgin. [15] This film focuses on two young, alienated protagonists, a boy and a girl, who have formed an uneasy relationship. As with many of his films, Wakamatsu sets the action in a bounded, single space – this time, the roof of a building. Our only reprieve from this environment comes via a series of flashbacks. The girl, it seems, is a perpetual rape victim; in the flashbacks we see her gang-raped by four youths, raped again by two of the youths, then raped by one of them assisted by his girlfriend.

The boy has committed four bloody murders, which we again learn about in flashbacks. As in Violated Angels, Wakamatsu uses brief colour segments to display some of these gruesome scenes. It seems that the four adults he has killed include his parents; all four had been engaged in an orgy, during which the boy was himself molested. At one point, a woman urinates over him. His response is to stab them all.

More violence follows when the boy slaughters the four rapists (and their girlfriends). These scenes of violence are juxtaposed with almost lyrical passages, during which the boy and the girl cavort innocently on the rooftop accompanied by a poignant soundtrack. Night falls.

Wakamatsu further compounds the air of confusion by now inserting a typical string of colour images – possibly representing the young couple’s troubled dreams – both of commercial sex and violence and, more controversially, of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski. Tate (eight months pregnant) had only recently been butchered in Los Angeles, and with this deliberate reference to a topical real-life crime, Wakamatsu repeats the correlation – also implicit in Violated Angels – of the malaise in contemporary society and his own configurations of sexual violence. At daybreak – traditionally a time for renewed optimism after the atavistic rigours of night – the young couple casually walk off the roof, plunging pointlessly to their deaths.

As explicitly as the Manson murders he evokes, as Altamont, as the drowning of Brian Jones, Wakamatsu’s movie epitomises the auto-destruction of the “love generation” which marked 1969. But that same year Wakamatsu surpassed even the sexual derangement, carnage and morbid pessimism of Go, Go, Second Time Virgin with his masterpiece, Shojo Geba Geba.

Shojo Geba Geba is a stupendous 70-minute tour-de-force set in a desolate rural landscape which, it soon becomes apparent, represents an infernal circle of sex and violence from which there is no escape and in which all the pawns who play out Wakamatsu’s cinematic schema are sentenced to either death or a purgatorial eternity as lost souls. As Wakamatsu himself has noted [see following interview], this mise-en-scène is just as claustrophobic as the nurses’ dormitory in Violated Angels. [16]

The film opens in black and white with shots and freeze-frames of a night city set to a fractured percussive soundtrack, then cuts to two cars – one white, one black – speeding along the dirt roads of some bleak, deserted terrain. In the first car, three men hold a fourth, tied and blindfolded, captive. When they stop and pull the man out to urinate, the second car is shown to be full of jeering young women. Both cars then arrive at a barren, windswept spot marked by a huge wooden crucifix. A blindfolded woman is dragged from the second car and she and the blindfolded man are hurled into a gulley together. Despite his bonds, the man gropes the woman’s crotch. The girls from the car, secretly watching, strip the couple semi-naked. The couple kiss, pondering their fate. We learn that the man, Hochi, works for a yakuza boss; he has made the mistake of having an affair with the boss’s girlfriend, Hanako, and now they are both doomed to die. They are next stripped completely naked, as the girls continue their voyeuristic vigil.

Finally the couple are pulled apart; Hanako, her blindfold removed, is lashed to the crucifix. Hochi is dragged up to look at her before being untied and shoved into a tent. Soon one of the girls enters the tent, strips naked and starts to make love to him, lasciviously pawing his body. Cut to the other girls jeering at Hanako on the cross.

Cut back to the tent, where Hochi is now throttling the girl, strangling her to death. He slips beneath the back of the tent into the gulch and flees for his life. The thugs soon discover the girl’s corpse and give chase to Hochi in their car, but he reaches terrain where they cannot follow. They give up, cursing him.

Hochi flees into the distance, gasping and screaming in horror. We follow his flight for several miles, across barren tracts to the horizon. Here he collapses in exhaustion, and drifts into sleep haunted by Hanako calling his name. In a green-tinted sequence, soundless but for a musical track, he dreams of her being gang-raped by the thugs, next to the nude corpse of the strangled girl. She escapes, runs into the fields as the sequence erupts into full colour. Reunited, they make love, but as her hand caresses Hochi’s back she suddenly feels an animal’s tail growing from the base of his spine. Hochi wakes up abruptly.

For hours he wanders the wasteland, dressed only in the strangled girl’s slip, tormented. Then, as daylight fades and the full fist of night balls into black, he encounters another group of people encamped on a hilltop. These men are dressed in fine suits and surrounded by naked concubines. Hochi is welcomed, fed, fondled by the girls.

