CINEMA FROM THE WORLD
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					Tatsumi Kumashiro
			During the 1960s there was a crisis among the major Japanese film companies. Venerated studios such as Toei, Daiei and Shochiku saw audiences and production output shrink. Unable to compete with the rapid spread of television and the emerging proliferation of independent film houses, the majors looked to the newly emerging genre of pinku eiga (literally "pink films") to lure audiences back to the theaters. Through brazenly sexual, so-called pink films were never explicitly pornographic. Due to strict postwar censorship laws, these films were forbidden to show genitalia, pubic hair or "hardcore" sexual intercourse. Therefore, filmmakers had to be creative in their depiction of sexual acts through the use of extreme close-ups, inventive compositions, as well as the intentional use of black marks over potentially incriminating areas. The films (or at least the best of them) depict often-startling sexual situations and perverse obsessions. Typically produced on bare-bones budgets and clocking in at an economical seventy minutes, quite a few of these films—Masaru Konuma’s controversial but artful S&M flick A Wife to Be Sacrificed (Ikenie fujin, 1974) for example—became box-office smashes. The genre offered so much promise that by 1971 one of Japan’s oldest and most prestigious film company, Nikkatsu, formally announced that it would begin mass-producing its own line of soft-core pinku eiga called, appropriately enough, Nikku Roman Porno (literally Nikkatsu Romantic Pornography). Enter Tatsumi Kumashiro. One of Nikkatsu's most creative and prolific talents, he not only helped bring these films to a wider audience but garnered critical accolades as a directoral presence, elevating the genre to the realm of art cinema. His Woman with Red Hair (Akai kami no onna, 1979) is a candy-colored crystalization of the Roman Porno aesthetic, executed with abundant stylistic flair and a scorching imagination. Born in 1927 to a wealthy merchant family in Kyushu, Kumashiro would, from an early age, rebel against his family’s privileged position. As a teenager he would often cut classes to see movies; in 1945, against his family’s wishes, he attended Tokyo’s prestigious Waseda University to study Western literature. An aspiring novelist, Kumashiro took up filmmaking in 1952 as a way to support himself, accepting a job at Shochiku as an assistant director. He moved to Nikkatsu in 1955, and began to direct his own films by the late 1960s. Eventually, he would helm thirty-four films during his lifetime. He died from a heart attack in 1995. As a filmmaker, Kumashiro had a fondness for long takes, gritty visuals, and iconic freeze-frames as well as abundant use of dark humor, political and literary references. Like the masterful Shohei Imamura, Kumashiro was also a minimalist who often set his films in the fringes of Japanese society. Teeming with prostitutes, strippers, and down-and-out workers, they often articulate a raw bawdiness that edges towards sexual desperation. For these prostrate characters, sex is more than a means of gratification, it is a desperate, if futile attempt to escape the darkness of their own marginality. However, there is a singular crucial characteristic that sets his work apart from the rest of the genre. While many Roman Porno films were deliberately exploitive of women, Kumashiro brought a respect and admiration to both the female body and mind. His surprisingly unabashed feminist stance is exemplified in The Woman with Red Hair, wherein the central romantic relationship begins with a rape, then twists into serious consensual passion—with the eponymous title character gradually assuming control. Legendary French auteur François Truffaut admired Kumashiro's earlier, similarly-themed World of Geisha (Yojohan Fusuma no urabarif, 1973) for its "praise of female beauty and derision of male stupidity.” Kumashiro’s films were almost always critical and box-office successes at home. In 1994, the venerated Japanese film journal Kinema Jumpo declared The Woman with Red Hair one of the Best Japanese Films of the 1970s. (The publication had previously awarded Woman's star and Kumahiro regular Junko Miyashita as Best Actress in the year of the film's release.) Abroad, however, it was a different story. Kumashiro, much like his fellow Nikkatsu director Seijun Suzuki, was virtually unknown in the West until quite recently. It wasn't until retrospectives of his work began popping up in Europe and the U.S. that non-Japanese audiences began to appreciate his rich body of work for what it was, and continues to be: subversive, generically groundbreaking, and above all, cinematic .
				A Woman with Red Hair / The world of Gaisha