It is criminal to shoot from a powerful point of view (Koji Wakamatsu)
In a cinematic year that is proving painfully costly, we learn of yet another death. Dissident Japanese director Koji Wakamatsu has left us. Having been hit by a taxi on the night of the 12 October, he died yesterday in a Tokyo hospital where he had been taken after the accident with injuries to his head and lower back. Born in 1936, Wakamatsu first came to fame as a prolific director of “pink films”, a sort of Japanese version of sexploitation very popular in the 1960s. Partly thanks to the mitigating circumstances of the adult genre and its looser censorial restraints, the director seeded his films with the radical motifs he had started to openly endorse as the Sixties neared their political peak. Though systematically overshadowed by the “romantic” exploits on the Parisian boulevards, the year of 1968 in Japan saw massive protests and prolonged occupations taking place alongside street battles whose sheer size and force belittle anything that took place in the west in comparison. It is in this context that Wakamatsu fully committed his career to the revolutionary cause while cultivating links with ultra-leftist formations such as the armed group United Red Army whose disastrous parable will later be the subject of an eponymous movie.
Despite the ideological orthodoxy of the Japanese extra-parliamentary left, Wakamatsu never succumbed to its fanatical dérives, articulating instead a cogent critique from within, critical but never dismissive. In Sex Jack (1970) for instance, a group of revolutionary students hiding from the police is joined by a shy outsider willing to help them out only to be mistaken for a spy. Locked away from society in a claustrophobically small apartment, the group enacts the kind of exploitative and abusive practices they ostensibly oppose while covering their cowardice in empty revolutionary rhetoric. Sex here is actively deployed as an allegorical element of the story – highlighting the perverted power relations between the group members, males against females – rather than functioning as a mere front for the political subtext. The Embryo Hunts in Secret (1966) is Wakamatsu’s personal take on the class struggle, in which he tells an S&M-tinged story of a woman kidnapped and sexually enslaved by her boss whose brutal domination will push the young woman to the use of violence in order to break free. More existential issues were explored in Go, Go Second-Time Virgin (1969), a tender story of a man and a woman talking after he has silently witnessed her rape. The repressed suicidal tendencies and abrupt sentimentality of a traumatised nation emerged in this bleak yet deeply felt film, once again shot with almost no money but plenty of disenchanted passion. In 1970, on his way back from the Cannes Film Festival Wakamatsu stopped in Beirut with his colleague and fellow militant Masao Adachi to shoot a piece of agit-prop filmmaking with the Palestinian resistance, Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971). In 1976 he produced Nagisa Oshima’s sexually explicit masterpiece In the Realm of the Senses.
Always working on extremely low budgets, Wakamatsu made more than 100 movies but worked in virtual obscurity throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, only to resurface more recentlywith United Red Army (2007) and Caterpillar (2010). The former is a colossal epic detailing in unflinching details the rise and fall of the titular armed organisation which dissolved at the hands of Japanese police, as well as falling victim to its own monstrous fanaticism. Caterpillar, which premiered to critical acclaim in Berlin, tells the story of a Japanese soldier returning from the Sino-Japanese war without his arms and legs. Feted as a war hero, the man is in reality a cruel and abusive character tormenting his patient wife who, tired of nursing such a monster, will kill him in cold blood. Until the very end, the Wakamatsu never repented, standing with dignity by his ideals. Only this year, he presented two new features in Cannes and Venice respectively: 11/25 The Day Mishima Chose His Fate and The Millennial Rupture. Interviewed in Paris in 2009, Wakamatsu slyly declared: “I’m not about to change right now, I will always fight the authorities”; signing his premature epitaph with a mischievous smile.
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