He is shown a rifle, mounted on a fixed tripod, with telescopic sights. Through the sights he sees a girl’s breast and nipple, no more. They urge him to pull the trigger. He complies, firing a shot into the dark, and is rewarded by sex with both the whores.

In the morning the group are seen dressing, shaving, the girls exercising naked in the early sun. After they all pose for group photos by automatic camera, Hochi wanders off. Cut to him returning to the original site, greeted with unbridled hostility by the vicious, vengeful thugs. He ignores them, seeing only (in colour) Hanako, still slumped on the cross, with a bullet wound in her right breast. Blood is pouring the length of her body. She seems to be still alive.

Hochi catches her blood in his cupped hands. Intercut with the thugs in black and white shots. Back to colour as Hochi realises it was he who shot her; it was her breast in the rifle sights. He drinks her blood as if in expiation. From this moment on Hochi seems to possess a messianic aura. His presence triggers mass psychosis, fear. We see him next in the tent, making necrophiliac advances to the strangled girl.

The thugs strip their girlfriends naked, one by one, and shove them into the tent where Hochi brutally rapes them in turn as the dead girl “watches”. Two of the girls flee and are pursued by two of the thugs. The third man sees Hanako stir on the cross and flees in atavistic terror.

Rifle shots. The men in suits pick off the fleeing girls and also open fire on the two remaining thugs, who head back to the crucifixion site. Cut to Hochi, who is now encased from head to toe in a sack, writhing like a crysalis behind the cross. Nude female corpses litter the ground around him. The thugs set upon him with baseball bats, beating him to an apparent pulp as the sack darkens with blood. Then, in homicidal frenzy, they set upon each other. One destroys the other’s skull and then himself collapses dead. There are now corpses everywhere.

Hanako stirs, calls for Hochi. Miraculously still alive, he responds from the sack. A valedictory dialogue ensues, until Hanako finally expires from her wound. A bizarre ballad strikes up on the soundtrack.

Eventually the men in suits arrive, whores in tow. Gloating over the carnage of this nightmare Golgotha, they pose for more self-portraits in front of the crucified Hanako. Hochi silently emerges from the sack, baseball bat in hand. He has realised that the men are yakuza, and that the one who urged him to pull the trigger was in fact his boss – whose face he had never been allowed to see. In a quick series of freeze-frames showing the yakuza group posing in front of the cross, we see Hochi emerging behind them, ever nearer, his face a mask of twisted hate, until the screen erupts with the film’s final, cathartic violence. Hochi brutally slays the entire group, girls included, finally dragging the boss to the foot of the crucifix where he caves in his skull like an eggshell.

A storm breaks. The field is now littered with bloody corpses. Return to colour for the final sequence. As the strange ballad once again strikes up, we see the cross in flames, as if blasted by lightning. Sporadic fires pock the terrain. Hochi bears his lover’s body away through this blazing, apocalyptic landscape to vanishing-point.

In Shojo Geba Geba Wakamatsu employs customary devices – freeze-frames, white light, idiosyncratic soundtracking, jump cuts, colour segments to denote temporal, emotional or perspective shifts, and provocative widescreen compositions – to produce a cinema whose marriage of terse economic and virulent aesthetic has seldom been rivalled. Thematically, he clearly prefigures Pasolini’s Salo, [17] both in his claustrophobic depictions of ineluctable, internecine sexual violence and in his implicit political assertion that beyond the law lies only an even deadlier noose of fascistic repression. In Geba, his psychosis finally achieves a truly religious intensity; Wakamatsu has produced the ultimate fusion of his terrifying, revolutionary obsessions.

By the release of Shinjuku Mad (1970), Sex Jack (1970) and Tenshi No Kokotsu (The Angelic Orgasm, 1972), the focus in Wakamatsu’s movies had seemingly swung even more strongly from the pink to the political. Despite its title, The Angelic Orgasm contains a smaller ratio of sex to violence than many of its predecessors. The film follows the activities of an ultra-left-wing paramilitary group known as Shikikyokai (“Four Seasons Group”). The members of a sub-division called Jugatsu (“October”) are assigned to rob an American military base, but the raid goes horribly wrong and four members are killed or maimed. The survivors realize a traitor has set them up, and rebel against the Group, forming their own radical troop dedicated to acts of random ultra-terrorism and sexual anarchy. They are eventually killed. By revealing that the October division were betrayed because of Group disapproval of their sexual mores, Wakamatsu again suggests that nihilistic acts of sex and violence are ultimately the only means of affirmation open to a young generation disowned by both mainstream Japanese society and its equally puritanical, repressive left-wing counterpart. [18]

As the 70s progressed, Wakamatsu’s film projects became less political and more focused on sexual cruelty; typical examples of this include 100 Years of Torture: The History (Gômon Hyakunen-shi, Shintoho Studios 1975) and Modern Sexual Torture (Gendai Sei-gômon, Shintoho Studios 1976). These are crude and basic productions, amounting to little more than scenes of misogynistic violence, and typical of Shintoho’s 70s product. Wakamatsu also directed similar films for his own company, such as Female Sex Torture (Seishôjo Gômon, 1979) or Cruel Rape Devil (Zannin Renzoku Gokanna, 1979).

