Go, Go Second Time Virgin + Running In Madness, Dying In Love
The Cinefamily – Los Angeles, CA
11/14/09

During the 1960s, censorship laws forbade Japanese filmmakers from showing full nudity and sex. The Japanese pinku eiga genre, approximately translated as “softcore pornography” in English, was born of the attempt to represent eroticism through alternative means. With a meticulous eye for mise en scène, directors used elaborate props such as lamps and bottles to obscure the genitals (a visual gag used to much crass effect by Mike Myers in the the late nineties) and often operated on low budgets and limited resources. Out of this period of Japanese cinema, Koji Wakamatsu is one of the most recognized and controversial directors.The director did more than just push the sexual taboos of 20th century Japan. Wakamatsu’s films, frequently shot in one location with single takes, took on explicit themes of sex and violence while defining the aesthetic avant-garde of Japanese cinema.

This Saturday, the Cinefamily will screen two of Wakamatsu’s films, Go, Go Second Time Virgin (1969) and Running In Madness, Dying In Love (1969). Wakamatsu’s films, frequently shot in one location with single takes, took on explicit themes of sex and violence while defining the aesthetic avant garde of Japanese cinema. These two films are no less representative of his radically visionary filmography. The Cinefamily describes them as…

An allegory for the end of the hippie movement? For the impotence of youth against the crushing oppression of a chaotic world? Or a cruel reflection of society’s self-destruction during the chaos of the 1960s? It’s up to you to draw your own conclusion, for Go, Go Second Time Virgin’s grim teen rebellion has explosive impact that defies conventions. In the film, two psychologically battered teenagers of the opposite sex meet on a desolate urban rooftop and bare their psychic scars to each other. The boy feels a mixture of arousal and anguish when he sees the girl unclothed following a gang rape on the rooftop (in which he was a partial participant) but their relationship becomes far more devastating and perverse than a forced sexual encounter. Though running barely over an hour, Go, Go… packs a tremendous amount of artistry into every scene, as Wakamatsu gives us one of his most visceral and intensely focused works.

Lesser-known but still packing a mad punch, Running In Madness… tells of a student activist who is forced to flee Tokyo with his sister-in-law after he inadvertently shoots his police officer brother at a protest rally. We follow the two as they travel north to their hometown of Hokkaido, across a majestic winter landscape. Shot in a stellar psychedelic style and scripted by frequent collaborator Masao Adachi, the story was influenced by Adachi’s time spent with master director Nagisa Oshima, which led to Adachi’s development of a more rigorous, formal approach to his work. Running In Madness is one of the first Japanese films to employ “Landscape Theory” (fukei-ron), a style of storytelling, according to Adachi, in which “all the landscapes one faces in…daily life, even those such as the beautiful sites shown on a postcard, are essentially related to the figure of a ruling power.”

Go, Go Second Time Virgin Dir. Koji Wakamatsu, 1969, 35mm, 65 min.
Running In Madness, Dying In Love Dir. Koji Wakamatsu, 1969, DigiBeta, 77 min.

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Via The Cinefamily

via EM Staff, 9 November 2009 11:43am | 1 |