Cinemateque Seoul is holding next month a retrospective on Japanese director Koji Wakamatsu, considered the master of the Pink Film (or Pinku eiga). The director will also be coming to Korea to give a master class. I’m really keen to see how this goes over with Korean audiences.
And just in case you wanted to know what kind of guy we’re dealing with, this is from an interview he gave:
The reason I went to shoot a documentary about the Palestinian guerrillas is, to be honest, the money. Because of that film, though, I was branded a terrorist; I’m still a wanted man. When I tried to get permission from them to film from the inside, they asked me if there were an emergency, would I pick up a gun or a camera. I said I’d grab a gun. After that, I was training to be a guerrilla every day. Dressed in guerrilla gear, drawing water, digging ditches, learning how to use and take apart a gun–all guerrilla training. They didn’t let me film at all. Then one day they finally let me film, that day only, so I had to do everything, filming and interviewing, in the space of a day. After I came down from the mountain, so to speak, I wanted to show this world to the Japanese public. When I tried to show the film, I became a marked man in the eyes of Interpol. Since then, I haven’t been able to travel outside of Japan, even though I’m such a nice guy…
To change the subject, when my daughter was in junior high school, I sent her to study abroad in the U.S., in Wisconsin. After three years she came back completely Americanized, with all these absurdly self-centered notions of individuality. So I got upset and sent her to the guerrillas in Beirut. I wanted her to be re-educated. She spent four years there, bathing out of an old oil drum and hand-washing her clothes. I told her never to come back to Japan. I asked the guerrillas not to send her back, either. You might wonder what kind of parent I am. She really hated me at first, but after a while, she called her younger sister to join her. They both seemed to like it. The guerrillas are all kind, close-knit, and they look after their troops well. It’s a good education. Money can’t buy that kind of experience. Like the old saying goes, “If you love a child you have to send her away.”
10 Comments
Strangie teacha, strangie!
“absurdly self-centered notions of individuality.”
In other words, the film maker believes collectivity is the answer. Thanks but no thanks. Collectivity as a way of politics and living has failed in so many ways. Individuality is the only way out of control by others.
Yeah, but a guy who makes SM porn seems to have a low opinion of individuality from the start, don’t you think?
Well, yes, but in some ways, you would think that his line of work would be the epitome of an individualist way of working, as most directors are quite independent-minded, whereas in any heavily collectivist society, he wouldn’t be making films like that, he’d be either dead or in jail.
Funny, I was thinking of a Sadean kind of disregard for the individuality of the person the sadist is working over, but your interpretation totally makes sense…and Hollywood operates in a sort of S/M way too
Sounds like the equivalent of political moonbatism in Hollywood.
The man sounds seriously deluded and tasteless.
I’m sure someone here will fall in love with him but not many; most Koreans would not be impressed with such.
The icing on the cake was this line:
“I told her never to come back to Japan….You might wonder what kind of parent I am.”
Uh, yes, we might indeed what kind of parent he is. There’s a point where, um, not outright disowning your daughter takes precedence over pretty much everything else.
(Couldn’t he just have sent her off to a Buddhist monastery, or to work on a farm?)
There is a certain history in Japan of “terrorist chic groupie-ism” in Lebanon. As laughably confused as these Red Army folks and others were, they killed a lot of people in the 1970s.
Wakamatsu is an ultra-leftist and activist for Japanese Red Army. A crazy old man and somebody must be crazy enough to asking for his teaching…