Wakamatsu’s output in the 1980s and 1990s was sparse and varied, including work for television. Yet his reputation abroad continued to grow, with retrospectives of his classic films held in many countries. In 2007 he made something of an international comeback with a new film, United Red Army (Jitsuroku Rengo Sekigun: Asama Sanso e no), a lengthy (190 minutes) docu-drama overview of Japanese revolutionary movements since the 1960s. His Caterpillar (2010) was an adaptation of the Edogawa Rampo horror story about the sexual miseries of a limbless man, while 11.25: The Day He Chose His Own Fate (2012) concerns the last hours of the writer Yukio Mishima before his suicide by disembowelment in 1970.

Wakamatsu's last film was The Millennial Rapture (2012); he died on October 18 2012 after being hit by a taxi in Shinjuku.

Koji Wakamatsu must be viewed retrospectively as one of  the greatest, and certainly most prolific, underground/avant-garde film director Japan has ever produced. His outrageous, monomaniac films of the ‘60s helped pave the way for the public and governmental acceptance of sado-cinema enjoyed by more mainstream companies – including, ironically, his former employers Nikkatsu – in the ‘70s and ‘80s, while his relentless political motivation gives those films an undiminished subversive power. Recognition and rehabilitation for Wakamatsu as one of the leading forces in global revolutionary cinema are long overdue.

NOTES

[1] Tetsuji Takechi’s Daydream (Hakujitsumu) is generally considered to be the first major pink film. Tachechi has since became known as the “Godfather of Japanese porno cinema”. Produced by Shochiku Studios, this was the first of the so-called “Japanese New Wave” films to present a blatantly erotic storyline, featuring female nudity and even a brief glimpse of armpit and pubic hair, very much taboo in Japanese society. The “daydream” of the film’s title is experienced by a young artist whilst under anaesthesia at his dentist’s. He hallucinates about a pretty young girl whom he met in the waiting-room, seeing her subjected to all kinds of sexual molestation, rape and torture by the sadistic dentist. This includes hanging her from the ceiling and electric shock treatment. When he wakes up, the reality – or otherwise – of his voyeuristic experience becomes ambiguous. Guaranteed wide distribution by dint of deriving from a work by popular, respected novelist Junichiro Tanizaki, Daydream opened at the same time as the Tokyo Olympics, causing much embarassment to the Japanese government, who strongly objected to the “amoral” image of their nation the film might give to the rest of the world. Takechi followed this with the even more controversial Kuroi Yuki (Black Snow, 1965), a Nikkatsu production whose explosive mix of sex and politics finally proved too much provocation for the governmental censors. Takechi was arrested on charges of obscenity and sent to trial. The trial became a media event, with many participating intellectuals and artists defending the film director, as in the Western cases against books like Lady Chatterley and Last Exit To Brooklyn. And as in those trials, the defendant won, shaming the repressive state and opening the floodgates for a new era of nudity and permissiveness.

[2] Born in Kyoto, 1932, Nagisa Oshima was a graduate in Marxist history before joining Shochiku as an assistant director and scriptwriter in 1954. His first film as director was Ai To Kibo No Machi (Town Of Love And Hope, 1959), followed by Seishun Zankoku Monogatari (Cruel Story Of Youth, 1960) and Taiyo No Hakaba (The Sun’s Burial, 1960). Inspired by Jean-Luc Godard, these films focused on youth crime and abusive relationships to comment on the state of contemporary Japan. Nihon No Yoru To Kiri (Night And Fog In Japan, 1960) was withdrawn by Shochiku due to its politically sensitive nature, prompting Oshima to quit the studio and direct Shiiku (The Catch, 1961) and Amakusa Shiro Tokisada (The Rebel, 1962) independently. He then formed his own production company, Sozosha, and worked in television for three years before going on to make such films as Etsuraku (Pleasures Of The Flesh, 1965), Hakuchu No Torima (Violence At Noon, 1966), Koshikei (Death By Hanging, 1968), Shinjuku Dorobo Nikki (Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief, 1968), Shonen (Boy, 1969) and Gishiki (The Ceremony, 1971). Throughout this body of work – which established him firmly as the leader of Japanese cinema’s “New Wave” – Oshima largely rejects conventional modes of narrative and uses the cinematic medium to promote his own political analysis of Japan. In the 1970s he finally quit the country, making the seminal Ai No Koriida (1976) as a French co-production. This was followed by other foreign collaborations including Ai No Borei (Empire Of Passion, 1978), and Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983).

