Toshiharu Ikeda Interview

By Jasper Sharp

*Questions in ( ) are invented

Q: Which film directors most influenced you?

A: Jean Luc Godard, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Sone. Especially Mr. Chusei Sone. I love him.

Q: Which directors were at Nikkatsu when you were there?
A: Chusei Sone especially, and Noboru Tanaka, Tatsumi Kumashiro, Toshiya Fujita, Shogoro Nishimura, etc... I shouldn't say this in front of a lady, but I was called a "prostitute on a busy pitch". A busy prostitue, it means... (laughs) It's an old and unattractive expression, but it was part of the jargon at the studio. They called me a prostitute on piece work because I worked on so many different shoots without any fixes schedule. Normally, one person worked for just one director as his assistant. But I wasn't given any particular director and had to work for everyone. I worked for Chusei Sone and Masaru Konuma more often than anyone else.

Q: (How was your relationship with them?)
A: We all had a good relationship with each other. We didn't have any money though. The wages were very low, it was almost half the average of a university graduate's salary at the time. And sometimes we didn't even get all that because the company had to borrow half of our wages. We couldn't even afford to eat outside, so we had to go to the staff canteen. And after work, someone would have to take me to a bar and buy me drinks. It really was like that. I couldn't even think of tomorrow, I just immersed myself in filmmaking.

(Ningyo densetsu, 1984)

Q: (How about screenplays?)
A: I worked on many screenplays. Well, in a roman porno, we shot 4 films a month and it came to 48 films a year. So even if the screenplay wasn't perect we just had to start shooting. Because the schedule was already fixed. Sometimes, if the director said the script was boring, I had to change it. I've rewritten many scripts. The release of all the films were already fixed in the program picture. It was a strict rule that the release date shouldn't be changed, so even if the script wasn't perfect, we just had to get on with shooting it. So I had to tidy up many scripts. The producers handled the budgeting side, and I was just given a certain period to complete the work, which was 2 weeks in the beginning. I was given 10 days for the last one I shot. Usually, shooting went on for 2 weels, but then came the actors' post-recording, so including the period we spent on sound, I guess it was about a month. Post-production took about 2 to 3 weeks.

Q: What do you think of Chusei Sone?
A: I was a screenwriter and an assistant director on the first "Angel Guts", which was shot by Chusei Sone. And I was also an assistant director on Tanaka's "Angel Guts". Funnily enough, it really was a coincidence. I can understand why he wanted to and why he had to make the series so extreme. That series definitely had an impact on Roman Porno history as well as on the audience. Chusei Sone is a genius. He really is a true genius. The three of us, me, Shinji Somai who has passed away, and Kichitaro Negishi were Chusei Sone's assistant directors. We were all tremendously influenced by him. Anyway he was incredible. It was indescribable. Somai and I normally waited for Chusei Sone in the morning to get the script we were going to work on that day. When he came in, he gave us the updated manuscript and sometimes whole pages were completely crossed out. Tremendous. Because we got to see the original script beforehand we also noticed how badly some scripts were written. As we were wondering what he was going to do about it he'd just turn up in front of us, and dramatically throw pages away. Of course, they prepared a new script immediately, but we then needed to get different cast members and sets in a rush. We were stunned, but at the same time had a deep admiration for his charisma and we were eager to assist him in anyway we could. He really was an amazing director. I miss him...

