Porn is easily the most self-explanatory type of film there is: cheap, hardcore sex, a few locations, a low budget, and you’re all set. It never tries to be anything else but titillation for loners or a foreplay tool. However, while people in the west are primed to expect skin flicks to show up on Cinemax on a late night while channel surfing, for Japanese people, sex films are about as common as say, reading comic books while riding the subway to work.
It’s an entire subgenre of films known as pinku eiga, or “pink films”, and unfortunately for the raincoat-wearing crowd, it’s not cheap, video-shot porn but a whole movement, an entire class of films which has been around since the 1960s and is more about eroticism and passion. For the Japanese, pink films are about art rather than straightforward pornography; let’s just try to ignore hentai animes and the whole weird “tentacle rape” fetish.
Pink films were born out of necessity; with television becoming more popular at the beginning of the 60s, theater attendance was dropping and big-budget pictures made by all the big studios weren’t bringing in the crowds like they used to. The void was filled by independent production companies specializing in low-budget films, who found a home in cinemas now that major studios were slowing down in their output. And with an audience largely dominated by males, these films largely centered on yakuza exploits and of course, sex.
Of course, countries as traditional and educated as Japan has strict censorship laws, despite films like Legend of the Overfiend making one think otherwise. Pink films already had some set rules from the word go: they had to be under 60 minutes long and include a certain number of sex scenes, among others. They also couldn’t show male or female genitalia or explicit sex acts. This forced pinku filmmakers to get creative and get past the censors. Various camera angles were employed, as well as carefully planned out close-ups – using a camera, apparently armpit hair can easily pass for pubic hair – and sex organs were craftily hidden behind objects, Austin Powers-style.
The lack of explicit sex also allowed filmmakers to experiment within the genre, sometimes moving away from straight hardcore into other areas such as psychology and dreams. One of the founding fathers of pinku eiga is director Tatsuji Takeshi and his film Daydream. The premise is ready-made for a porno: a patient at a dentist’s office stars having vivid sexual fantasies while under sedation. But rather than have the M.D. play cavity search, Takeshi instead used this as a means to explore themes of sexuality and repression through suggestive and surreal imagery, even managing to work in vampires. The film has been compared to films like David Lynch’s Eraserhead or Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou; pretty lofty company for a movie which obviously aims a lot higher than your typical smut.
Pretty soon, all the major film studios, like Toei and Nikkatsu, saw how profitable pink films could be and started coming up with their own projects, this time employing professional actors and higher budgets, part of an offshoot of pinku known as “Roman” films. Toho, the creator of Godzilla, was the only studio to skip out on the genre.
The genre was brought closer to exploitation territory when the subgenre of ‘Pink Violence’ was created. Started in the 1970s, filmmakers saw the potential of mixing together the two most popular elements of the time, the violence of a Yakuza film and the nudity and erotic content of pinku eiga.
These films centered on two topics: wronged women seeking revenge – series like Lady Snowblood and Female Prisoner Scorpion – or girl gangs taking down gangsters, with series such as Girl Boss and Stray Cats Rock. Despite their large amounts of sex and violence, these films never looked cheap or felt like straightforward exploitation. Like their originators, they were loaded with art house touches and even some social commentary revolving around women’s rights, and their post-WWII freedom to vote, marry and choose any educational or professional opportunity they wanted.
Pink Violence films are really bold statements in female empowerment, a genre which allows women to show how powerful and independent they can be, by beating or hacking to death any unfortunate bastard that happens to cross them. They comfortably sit side by side with similar Western films from the same time period, like Pam Grier’s sassy asskicker Coffy, only much more refined: by using inventive set designs, lighting techniques and carefully selected color palettes, these films became much more artistic, and made superstars out of actresses like Meiko Kaji, who also had a successful singing career with the theme songs to both Snowblood and Scorpion; and Reiko Ike, a 16 year-old who pulled a Traci Lords and lied about her age to star in Hot Springs Mimizu Geisha, as a woman famous for a “vagina with quivering walls”; subtlety was probably her strong point.
Pink films reigned strong until the 1980s, when the home video market directly affected film production; films could now be made and distributed on the cheap, and pornographic films began to focus more and more on just the sex; something similar happened to pornography in America at the end of the 1970s.
However, the production of pinku eiga has never really gone away, and today, it is as strong as ever, constituting a valid and artistically praised genre for Japanese film. Many of the country’s top directors got their start in this genre, which allowed them to flex their creative muscles; a recent example is Yojiro Takita, director of the Oscar-winning Departures, who started out as an Assistant Director shooting nude scenes on many an erotica film.
Film series like Female Prisoner Scorpion and Zero Woman also enjoyed a renaissance during the 90s when they were reimagined for the video market; and some filmmakers regularly churn out affectionate tributes to the Pink Violence films, such as Yakuza Busting Girls: Yakuza Death Ride Battle, a throwback to 1970s exploitation films starring adult video star Asami, herself a popular star of modern-day pink films.
The influence has also been felt in the west, and one need look no further than Quentin Tarantino, whose Kill Bill series was definitely inspired by those 70s exploitation films. O-Ren Ishii definitely owes more than her costume to Lady Snowblood, and there are some Meiko Kaji songs scattered throughout the soundtrack. All that was missing was the nudity,
Pink films are a legitimate genre, not just porn; now that you know, you can watch them without feeling too dirty *wink*.