[3] Wakamatsu’s other films of 1965 include Botoku No Wana (Filthy Trap), Ai No Design (The Love Robots) and Joji No Rirekisho (Career Of Lust) – the latter once described as the most successful of all pink movies.

[4] Japan has always had a notoriously high level of student suicides, due to the intense pressure to succeed.

[5] As a producer Wakamatsu was responsible for discovering directors such as Masao Adachi (Seiyugi [Sex Games, 1968], Ryakusho Renzoku Shasatsuma [A.K.A. Serial Killer, 1969], Jogakusei Gerira [Schoolgirl Guerilla, 1969]), and Atsushi Jiku Yamatoya (Uragiri No Kisetsu [Season Of Treason, 1967], Koya No Dacchi Waifu [Inflatable Sex Doll Of The Wastelands, 1967]. He also produced Tatsumi Kumashiro’s acclaimed Akai Kami No Onna (Woman With Red Hair, 1979, starring “Queen of Eros” Junko Miyashita), and was an executive producer of Nagisa Oshima’s Ai No Koriida.

[6] “Geba” has no literal translation. It derives from the German “gewalt”, meaning strength or power, and is a political term used by leftist Japanese students to describe their movement (e.g. geba-bo [“staffs of power”], the long sticks used in violent encounters with police). A phonetic spelling of “gay bar” has also been posited as the word’s meaning in Shojo Geba Geba’s title; since the title was reportedly suggested to Wakamatsu by Nagisa Oshima, a political connotation seems much more likely. For Wakamatsu’s 1998 retrospective in Tokyo, the film was shown under the English title Violent Virgin.

[7] It is in fact estimated that between the inauguration of Wakamatsu Productions in 1965, and 1972, Wakamatsu produced around 45 films – mostly shot on ultra-low budgets equivalent to around $5,000, with an average turnaround of 16 days. Many of these have rarely, if ever, been seen in the West. The films discussed in this chapter are therefore not strictly sequential. Probably their nearest equivalent – in terms of singularity of vision, unflinching juxtaposition of sex and violence, visual poetry and psychotropic editing – would be Russ Meyer’s quartet Lorna (1964), Mudhoney (1965), Motorpsycho! (1965), and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966). Wakamatsu finally compounds all these elements with the political/experimental edge of a Jean-Luc Godard (minus the tedium) to create a devastating cinematic experience.

[8] Other films directed by Wakamatsu in 1966 include Joyoku No Kurozuisen (Narcissus Of Lust), Chi Wa Taiyo Yori Akai (Blood Is Redder Than The Sun), Hikisareta Joji (Torn Lust), and Shiro No Jinzo Bijo (White Baby Doll).

[9] Wakamatsu’s use and admixture of “found” music and original scoring is one of the most striking aspects of Embryo, and indeed his subsequent movies. Church organ, baroque hapsichord, soul-rending lullabyes and, in particular, his use of strident classical themes to counterpoint moments of sickening violence (clearly anticipating Kubrick’s use of same in A Clockwork Orange [GB, 1971]), weave a potent sonic fabric to which he would later add avant-garde jazz and weird folk ballads (see Shojo Geba Geba, for example).

[10] In the course of their investigation the police began to suspect that Richard Speck, the nurse-killer of Chicago, was also responsible for a series of still unsolved sex murders in the area of the Great Lakes. He had, after all, been there at the time of the crimes. The tattooed “rockabilly-killer” (complete with Elvis quiff and leather jacket) was duly sentenced to imprisonment for life (“600 years”) without remission.

[11] Though Wakamatsu’s theory that Speck spared the nurse out of sympathy [see interview] is, of course, mistaken. Wakamatsu’s Nihon Boko Ankokushi: Ijosha No Chi (Underground History Of Japanese Sex Violence: Blood Of A Stranger, 1967) was also based on true crime, loosely reprising – with typical embellishments of sadism and political disharmony – the story of Yoshio Kodaira, a notorious Tokyo rapist in the 1940s. Wakamatsu continued with a series of Underground History Of Japanese Sex Violence films, including: Zoku Nihon Boko Ankokushi: Bogyaku Ma (Underground History Of Japanese Sex Violence 2: Rank Oppressive Evil, 1967); Nihon Boko Ankokushi: Onju (Underground History Of Japanese Sex Violence: Raging Beast, 1970); and Gendai Nihon Boko Ankokushi (Story From The Underground History Of Japanese Sexual Violence, 1972). Other films Wakamatsu directed in 1967 include Sei Hanzai (Sex Crimes), Mitsu (Dark Streets), Ami No Naka No Boko (Rape Trap), Sei No Horo (Sex Beast), and Ranko (Orgy).

