The Nikkatsu Corporation is among the largest film studios in Japanese cinema. Founded in 1912, Nikkatsu produced numerous classics of Japanese cinema – from the silent film era to the masterpieces of Kenji Mizoguchi all the way through the new wave rebellion of Shohei Imamura und Seijun Suzuki. Even more unprecedented in international cinema history was the step that Nikkatsu took in the early 1970s. With the boom of pinku eiga in Japanese cinema and television threatening revenues, the studio decided from then on to exclusively produce sex films. It remained so for 17 years, until 1988. Nikkatsu produced over 1000 so-called roman pornos during this period.
What can be described as ROMAN PORNO is less attributed to the American-European definition of porn, and the concurrent Golden Age of Porn, but rather relies much more on the classic roman pornographique and a more literary-intellectual line of tradition. The roman porno was to be the sophisticated equivalent to quickly and cheaply produced pinku eiga, from which it gets its basic conditions – no more than 80 minutes in length, one week shootings, every 10 minutes a sex scene – but brought them together under the professional production values and knowledge that an established film studio had to offer. Roman pornos were often projected in cinemascope, projecting magnificent colors onto the screen, and while the director had to respect the basic rules, the studio still left them with astonishing artistic freedom, often expressed both experimentally and in decidedly leftist political statements.
Both forms of deviation from genre convention are clearly pronounced in the rich oeuvre of Tatsumi Kumashiro – especially in his portraits of Geishas and other sex workers. Kumashiro breaks these tales up over and over again through formal playfulness, pointing out the current state censorship practices of his time. We will screen five of his films from 35mm copies with English subtitles.
In cooperation with Japan Foundation Tokyo and Japanese Cultural Institute Cologne.
