Once again, there’s no room for the planned and/or promised updates, as it’s time to pay tribute to a recently and suddenly deceased director. This time that’s even to be read literally, because Japanese cult director Kôji Wakamatsuwas run over by a taxi. Some
sources claim it was no accident as Wakamatsu had claimed he wanted to make a critical movie about the nuclear company Tepco. Of course, that’s only speculation at best, but how fitting an ordered execution would be for such a director.
When these pages belonged to a cult review site, DV, Wakamatsu’s filmography was mentioned and discussed. One of the most overused expression was fitting for him: you either hated or loved him. Smutty pornographer to some, bleak observer to others, his movies didn’t leave most members unmoved. And whereas it’s true that some of his work was little more than pornographic (especially in the 1980s), the same could be said for Jean Rollin or Jess Franco, directors who did get to keep their medals of cult directors.
Make no mistake, The embryo hunts in secret (1966) is extreme cinema. Basically, it’s like watching a woman who’s constantly tortured by a man. Like Fifty Shades then, but bleaker, less eroticising and more stylistic. Well, a lot more stylistic.
Kôji Wakamatsu directed so many movies – his IMDb profile, which may not even be complete (but it’s hard sifting through the movies with countless titles) – clocked off at 105 titles. That’s more than a hundred titles for a director who didn’t do anything between 1997 and 2003, or indeed skipped a couple of other years too. By contrast, he managed to complete ten titles in 1964. (He debuted in 1963, at the age of 27.)
No wonder then that it’s sometimes hard to distinguish which movie you’re watching. There are so many and most carry his cinematographic style. When asked why his body of
work was often repetitive, the director answered: Because the basic theme is the same, because all my films deal with the same primal element – the fight against authoritarianism, the individual hate and revenge against authority and repression. That hate and revenge explode in lust and violence. Is this bad?”
Wakamatsu was also a producer and even made some of his fame there, being the executive producer of In the realm of the senses, Oshima‘s erotic classic. Oshima is a lot more known and a little less extreme than Wakamatsu, but if you like Oshima’s work, there’s a chance you’ll like Wakamatsu as well. (I had to think of Oshima’s Naked Youth a.k.a. Cruel story of youth the first time I watched a Wakamatsu movie.)
For a lot of Wakamatsu’s work you’ll have to rely on the internet as most of his movies aren’t out on DVD anywhere else than Japan. A couple of movies were released in the US,
such as the excellent Go, go, second time virgin or Ecstasy of the Angels (both Image) or The notorious concubines (SWV). If you manage to catch Italian channel RaiTre, the often excellent Fuori Orario is currently showing a weekend long of movies as a tribute to the late director. On the internet, MUBI has a page on him with more than 20 films which he either directed or produced.
To me, Wakamatsu’s work are more political than erotic, no matter how much sex there is in some of his exploitation movies. (Then again, I’ve only seen ten of his films, that’s less than 10% after all.) The low budget he often had forced him to limit locations, but it helped to make his films claustrophobic. His style allowed you to understand his movies even if you can’t speak a word of Japanese (check). One of his films is called Violence without a cause, which neatly sums up Wakamatsu’s body of work. You can find a lot of clips from his movies on YouTube, but I’ll leave you with the opening scene of Ecstasy of Angels, which shows Wakamatsu didn’t need sex or violence to know where to point his camera to.
After Sex is Comedy by Breillat (which I skipped, as it was dubbed) it was time for another unscheduled event: Focus, the making of a porn movie. This documentary was filmed by Francis Leroi, also director of the porn movie Regarde-moi. Focus opens with Leroi admitting he’s financially forced to make the porn movie and really not looking forward to it. Leroi wrote, directed and produced saucy movies and porn movies from the 60s to the 80s. He is the producer of the cult porn Le Sexe Qui Parle (Pussy Talk – I’ll leave it to you to gather what the synopsis is) and some of his saucy movies have titles that make you expect the worse (Charlotte gets her panties wet, anyone?). If you want to look at his filmography, 
Fast forward to 2000 and his financial problems. Hardly motivated to direct another Film X (as porn movies are called in France), he decided to have a digital camera follow him and his actors. The result, Focus, was shown on Leroi’s website.
By now she’s worked with Truffaut star Jean-Pierre Leaud (in the movie Le Pornographie, co-starring her and Jérémie Renier) and Diva director Jean-Jacques Beineix (in the movie Mortel Transfert) and claims she can tell when someone wants to abuse her. Leroi claims she’s an arrogant starlet. It’s hard to pick sides here, even though you tend to feel more sympathy for a dying man (but we don’t know if anyone at the time knew the man was in his final years). Basically, Leroi wanted to do another take of a sex scene. Ovidie claimed she’d already done all that was in her contract and that the director wanted to get her to do a sex scene for free. In the end a producer had to step in and tell both parties to leave each other alone.
Avenue Kurtodrome 
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