Top 5 Nikkatsu Roman Porno

If you don't know, Nikkatsu is the oldest studio in Japan and they were for many years known by their chambara films. However, at the end of the 50's they started to produce youth-themed movies with strong characters and nihilistic themes. Their gangster noir films were recurring productions too. By the beggining of the 70's, because erotic movies were popular and yet mainly produced by smaller companies or none at all, Nikkatsu changed their movie policy again, to save the studio from bankruptcy and conquer a new audience. Thus they began a new line of eroductions called Roman Porno. These productions were somewhat revolutionary because they simbolized the first time erotic movies were taken seriously by a main studio (true, Toei had ero-guro in the 60's but that was always considered excessive and outcast at the time, not being the main focus of the studio) and they usually had big budgets, although their running time was usually sixty, seventy minutes. All kinds of directors and actors emerged, showing the world erotic movies could be much more than just filmed sex. Of course, they were times that none of the directors would care if their movies were more than sex, but other times, some of the productions are exotic, dark and very creative. What I personally enjoy about some Roman Pornos is what I could call "a vision from inside". In these movies, things are seen twisted from their usual sense, creating some sort of claustrophobia of emotions. Sex is just a way to detach the eye into a troubled one, not searching only for pleasure, but for pain. These movies can amaze the viewer, because they depict another world, the world of imanent fears, screams, intimacy... This top is not complete because I didn't watched all those films (and I do think that some of them, like Shinji Somai's Love Hotel, could feature here in the future).

No. 5

Assault! Jack the Ripper! (1978) - directed by Yasuharu Hasebe

Hasebe's Jack The Ripper works like a linear nightmare that gets so intense only to end with no conclusion, suspending the disbelief of the spectator to a point where he can wonder that all is an illusion. Hasebe is known for changing the erotics of Nikkatsu to bleak narratives with violent characters, anti-social actions and with this controversial film, one might wonder if he's awake or asleep.

No. 4

Night of the Felines (1972) - directed by Noboru Tanaka

With this character driven movie, director Noboru Tanaka reworks almost the same themes as Kenji Mizoguchi did in 1956 with his last film, The Street of Shame, but with a more modern background to it. Night of the Felines films the relationships between men and women with a almost sarcastic tone, never forgetting the most dramatic parts and the amazing cinematography (check the last takes, it almost recalls avant-garde films like Oshima's Diary of a Shinjuku Thief).

No. 3
Twisted Path of Love (1973) - directed by Tatsumi Kumashiro

This film by Kumashiro blends almost every good thing that Roman Porno's movies could offer: ecstatic moments of rapture, flirtation with cinema devices (meta-filmic references, anyone?), and the portrait of anguished youth with a great soundtrack - those guitars make me shiver. Kumashiro's movies are almost like if the viewer is listening to a story told by some poor-class worker with great communication skills, but almost illiterate. It's this kind of oral tradition (often musically represented) that Kumashiro masterfully crafts into his ouvre, giving disjointed narratives that seem to go nowhere. Images turn themselves on us, and everything is at the same place: laughter, cries and etc.

No. 2
Sweet Scent of Eros (1973) - directed by Toshiya Fujita

Toshiya Fujita might be most known and acclaimed by his Lady Snowblood films (especially after Tarantino's hommage in Kill Bill) but almost anyone know that he was, at the same time, one of the most groundbreaking Nikkatsu directors, a truly creative voice in the studio. Sweet Scent of Eros is a great example of the genre transforming itself in something else, a bittersweet critique of disoriented youth.

No. 1
Angel Guts: Red Classroom (1979) - directed by Chusei Sone

Director Chusei Sone is the most distinct follower of Seijun Suzuki's oblique style at Nikkatsu. His films are filled with visual alucinations too, mad passions, obsessions and of course haunting images, making him one of the definite masters of Roman Porno. With this thematic sequel to the Angel Guts series (based on the manga by Takashi Ishii, a director in his own right), there is no school exploitation - forget the Classroom in the title - but a tale of deception and sorrowfull erotism. Cinematically speaking, this is maybe one of the most interesting films of the 70's Japanese cinema, one sex scene in particularly feels like the viewer is drunk or high. It's this hard sense of alienation that Sone, with his psychotic camera, captures masterfully.

