The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema Free
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FREE BEHIND THE PINK CURTAIN: THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF JAPANESE SEX CINEMA PDF Johnny Sharp | 256 pages | 03 Nov 2008 | FAB Press | 9781903254547 | English | Godalming, United Kingdom Kōichi Saitō (cinematographer) - Wikipedia If you have been around for any length of time in Japan, sooner or later you will stumble over that particular Japanese sex film genre called pinku eiga or the pink film. Pink movies are softcore sex productions generally shot on 35mm celluloid and made for theatrical screenings. They always feature plenty of boobs and butts but no genitals at all, the public display of the latter still being prohibited in Japan. However, the films do tell actual stories… the directors working in the genre have had all the freedom to tell any weird tale they wanted as long as they stayed within their budgets and showed the required amount of skin on screen. Cheaply produced, they closely mirrored the times in which they Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema made. Pink films have been a major training ground for a great number of directors who later became successful in mainstream cinema. Yojiro Takita, who won an Academy Award in for his film Departureswas one of them. But even more importantly than that, pink film did in fact save a large part of the Japanese film industry from imminent bankruptcy in the s. Though various retrospectives of influential works have been screened at international film festivals, the genre as such is still often Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema with contempt by many Japanese and international critics. He ended up in prison in Beirut eventually, Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema extradited to Japan, spent some more time in prison here and is now making movies again. Wakamatsu and Adachi both receive their own chapters in the book and they are not limited to their input into sex-movie making they cover their whole colorful, bizarre yet influential careers. Other director profiles include Sato Hisayasu who turned pink movies into media-obsessed tales of video-lit, psychotropic, horror slaughterhouses in the early s, Sano Kazuhiro who brought punk underground aesthetics to pink, and Zeze Takahisa, who established himself as an artist auteur among international festival audiences with films like Tokyo X Erotica Sure, an incredible amount of painstaking research went into the book to uncover all those stories, films and biographies and their relations to both the world at large and to the politics of the bookkeepers back at the pink film company offices. As you would expect from a work on sex movies, Pink Curtain features a generous amount of film stills, depicting plenty of the hotter moments in the respective flicks. If you finally think that you got to see some of those movies Sharp writes about, the book ends with a large index which lists both the English and the Japanese names of the films the latter in their original script as well as the DVD sources for each film — provided the film ever made it to digital. In short, Pink Curtain is the definite, authoritative book on pink cinema in the English language and it will certainly remain the standard work on the subject for years to come. Johannes Schonherr If you have been around for any length of time in Japan, sooner or later you will stumble over that particular Japanese sex film genre called pinku eiga or the pink film. Behind the Pink Curtain - Pink Visitor Behind the Pink Curtain takes the reader on a wild joy ride deep into the hinterlands of Japanese culture, society and radical politics by way of the weird and wonderful world of the Pink Film and Roman Porno genres. In lavishly illustrated pages, Behind the Pink Curtain focuses on the art and industry of one of the most notorious sectors of Japanese filmmaking, the erotic Pink Film, or pinku eiga genre, and the closely related Roman Porno films produced by Nikkatsu studios from to A phenomenon distinct from the cheaply-produced hardcore Adult Video AV market, from the early s onwards major Japanese film studios and independent producers alike have kept up a conveyor belt level of output of pornographic features intended purely for cinema release. Still today, just short of such titles Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema shot on 35mm every year intended for screening in a specialist network of adult cinema across the nation. In recent years, many have found themselves released on DVD in the West or screened at international film festivals, while many of Japan's most noted filmmakers today have cut their teeth in this industry. Just how close are the links between the arthouse and the grindhouse in Japan? Read about the ins and outs of Japanese censorship from the wartime onwards, and how topless deep sea diving girls came to woo local audiences in the s. Learn how a TV nature documentary maker ended up helming nude female Tarzan movies, and how s mavericks Koji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi met up with John and Yoko at Cannes while on the way to the Golan Heights to make a film about Palestinian revolutionaries. How Deep Throat's Harry Reems wound up in Tokyo starring in a zany sex comedy about a penis transplant gone awry, and how one of Japan's most famous literary figures ended up the subject of the country's first gay porno movie. How one of Nikkatsu's leading directors went it alone to make a film about powerboat racing and ended up in the bad books of the yakuza, and how the anti-Bush sex farce Horny Home Tutor: Teacher's Love Juice came to be re-titled as The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai and became one of the most talked-about Japanese films of recent years, playing at over twenty international film festivals. Based on extensive interviews with many of the leading figures in the field, Behind the Pink Curtain is a colourful and exhaustive trawl through Japan's most vibrant and prolific filmmaking sector. He contributes liner notes and audio commentaries to DVD releases of Japanese films worldwide, and has written chapters for several anthology collections including 24 Frames: Japan and Korea ed. Ian Luna and Dictionnaire mondial des images ed. Laurence Gervereau. Why a book on Japanese erotic films? Hasn't this topic been covered quite exhaustively and exhaustingly enough already? What more is there to be said? The others I've read are sort of redundant, just scene-by- scene descriptions of what you see on screen without any sort of context or insight. Weisser's book is pretty exhaustive, but it is basically a reference guide. It tells you what's out there, and details about the cast, directors etc. It is a good book though. It does what it sets out to do pretty well. But I was always more curious about the industry as a whole - when did it all begin, why and how did the pink film get so popular in the first place, who makes the films, who watches them and where do they watch them, and why is Japan still making sex films for the cinema when no other country seems to be - these kinds of questions. I knew when I first started looking at them that a lot of pink films had political elements or that you needed a certain background context to understand what they were really trying to say - I'm thinking specifically of the films of Takahisa Zeze and the other Four Devils directors, but this applies just as much to older directors such as Koji Wakamatsu. It was also clear that from the beginning pink directors were making Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema that reacted against the type of films being made before, both in and outside of the genre. There's always been something punk-ish about the whole industry. Anyway, clearly to me there were a whole lot of questions that remained to be answered. I guess the best thing to say is that Weisser pioneered the subject; he first marked out the boundaries on an empty map, and I've come back to draw in the contours and put up signs to other areas on it Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema might warrant further investigation. This was also a big part of the appeal for me. It is very rare when you are writing about cinema that you find an entire substrata of films that can be grouped by their content, their makers and their production circumstances and that haven't been covered in any real detail before. It was like discovering a lost continent - there's been at least films made in the pinku eiga genre, and this isn't even counting Nikkatsu Roman Porno, and only a small Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema of these have made it through to the West before. And owing to the films' erotic or violent content, the field has never really been seen fit as a subject for scholarly research, analysing how these films fit into the cultural climate of when they were made and what they actually mean. More importantly though, when I was living in Tokyo, just getting to know Japanese cinema better in general and getting to meet other fans, researchers or people in the industry, I ended up getting pretty close to some of the filmmakers working in pink cinema, and talk to them about what they were trying to do within it.