[12] Juro Kara is a radical figure in “post-Shingeki theatre”, an avant-garde theatre movement which developed parallel to Japanese New Wave cinema in the 1960s, fomenting in the decadent Golden Gai area of Shinjuku. Kara is director of the Jokyo Gekijo (“Situation”) Theatre, whose itinerant troupe, Akai Tento, have performed works such as Hebi Hime ( Snake Princess, 1977) to continued acclaim. Kara co-scripted Violated Angels, as well as playing the lead role. He also appears (as himself) in Oshima’s Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief, and more recently in Last Frankenstein (1992), a film by modern cult theatre director Takeshi Kawamura. Kara’s only film as director is Genkai Nada (Dead Horizon, 1976). Other key post-Shingeki playwrights include Makoto Satoh and Shuji Terayama. Satoh is best known for his plays Abe Sada No Inu (“Sada Abe’s Dogs”) and Onna-goroshi Abura No Jigoku (“Woman Killer In Oil Hell”), while Terayama received acclaim for such scandalous works as Inugami (“Dog God”, 1969) and Jashumon (“Gate Of Heretics”, 1971), performed by his travelling Tenjo Sajiki troupe. Terayama moved into movies properly in 1970 with the short Tomato Ketchup Kotei (Emperor Tomato Ketchup), a typical melange of nudity and libidinal regression concerning the sexual adventures of a nine-year-old boy. Terayama’s later films include Rolla (1974), Marudororu No Uta (The Songs Of Maldoror, 1977) and the French/Japanese production Les Fruits De La Passion (Fruits Of Passion aka Story Of O II, 1981), starring Klaus Kinski. His absurdist credo is betrayed by the following quote: “I believe my films are very funny, whilst having the appearance of being serious; today, the greatest sickness is taking oneself seriously”. The collision of film and the avant-garde is perhaps best represented by Katsu Kanai’s Mujin Retto (The Deserted Reef, 1969), a grotesque and surrealistic visual poem suffused with alarmingly cruel, absurd and perverse imagery. Kanai’s Okuku (The Kingdom, 1973) is an equally strange creation, in which a deranged bird-watcher must pass through the anus of a duck in order to defy his nemesis, King Chronos. The spirit of post-Shingeki and its links to underground cinema still survive in today’s Tokyo, maintained by the likes of Kei Fujiwara, star of Tetsuo and director of Organ, who runs her own avant-garde playhouse.

[13] The Marquis de Sade’s credo of sexual violence, blasphemy, revolution, cosmic atavism and the annihilation of the nuclear family is encapsulated in his Philosophy In The Boudoir (1798), a polymorphous rite which ends with the mother – the eternal betrayer – being punished by having her vagina sewn shut (also symbolically denying re-entry to the sundered foetus). Sade took these codes to their murderous conclusion in The 120 Days Of Sodom, in which his libertines devise endless ways to fornicate with and then butcher mothers, daughters, prostitutes, pregnant women and little girls alike. The Sadean impulses which drive Wakamatsu’s The Embryo Hunts In Secret reach fruition in Violated Angels, an absolute indictment of the human condition expressed with perverse, poetic savagery. Tatsumi Kumashiro’s Onna Jigoku: Mori Wa Nureta (Female Hell: Wet Forest, 1973) is a notable roman porno film partially based on de Sade’s Juliette.

[14] Haragashi Onna (Womb To Let), Kikutai No Yokkyu (Desires Of The Flesh), Fukushu Ki (Demon Of Vengeance), and Kimpeibai (Concubines).

[15] Other films directed by Wakamatsu in 1969 include Kyoso Joshiko (Death Of A Madman), Niku No Hyoteki Tobo (Screaming Flesh Target), Kongai Joji (Adulterous Lust), Gendai Sei Hanzai Zekkyohen: Ryu Naki Boko (Modern Sex Crimes: Fierce Screams, Wild Rape), Gendai Sei Hanzai Ankokuhen: Aru Torima No Kokuhaku (Modern Sex Crimes: Confessions Of A Demon Killer), and Otoko Goroshi Onna Goroshi: Hadaka No Judan (Male Killer, Female Killer, Naked Bullet).

