Japanese genre movie. Pink eig

Pinku eigu (literally – “pink film”) is a direction in Japanese cinema that exploits the theme of a woman in criminal circumstances, containing a large number of scenes of violence and erotic content. The peak of popularity was in the early 1970s. Sometimes Western film experts completely identify pink eig with films of the Sexploitation category or even with Softcore pornographyruen (“easy” pornography), but the cinema of Europe or America has no real analogues in this direction. “The West does not know anything about these films, and it shouldn’t know”, American film expert Donald Ritchie once said. The term “Pinky” was first coined in 1963 by journalist Murai Minoru, but became common only in the late 1960s. In the early 1970s, Japanese criticism in relation to the features of the projects of various studios began to single out two more related areas – Pinky Violence and Roman Porno.

The development of Pinku Eyga
First wave

In the early 1960s, television around the world was actively taking audiences out of movie theaters. It is possible to return the viewer to the cinema only with films that, due to age or ethical restrictions, cannot be shown on public networks. For Japan, the previously forbidden topic of sex became commercially successful, brought to the absolute cruelty of combat in the spirit of martial arts, torture and BDSM. The first in the subgenre was the 40-minute film “The Market of the Flesh” (肉体 の 市場, Flesh Market, 1962), shot at a small studio OP Eiga with a very modest budget. Almost the next day, the police seized the tape for indecent detention, but, after censorship cuts, its rental was continued with even greater success.

The first pinky-style full-length film Videnie (白日 夢, Daydream, 1964) was directed by Tetsuji Takechi. The plot was a structureless hallucination of a patient under anesthesia in the dentist’s chair, demonstrating rape and bullying of a beautiful young woman. The establishment took the picture negatively, believing that a public demonstration of such sexual manifestations would form a bad opinion of foreigners about Japanese art in the year of the Olympic Games in Tokyo. It should be noted that this film production was produced completely legally at large studios and was shown in conventional rather than specialized cinemas. Erotic elements were not displayed openly, as in the actual pornographic films, but using various de-visualization techniques: through foggy glass, through an opaque bottle, etc. It is interesting that the directors of frankness in the demonstration of the naked body were not pushed by commercial ephemeral artists, and intellectual directors. Seijun Suzuki, the “absurdist and anarchist genius of Japanese cinema,” contributed to this style. His films The Gates of Flesh (肉体 の 門, Gate of Flesh, 1964), The Story of a Prostitute (春 婦 伝, Story of a Prostitute, 1965) and Carmen from Kawati (河内 カ ル メ ン, Carmen from Kawachi, 1966), included in the “trilogy of the flesh”, became not only an example of high dramatic cinema about the life of post-war Japan, but also the first to reach a new level of sexual emancipation.

The above-mentioned Tetsuji Takechi, the author of Vision, after his next film was involved in lengthy criminal proceedings for demonstrating obscene scenes. Two years later, the director won the court, thereby “paving the way” direction. Pinky-films were shot in almost all studios, their volume exceeded half of the country’s film production. The most successful in this was the Toei Company.

Toei Company. Pinky violence

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Toei Company studio developed a conveyor belt for the production of Pinku eiga ribbons, which have a number of features. The heroines of all (almost without exception) paintings were participants in street gangs or solitary avengers, fighting the injustice of the world around them. Sexual content was still one of the main roles. A figurative and ironic definition for films of this period was given by Russian critic Dmitry Comm:

“Take Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, clean the whole other half and replace Malcolm McDowell with a dark-skinned, skinny, boy-like lady of about 20 years old in equally extravagant outfits and makeup (and often completely naked) and with rose tattoos on the intimate parts body. The Japanese screens were filled with bad girls with knives and brass knuckles, who fought to the death with vile yakuza and even more disgusting policemen. Films of this direction often carried an anarchist, anti-authoritarian message: government officials – police officers, government officials and even members of parliament – were only suitable for beating them, or even killing them in the most cruel way. ”