Daydream (1964 film)

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Daydream

Poster of Daydream (1964)
Directed by Tetsuji Takechi
Starring Kanako Michi
Akira Ishihama
Cinematography Akira Takeda
Release date(s) Flag of Japan
Country Japan
Language Japanese
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Daydream (白日夢 Hakujitsumu?) is a 1964 Japanese Pink film. It was the first of these softcore pornographic films to have a big budget and a mainstream release in Japan. It was given hardcore remakes in 1981 and 1987, starring actress Kyoko Aizome in both films.

Contents

[edit] Background

[edit] Origins of the Pink film

In the years since the end of World War II, eroticism had been gradually making its way into Japanese cinema. The first kiss to be seen in Japanese film-- discreetly half-hidden by an umbrella-- caused a national sensation in 1946.[1] In the mid-1950s, the controversial taiyozoku films on the teen-age "Sun Tribe", such as Ko Nakahira's Crazed Fruit (1956), introduced unprecedented sexual frankness into Japanese films.[2] At the same time, films such as Shintoho's female pearl-diver films starring buxom Michiko Maeda, began showing more flesh than would have previously been imaginable in the Japanese cinema.[3] Nevertheless, until the early 1960s, graphic depictions of nudity and sex in Japanese film could only be seen in single-reel "stag films," made illegally by underground film producers such as those depicted in Imamura's film The Pornographers (1966).[4]

Nudity and sex would officially enter the Japanese cinema with the independent, low-budget pink film genre. Known as eroductions at the time,[5] the Pink films genre would come to dominate domestically-produced films in the 1960s and 1970s.[6] The first true pink film, and the first Japanese movie with nude scenes, was Satoru Kobayashi's controversial and popular independent production Flesh Market (Nikutai no Ichiba, 1962).[7] Director Seijun Suzuki's Gate of Flesh (1964) was the first Japanese mainstream film to contain nudity.[7]

[edit] Tetsuji Takechi

Before entering film, Tetsuji Takechi was a theatrical director, especially known for his innovative conributions to kabuki. Always attracted to controversy, when his interests turned to the cinema in 1963, he focused on the Pink film. His first film was Women... Oh, Women! (Nihon No Yoru: Onna Onna Onna Monogatari - A Night In Japan: Woman, Woman, Woman Story, (1963), a sex-documentary which was later given a U.S. release.[8] His second film, The Dream of the Red Chamber (Koromu, 1964) underwent extensive censorship before the government would allow it to be released.[4] Eirin, the Japanese film-monitoring board, cut about 20% of the film's original content, and this footage is now considered lost.[9] Daydream, Takechi's fourth film, was the first big-budget, mainstream pink film, Artistically shot by Akira Takeda, who was Nagisa Oshima's cinematographer between 1965 and 1968,[10] the film was produced independently but released by Shochiku studios who gave it a major publicity campaign.[11]

[edit] Synopsis

Loosely based on a 1926 short story by Junichiro Tanizaki,[4], the film opens as an artist and a young woman are in a dentist's waiting room. Though he is attracted to the woman, he says nothing to her. They are later in the same examining room. When he is given an anaesthetic, he begins to imagine a series of scenes in which the woman undergoes various forms of sexual abuse, including rape and torture. When the artist recovers from the anaesthetic, he finds clues showing that he may not have been hallucinating.[12]

[edit] Impact

Though modest compared to pink films which would come soon after, the movie did contain female nudity, including a brief shot of pubic hair.[13] To the outsider, Japanese censors can seem surprisingly lenient in what is allowed on film, however the depiction of pubic hair and genitalia was strictly forbidden.[4] Takechi fought the government's censorship of this shot, but lost. When the censors obscured the offending hair with a fuzzy white dot, Daydream became the first film in Japanese cinema to undergo "fogging," which would become one of the trademarks of Japanese pornography for decades.[14]

The government was also displeased with the film because it was released during the Tokyo Olympics, at a time when the world's attention was focused on the country. The authorities were not happy with the impression a widely-released sex film might give.[10] Nevertheless, the film was a success in Japan, greatly contributing to the acceptance of nudity in the mainstream cinema. Daydream also received two releases in the U.S. The first release was in 1964. Joseph Green, director of the cult film The Brain that Wouldn't Die (1962) re-released Daydream in the U.S. in 1966, adding his own footage to the film.[4]

Encouraged by the success of Daydream, Takechi made the even more controversial, politically-provocative Black Snow in 1965. This film would result in Takechi's arrest, and the first motion picture obscenity trial in Japan.[15] After Daydream, Takechi would continue to be a leading figure of the Pink film genre. He was a television show host in the 1970s. At the age of 68, with his 1981 re-make of Daydream, he became the director of the first theatrically-released hardcore pornographic film in Japan.[10]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Bornoff, Nicholas [1991] (1994). "18 (Naked Dissent)", Pink Samurai: An Erotic Exploration of Japanese Society; The Pursuit and Politics of Sex in Japan, Paperback, London: HarperCollins, p.602. ISBN 0-586-20576-4. 
  2. ^ Sato, p.212-213.
  3. ^ Anderson, Joseph; Donald Richie (1982). The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, Expanded Edition (in English), Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 266-267. 
  4. ^ a b c d e Sharp, Jasper. Tetsuji Takechi: Erotic Nightmares (English). www.midnighteye.com. Retrieved on 2007-03-15.
  5. ^ Domenig, Roland (2002). Vital flesh: the mysterious world of Pink Eiga. Archived from the original on 2004-11-18. Retrieved on 2007-02-19. “The term pink eiga was first coined in 1963 by journalist Murai Minoru. But it did not come into general use until the late 1960s. In the early years the films were known as 'eroduction films' (erodakushon eiga) or 'three-million-yen-films' (sanbyakuman eiga).”
  6. ^ Domenig, Roland (2002). Vital flesh: the mysterious world of Pink Eiga. Archived from the original on 2004-11-18. Retrieved on 2007-02-19. “Since the mid-1960s, pink eiga have been the biggest Japanese film genre... By the late 1970s the production of pink eiga together with Roman Porno amounted to more than 70% of annual Japanese film production.”
  7. ^ a b Weisser, p.21.
  8. ^ Weisser, p.103.
  9. ^ Weisser, p.94.
  10. ^ a b c
  11. ^ Weisser, p.67
  12. ^ Synopsis based on Weisser, p.102.
  13. ^ Weisser, p.102.
  14. ^ Weisser, p.90.
  15. ^ Weisser, p.67-68.

[edit] Sources

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