[16] In a legendary aside to his collaborator Atsushi Yamatoya – a notorious agoraphobic – as they surveyed the panorama of the film’s events, Wakamatsu urged Yamatoya to “lock yourself inside here”.

[17] Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo: O Le 120 Giornati Di Sodoma (Italy, 1975) is his version of the Marquis de Sade’s atrocity bible The 120 Days Of Sodom. Pasolini transposes the book’s action to an Italian castle at the end of World War II, producing an annihilating meditation on fascism and absolute corruption. Salo remains the most faithful cinematic interpretation of de Sade.

[18] The Angelic Orgasm was actually withdrawn by its distributors – fearful of “copycat” crimes – when a spate of real-life terrorist bombings occurred. Around this time, Wakamatsu himself reportedly left Japan to “join” the Palestinian Liberation Front. In 1971 he and Masao Adachi produced the short film Sekigun PFLP: Sekai Senso Sengen (Red Army PFLP: World War Statement) in Palestine. His name has also been (tenuously) linked to similar organizations within Japan, such as the Red Army who in 1971 executed twelve of their own rank in a public purge known as The Summation.

AN INTERVIEW WITH KOJI WAKAMATSU

Koji Wakamatsu was interviewed by Romain Slocombe at The Deep Gallery in Nogizaka, Tokyo, in February 1993. Also present were a lady Assistant of Wakamatsu, and an Editor from Eichi Publishing.

ROMAIN SLOCOMBE: Yesterday, in a bookshop of the Jinbocho quarter, I found a videocassette of one of your older films, Yuke, Yuke, Nidome No Shojo. I watched it this morning before coming here. The title is intriguing, but mainly I was surprised by the beauty of the images and of the jazz music. The story is rather simple, and the mood sort of intellectual, isn’t it? This movie must have pleased the students of the time, the ones who liked films by Oshima. At the beginning, were your film more violent? Has there been a change in style?

KOJI WAKAMATSU: Yes. Between the 1960 Japan-America security treaty, and the 1970 one, the social situation became more and more tense. Student movements were getting increasingly violent. In parallel to this, my works became more and more eccentric. I shot this film on the roof terrace of the building where our office was. I shot it entirely on the roof! The idea came to me as I was breathing there, watching the sky! It hardly cost anything, just had to pay the crew and the actors. While shooting, I didn’t know at all if it would turn into an interesting movie or not. It’s the others who say if it’s good or bad, etc. Myself, I don’t understand anything about my films.

RS: During the shooting, do you often modify the script?

KW: I change it all the time.

RS: Still, you do have a script to begin from?

KW: Yes. Of course, one needs a script to prepare things, and inform the team.

RS: You didn’t have too many problems concerning your relations with the producers, etc?

KW: Yes, they weren’t happy at first because the finished film had nothing to do with the project I’d shown them before!

RS: Even a small production company like Art Theater Guild [ATG]?

KW: Yes. But what matters is to attract as many people as possible into the cinemas. After that, once they’ve realised it’s a success, then they don’t complain any more.

RS: The more outré the movie was, the more it attracted an audience?

KW: Yes, students mainly but not the general public. People in general would think my films were “dirty”. My main audience was therefore an intellectual one, most of them being university students. On the other hand, quite a lot of poor workers from the Sanya ghetto would come.

RS: What was the average length of those films?

KW: Towards the beginning of my career, without thinking much, I always happened to make films lasting about 1 hour 20 minutes, and from time to time, 2 hours. And then, I began doing middle length films, about 1 hour. It’s the case for Okasareta Byakui. When shooting that one, I had no intention of showing it in movie theatres. I wished to do a personal film. I was in the midst of shooting a more commercial one then, and I asked the actors to give me three more days in order to make Okasareta Byakui. And I phoned Juro Kara: “Hey, come and have fun with us!” I lured him by promi sing him two big prawns as a salary. Kara and I left the camera turning for three days, without thinking of anything. And it didn’t cost much. I intended to show it in some small underground cinema. But it attracted attention from a few critics.

RS: Your films often deal with the relationship between a man and a woman, and you always show it (evolving) in a rather violent way. In an interview long ago, you said: “Between a man and a woman, there can be nothing but war.” [Laughter]

KW: But yes, it’s like war, their relationship! Actually the relation lasts longer when it’s more tense and when there is a distance between two beings, don’t you think so?

EDITOR: About Yuke, Yuke, Nidome No Shojo, Mr Wakamatsu, you said it had been shot entirely on the top of a building. In Shojo Geba Geba, you showed a cross erected in the middle of a desert. And Okasareta Byakui happens inside a closed, isolated room.

