Traditionally, pink films are hour-long softcore films that must be filmed with a specific, studio-mandated quota of nude scenes per film (the exact number of nude scenes depends on the studio as well as the project). The genre has numerous big stars, like Tattooed Flower Vase star Naomi Tan, who earned the seemingly dubious title of Nikkatsu Studio’s third “Roman Porno Queen” and was the first big female star to specialize in bondage and S&M. Pink films are also different from American porn in that Japanese censorship law requires genitalia to never be explicitly shown. This is key to understanding how that superior filmmakers like Masaru Konuma filmed sex scenes, often with a perverse sense of humor. The most explicit act of penetration in Konuma’s Tattooed Flower Vase is a scene where Michiyo (Tan), an older woman who shares a lover with her daughter, gets a tattoo. No sex act is ever explicitly shown, which partially accounts for the surreally orgiastic screams that the female stars make during sex scenes as a means of compensation.
In America, pink films have recently become something to talk about thanks to diligent curators like the ones that annually program the New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF). For three years now, NYAFF has screened several pink films produced from the ‘80s up to the current day, like S&M Hunter, an action-comedy starring a one-eyed dominator, and Molester Train: Wedding Capriccio, an entry in a popular mystery-comedy series about an unconventional detective that solves crimes by groping women on crowded trains. These films are fun entrees into the world of pink films. But within the context of the genre’s history, neither is more than a pop curiosity. They were made in the ‘80s, a period that’s looked down on as a low point in the production of pink films. In the ‘80s, “Adult Video” (AV) entertainment like S&M Hunter became more popular than the studio-produced pink films that were theatrically released to mainstream theatergoers. By then, it was widely understood that the genre’s halcyon days were over.
Nikkatsu is still producing pink films, but rather than attempting to secure theatrical releases, they focus their energies on courting the AV market with movies that cost less to make. To be fair, DVD companies like the West Coast-based Pink Eiga label have kept interest in pink films alive by releasing fun and freaky AV titles like the absurdly po-faced A Lonely Cow Weeps at Dawn, a comedy about a woman that pretends to be her blind father’s cow. But AV films like Lonely Cow were made after the Roman Porno era of pink films, the period between 1971 and 1982 that’s widely considered to be the high watermark of the genre. Luckily, the New York Film Festival’s “Velvet Bullets, Steel Kisses” retro is helping to raise American filmgoers’ awareness of pink films. Any retrospective that makes a film like Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter, an exemplar of the appropriately named “Pinky Violence” subgenre of pink films, seem a little more venerable is a good retrospective.
What exactly is so special about the Roman Porno era of Pink films, you ask? For starters, it was a period when Nikkatsu studios gave big production budgets to pink filmmakers. At this time, pink directors were in the public spotlight and given greater financial support than any other time in the history of the genre. It was a tawdry Renaissance of sorts, and you can see just how that sense of creative freedom fueled filmmakers like Woman with Red Hair‘s Tatsumi Kumashiro, who has three films available for rent from Fandor, including Sayuri Ichijo: Following Desire, better known as Ichijo’s Wet Lust.
Sayuri Ichijo is indicative of the fruitful relationship between directors like Kumashiro and popular pink stars like Hiroko Isayama. In the film, a strip-tease artist named Harumi (Hiroko Isayama) opens her own strip club despite the objections of her pimp who will stop at nothing to prevent her from doing so. Sayuri Ichijo is so well-regarded that the prestigious periodical film journal Kinema Jumpo, considered by many film scholars to be the highest authority when it comes to Japanese history, awarded Isayama an award for “Best Actress of the Year,” irregardless of film genre. Additionally, Naomi Tan’s collaborations with director Masaru Konuma are artfully sleazy. Both Tattooed Flower Vase and Cloistered Nun: Runa’s Confession are more than just skin flicks: they’re melodramas with thoughtful plots starring real actresses and helmed by a director with a good eye for what is erotic in a sex scene. They are basically the arty porn films that Michael Cera’s character dreamed of in Superbad. Thank goodness for the New York Film Festival: they just made it a little easier for people to feel good about being perverted.
Simon Abrams is a NY-based film, tv and comics critic for various outlets, including the Village Voice, the Onion’s A.V. Club and Wide Screen. He collects his writing on film at Extended Cut.