Lovers Corner #7 - All About Lily Chou Chou

(Riri Shushu no Subete, 2001)

By Chaos Rampant
(great writer on World-Cinema)

I was perhaps lucky to have seen a Hollywood film a few days prior, Alexander Payne's latest and supposedly also about a spiritual journey of sorts and passing for an 'indie'. The comparison is devastating. The many times Oscar nominated film: airbrushed beauty mistaken for purity. This little obscurity: lyrical breath and pulse from life.
In 1968, there was a film made in Japan called Nanami: Inferno of First Love, also Japanese New Wave about confused, apprehensive youth feeling the first pulls to join the fray of existence: love, pain, loss, all the adult stuff they used to know as words. The fulcrum of that film unraveled from this notion: if you peel a cabbage you get its core, but if you peel an onion? (this is really worth puzzling over by the way, in a Zen way, and the film worth seeking out.)
The answer to that very much pertains here. This is the New New Wave: even more visual episodic movements through edges of life, even more radical dislocations from the ordinary world of narrative.
The story is about teenage high school students: cliques and counter-cliques and much tension and drama inbetween them as they discover love and power. This is woven together with a thread about music, revolving around a band named Lily Chou-Chou that is all the rage among youth. Now and then conversations are enacted in some unspecified blogosphere: this is given to us as disembodied words against a black screen. We presume we'll get to know the people behind the nicknames and identify them as one of several youths whose lives we intimately follow in its petty cockiness and idle pleasure, or even worse that they don't matter at all and this is purely ornamental. It is actually much, much deeper.
Now we're lucky this is Japanese, and even perhaps unconsciously so. Typical for New Wave, the world is distinctly modern and vibrant. It is all about youthful rejection. But as with Oshima and the rest back in the 60's, what these guys perhaps don't know is that French film that seemed so radical and appealing to the Japanese at the time and was presumed to have re-invented cinematic grammar, it was built on precisely what the Japanese had first revolutionized about representation in the 18th and 19th century. The calligraphic eye.
So every rejection of tradition that we find in those films, or this one now, only serves to re-discover what was so vital and groundbreaking about Japanese tradition in the first place.
In other words: if the old Zen Masters were alive now, all of them exceptional poets or landscape painters in their day and with a great sense of humor, they would all be New Wave filmmakers.
This is as Zen as possible and in the most pure sense of the term. Transparent images. Vital emptiness. Calligraphic flows to and from interior heart. Mournful beauty about what it means 'to read the love letters sent by the moon, wind, and snow', to quote an old Buddhist poem. Plum blossoms at the gates of suffering.
So this is where it goes deeper than say, a new Malick film. There are no intricate mechanisms to structure life. That is fine but what this film does is even more difficult to accomplish. Just one lush dynamic sweep of a calligrapher's brush that paints people and worlds as they come into being and vanish again. I have never seen for example a film present death so invisibly, so poetically.
So if you peel a cabbage you get a core, but if you peel an onion?
We may be inclined to answer nothing. The film may seem like it was about nothing, at best tears from a teenager's overly dramatic diary. The form mirrors the diary after all, after Jonas Mekas. A whole segment about a trip to Okinawa is filmed with a cheap camcorder.
Let that settle and then consider the following key scene: a choir of students gets together for a school event to sing a capella a complex piano arrangement, Debussy's Arabesque. They had a perfectly capable piano player to do it but wouldn't let her for petty school rivalries. So once more we may be inclined to think that it was too much hassle for something so simple. Adults would never let things reach that stage. A compromise would be made, the piece would be played on the piano, properly.
Now all through the film we see kids listen to music, everyone seems to have his own portable cd-player for that purpose. Presumably they listen to Lily Chou-Chou, who we're told was heavily inspired by Arabesque. We don't actually listen to her. We never see her or the band, at the big concert we're left outside and marvel at a giant video projection: artificial images in place of the real thing.
But in this one occasion the kids achieve something uniquely sublime: they articulate the music, actually embody it, by learning to be their own instruments and each one each other's.
The entire film is the same effort: to embody inner abstract worlds and their 'ether'. The method is rigorous improvisation.
Something to meditate upon.

Life of a Court Lady [Asaki Yumenishi]

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