KW: I don’t know why. But I enjoy creating a drama within a limited space. In this case, I regarded the desert as a locked room. It allows a concentration. Among my works, those which have been considered as successful were always shot inside an isolated room.

EDITOR: For you, Mr Slocombe, it is a hospital room, isn’t it? You too feel attracted by the drama happening between a woman and a man shut up inside a room?

RS: Not exactly. Because in the case of my works, the man always stands outside the frame, one cannot see him, it is he who is the voyeur. For example, in a Japanese bijin-ga [woodblock print depicting a beautiful woman], we do not see the man contemplating her from outside the frame. And for me the image of the woman is enough. The spectator is left to wonder why this woman is injured, or bound. If I walk through a hospital corridor and pass by the closed doors of the rooms, I feel the desire of opening a door to discover what young woman is inside the room.

KW: I wonder if that desire doesn’t come from your childhood. I feel you’ve kept until now that feeling you had while watching that broken doll you once mentioned, it’s a feeling most people forget when they grow up. My film Mizu No Nai Pool [Pool Without Water, 1982] tried to revive this child’s desire – practising cruel experiments on frogs, touching a doll in between the legs, acting as a voyeur, etc.

EDITOR: These truly are desires from childhood. Maybe you would have liked to dissect a woman’s corpse?

RS: Mr Wakamatsu, I’d like to come back to Yuke, Yuke, Nidome No Shojo, which I just saw. I noticed the same purity in the hero of Okasareta Byakui, played by Juro Kara. He’s had no sexual experience yet he feels both aggression and love towards women. And he can’t make up his mind to kill that nurse, whom he recognizes to be as pure as himself. When the girl begs him not to rape her, their relationship remains pure. The hero of Yuke, Yuke... decides to kill the other, more adult, boys who have raped the woman. I got the impression that he himself wished to remain pure, and find a woman as pure as he.

KW: In the case of Okasareta Byakui, I was inspired by the nurse-killing by a young man in Chicago. The fact that one only girl hadn’t been killed interested me. It seems that this girl was the only one to understand the boy’s feelings, and that he just couldn’t kill her. As for me, I am the youngest of seven brothers. We were all boys and we only had our mother. Spectators of my films often notice my Oedipus complex. I wonder if this personal tendency comes from my family situation during childhood. But apart from that, I feel admiration towards womanhood in general.

ASSISTANT: Or rather, a complex of the “Holy Virgin”?

KW: Exactly. I seek comfort in womanhood as in the Holy Mother, or in the Goddess Kannon [feminine incarnation of the Buddha of mercifulness].

RS: Precisely, I was able to see your film Eros Eternal, or The Great Goddess Of Mercifulness [Seibo Kannon Daibosatsu, 1977]. There too one finds this woman, who appears from the sea.

KW: Yes. I admit to be a big admirer of woman, if I reflect on the subject. For me a woman is a being who understands me and accepts me totally without me needing to explain myself. In my films one always finds a yearning for a woman of infinite grace and kindness.

RS: This is perhaps a very Japanese theme?

KW: Yes. It certainly comes from the surroundings and situation during my childhood.

EDITOR: There must exist some gap between that idealised woman, and those of the real world...

KW: Yes, of course. There are plenty of differences. But I prefer to continue seeking this ideal, rather than live in resignation.

EDITOR: For Romain Slocombe, this idealised woman is represented in these pictures of women wearing bandages, am I right?

KW: I understand this perfectly. The injured woman who can’t move from her hospital bed, is in a way isolated from the real world: it’s in such an unintentional immobility that she gives off more eroticism than in her normal state. I find a woman more erotic while she’s asleep. In sleep, deprived of will, a woman exposes herself without wariness, without artifice. A naked woman sleeping is very beautiful sight. Actually I feel a lot of attraction when seeing a woman with bandages on a hospital bed. But if it’s a sick woman, then she’s much less erotic! [Laughter]

RS: True. The vision of a woman who’s ill, calls to mind the eventuality of her death, and this is disagreeable to me. The woman bandaged or in a cast, can be apart from this in perfect health but has to bear it for a month or so, a motionless position. I find her more thrilling so.

EDITOR: Visually, white bandage is very beautiful. Mr Slocombe, you mentioned the purity of the hero of Yuke, Yuke... ; it’s purity which brings the hero to his death, isn’t it? Mr Wakamatsu, why does your hero die at the end?

KW: ...That’s because I thought it was a more stylish resolution. For example, I find Che Guevara very chic – I would have liked to live and die like him! Unfortunately, I’m going to end as a mere film director. That’s why I went as far as Palestine to shoot a film. Following the principles of the film, the hero shouldn’t die. But I thought it would be a finer ending if he died.

