The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, October 19-25
Affairs within Walls (1965)
Directed by Koji Wakamatsu
Sexploitation flicks are usually associated with salacious, slightly prurient audiences looking for some nudity and the occasional cheap thrill. At most they are read as a sort of cinematographic symptom of the sexual revolution that swept the Western hemisphere in the late 60s. But in Japan, “pink films,” as the genre came to be known, are inextricably linked to ultra-leftist politics. The most prominent exponents were in fact highly politicized filmmakers that used sex as both a Trojan horse for their subversive messages and the perfect metaphor to stage the then-popular conviction that had the private sphere coinciding with the political one. Emblematic in this regard is Affairs Within Walls, which became the first pink film shown outside of Japan when it was selected for the Berlin Film Festival. Sexuality, voyeurism and revolutionary politics are here deployed as allegorical elements but also function as eminently narrative tropes, incarnating the characters’ dilemmas and tribulations. Spectacle is hosting the biggest retrospective of Japanese Pink Films to have ever taken place in North America, starting with the films of the late Wakamatsu, who skinny-dipped in the treacherous waters of radical politics and the armed struggle. (Testament to the heartfelt resolve that traversed and animated those films and their evident contradictions is perhaps the story of Masao Adachi, fellow filmmaker and screenwriter of Wakamatsu’s The Embryo Hunts in Silence, who would eventually enlist in the Japanese Red Army and join the ranks of the Palestinian resistance in Lebanon.) By undressing their protagonists of their social mores, pink films managed to chronicle the burning political passions as well as the crimes of a generation of young Japanese impatient to overthrow a most conservative society. It started with cinema and often ended in senseless tragedy, as many of these films had so presciently sensed. Giovanni Vimercati (October 22, 30, 7pm at the Spectacle’s pink films series)