Pink film

 ( Film Genres ) 

The Japanese film ethics board Eirin has long enforced a ban on the display of genitals and pubic hair. This restriction forced Japanese filmmakers to develop sometimes elaborate means of avoiding showing the "working parts", as American film historian Donald Richie puts it. He wrote:

To work around this censorship, most Japanese directors positioned props—lamps, candles, bottles, etc.—at strategic locations to block the banned body parts. When this was not done, the most common alternative techniques are digital scrambling, covering the prohibited area with a black box or a fuzzy white spot, known as a pixelization or "fogging".Weisser. p. 23.

Some have claimed that it is this censorship that gives the Japanese erotic cinema its particular style. Richie wrote:

Richie makes a distinction between the erotic films of the major studios such as Nikkatsu and Toei as against the low-budget pink films produced by independents such as OP Eiga.

Contrasting the pink film with Western pornographic films, Pia Harritz says, "What really stands out is the ability of pinku eiga to engage the spectator in more than just scenes with close-ups of genitals and finally the complexity in the representation of gender and the human mind."

Richie and Harritz enumerate the fundamental elements of the pink film formula as:

1. The film must have a required minimum quota of sex scenes.Richie. The Japanese Eroduction pp. 159–160. "In theory, directors are instructed to aim at some kind of sex scene every five minutes; in practice, however, it has proved almost impossible to construct a story-line which allows this, with the results that sex scenes are sometimes fewer but somewhat longer."
2. The film must be approximately one hour in duration.Domenig. Vital Flesh. "Pink eiga... typically 60 minutes long..."
3. It must be filmed on 16 mm or 35 mm film within one week.Richie. The Japanese Eroduction p. 157. "The shooting-time for each remains short—a week at the most..."
4. The film must be made on a very limited budget.Harritz. Writing in 2006, Pia Harritz gives the required budget as about $35,000.

Foreign films of this time, such as Ingmar Bergman's Summer with Monika (1953), Louis Malle's Les Amants (1958), and Russ Meyer's Immoral Mr. Teas (1959) introduced female nudity into international cinema, and were imported to Japan without problem. Nevertheless, until the early 1960s, graphic depictions of nudity and sex in Japanese film could only be seen in single-reel "stag films," made by film producers such as those depicted in Shohei Imamura's film The Pornographers (1966).

In 1964, maverick kabuki, theater and film director Tetsuji Takechi directed Daydream, a big-budget film distributed by the major studio Shochiku. Takechi's Black Snow (1965), resulted in the director's arrest on charges of obscenity and a high-profile trial, which became a major battle between Japan's intellectuals and the establishment. Takechi won the lawsuit, and the publicity surrounding the trial helped bring about a boom in the production of pink films.

In her introduction to the Weisser's Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: The Sex Films, actress Naomi Tani calls this period in pink film production "The Age of Competition".Weisser, p. 12. Though Japan's major studios, such as Nikkatsu and Shochiku made occasional forays into erotica in the 1960s, such as director Seijun Suzuki's Gate of Flesh (1964)—the first Japanese film from one of the big four major studios to contain nudity, the majority of erotic films were made by the independents. Independent studios such as Nihon Cinema and World Eiga made dozens of cheap, profitable "eroductions". Among the most influential independent studios producing pink films in this era were Shintōhō Eiga (the second studio to use this name), Million Film, Kantō, and OP Eiga. Typically shown on a three-film program, these films were made by these companies to show at their own chain of specialty theaters.Richie. A Hundred Years of Japanese Film

Another major pink film studio, Wakamatsu Studios, was formed by director Kōji Wakamatsu in 1965, after quitting Nikkatsu. Known as "The Pink Godfather",Weisser, p. 287. and called "the most important director to emerge in the pink film genre",

Tatsumi Kumashiro was one of the major directors of the Roman Porno. Kumashiro directed a string of financial and critical hits unprecedented in Japanese cinematic history, including Ichijo's Wet Desire (1972) and Woman with Red Hair (1979), starring Junko Miyashita.Weisser, p. 495. He became known as the "King of Nikkatsu Roman porno" Noboru Tanaka, director of A Woman Called Sada Abe (1975), is judged by many critics today to have been the best of Nikkatsu's Roman Porno directors.Weisser, pp. 323, 359.

The dominant directors of pink films of the 1980s, Genji Nakamura, Banmei Takahashi and Mamoru Watanabe are known collectively as "The Three Pillars Of Pink".Weisser, p. 231. All three were veterans of the pink film industry since the 1960s. Coming to prominence in the 1980s, a time when the theatrical porn film was facing considerable difficulties on several fronts, this group is known for elevating the pink film above its low origins by concentrating on technical finesse and narrative content. Some critics dubbed the style of their films " pink art".

By the time Nakamura joined Nikkatsu in 1983, he had already directed over 100 films.Weisser, p. 60 While the plots of his films, which could be extremely misogynistic, were not highly respected, his visual style earned him a reputation for "erotic sensitivity." Nakamura directed one of Japan's first widely distributed, well-received films with a homosexual theme, (1983),Weisser, p. 229 for Nikkatsu's ENK Productions, which was founded in 1983 to focus on gay-themed pink films. Some of Nakamura's later pink films were directed in collaboration with Ryūichi Hiroki, and Hitoshi Ishikawa under the group pseudonym Go Ijuin.Weisser, p. 383.

Banmei Takahashi directed "intricate, highly stylistic pinku eiga",Weisser, p. 183. including New World of Love (1994), the first Japanese theatrical film to display genitals.Weisser, p. 292. Another prominent cult director of this era, Kazuo Komizu, is known for his Herschell Gordon Lewis-influenced "splatter-eros" films, which bridge the genres of horror and erotica.Weisser, pp. 126–127.

Three of the most prominent pink film directors of the 1990s, Kazuhiro Sano, Toshiki Satō and Takahisa Zeze all made their directorial debuts in 1989. A fourth, Hisayasu Satō, debuted in 1985. Coming to prominence during one of the most precarious times for the pink film, these directors worked under the assumption that each film could be their last, and so largely ignored their audience to concentrate on intensely personal, experimental themes. These directors even broke one of the fundamental pink rules by cutting down in the sex scenes in pursuit of their own artistic concerns. Their films were considered "difficult"—dark, complex, and largely unpopular with the older pink audience. The title pinku shitennō was applied to these directors, at first sarcastically, by disgruntled theater owners. On the other hand, Roland Domenig, in his essay on the pink film, says that their work offers "a refreshing contrast to the formulaic and stereotyped films that make up the larger part of pink eiga production, and are strongly influenced by the notion of the filmmaker as auteur."