EDITOR: I believe the hero had to die in order to preserve his purity.

KW: I wasn’t conscious of it. Because I don’t use my brain much to do a film. I only respect my feelings and my sensitivity. And very often, actors don’t understand what I want. I find myself very instinctive, like an animal. Never been to a cinema school, never learnt the cinematographic technique. It’s by chance that I entered this profession. I had never dreamed of it! Simply, I had the urge to create something, either a text, either a film, by any means. I wished my desires to come true, for example the desire to kill cops! [Laughter] I cannot do this in real life, of course. But in a film I can exterminate a huge number of cops all at once. There you are, I started making movies for a very crude motive. Because of those first films, which met with some success, people began calling me a film director. Since then I shoot constantly, even today when conditions are more and more difficult. I do not construct a film inside my brain. The desire comes to me all of a sudden. For example, Taiji Ga Mitsuryo Suru Toki is born from an image I saw from the window, a rainy morning in May. First, there was an image. Then to this initial image I add other images, one by one. That’s how I build a film, just with images. As soon as I’ve found this core-image, I summon the crew and the actors. If I’d had to wait a month or so, the desire would be gone already. It’s always a nuisance when I’m asked: “That image there, what is it supposed to mean?”

RS: Did you conceive in the same way Terroru No Kisetsu [Season Of Terror, 1969]? The hero, who lives with two women, goes to blow up Haneda Airport at the end.

KW: Yes, I really knew this guy who lived with two women. Those two women had children almost at the same time. And they loved each other, they were lesbians! And all of them got on very well together. I found the situation very amusing and wanted to make a movie about those three people. It’s only after that I added the detail of the man being a terrorist.

RS: Sex and terrorism, both themes were mixed together. For such a reason one of my books got censored in France.

KW: My film Sex Jack got banned in France too. It was first shown at Cannes festival, then forbidden – although some film fans had liked it. The problem was that at the end of the film, a “nice” young terrorist tries to kill the Prime Minister, They thought it was anti-social. As for Okasareta Byakui, they said there was too much blood.

RS: This intrigues me: in France or in England, a film or a comic showing S/M and violence towards women, faces censorship. While the depiction of sex scenes is widely tolerated. In Japan it’s the reverse situation isn’t it?

KW: Yes, to show S/M and violence in a film is perfectly OK. But for love scenes, some limits have been fixed. Which means one can’t show everything, you understand? At European film festivals, people often laugh at Japanese movies, because the camera makes bizarre motions not to show certain things. I feel sort of embarrassed each time a European asks me: “What is the meaning of that rather brutal camera movement?” Why must one hide sexual organs? I believe that in Japan sex is the privilege of men who have power, like politicians, very rich people, etc. They all have girlfriends, don’t they? In the past we Japanese were told: “You the poor people, be content with eating rice.” And even now they say to us: “Be content without seeing images of sex.” In the Edo period everything was more broad-minded, from what I heard. It is after the Meiji and Taisho periods that the authorities became very strict.

EDITOR: While S/M and violence still remained tolerated, as always in Japan.

KW: Yes. Perhaps because authorities believe these things to be absolutely normal.

EDITOR: I find that idea interesting, power monopolizing sex.

KW: That’s why in my films I enjoy making fun of power, by associating it with sex.

RS: Have you noticed any recent changes, watching the work of young film-makers? Do you intend to try other styles of film?

KW: I often note that young directors show naked women in a solely commercial purpose. I find them quite superficial. That’s why I rarely see their movies. My director friends and I, if we made pinku eiga, it was to express some kind of serious feeling. As for other film styles, I’d say I’ve already tried them all.

EDITOR: So, if I understood you right, even in your pinku eiga, the main subject wasn’t sex.

KW: Right. First, at the time, I wasn’t accepted by big production companies. To make a movie, I was forced to work in the field of pinku eiga. And my films had to be seen by the largest audience possible, so I put some rather scandalous titles to attract a greater public, like Yuke, Yuke, Nidome No Shojo. Reading the word “virgin”, people imagine pornographic things and rush into the cinemas. What’s important is that they are happy with what they saw, even if it wasn’t at all what they expected, don’t you think?

ASSISTANT: So now you can direct the movies you want to, they don’t have to be pinku eiga?

KW: Yes, the situation has changed completely. I’m even currently shooting a film for TV. [Laughter]

Table of Contents

- POP AVANT-GARDE VIOLENCE

- CREDITS AND COPYRIGHT
- THE FILMS OF KOJI WAKAMATSU
- NOTES
- PHOTO AND POSTER GALLERY
- AN INTERVIEW WITH KOJI WAKAMATSU

- BACK COVER