With so much gentility and desire for respect and accolades to be found in a random scan of any film festival program, the audacity of highlighting the films of someone with as checkered a historyโto say the leastโas Japanese director Masao Adachi might seem a provocation if this filmmaker was not in his venerable 70s, yet even so his home country wouldn't allow him to travel to Rotterdam for a spotlight on his career.
Whatever cinema production Adachi may have been doing in the Middle East does not seem known, if it exists at all Adachi says footage he shot was destroyed in Israeli bombings. The condoned softcore sex films of the era, their popularity and production flourished as the Japanese studio system took a post-boom nose dive and provided cinematic vessels for filmmakers like Wakamatsu and Adachi to fill with outre politics, extreme technique and other provocative content so long as a quota of tits and ass were fulfilled.
And rapeโlots of rape. Adachi's Sex Game and Female Students Guerilla pinpoint not just what make radical pinku eiga great, but the supreme discomfort they inspire as we grow distant from the era and cultural moment in which they were produced. Giddy with flagrant female nudity and the kind of casual sexual assault and off-hand rape common to much Japanese cinema of the time, it is impossible to ignore such aspects as Sex Game 's opening scene of half play-acted, half "dramatic" gang rapeโwith the men insisting on needing to "make it real"โor that strange convention of Japanese cinema where after being brutally raped women seem to fall in love with their assailants.
It would be naive to excuse the films these moments and needs because they must fulfilled a production requirement to exist and which allowed for "greater" expression once these needs are met.
But the reason why these two Adachi films are still stunning despite their gratuitous exploitation of their actresses in specific and woman in generalโthough it should be noted that the men in these pictures are portrayed as completely inept, horny slugs with only a dim idea of what sex isโis that Adachi makes the sexual lives, in action and in body, inextricable from political stance and social revolt for his young protagonists.
