jameselliot-1 Review of The Pornographers

The Pornographers (1966)

An art film featuring Japanese smut peddlers

[6/10 · 30 January 2010]

Audiences in the States had to have been mystified when they went to see this film because of the title, expecting a sexploitation movie, and got a very well-made "theater of the absurd" art film with no skin and only a superficial exploration of the mechanics of porn film-making. Mr. Imamura and his associates succeeded in making a "pink" film without the pink and they've done a brilliant job. Still, it took me four nights to get through The Pornographers. The film is done in long shot in a highly theatrical composition for the most part with very few close-ups or camera movement. As other posters here have mentioned, windows and doorways are used as compositional framing devices. This technique gets to be boring for a film that runs almost two hours and defuses the emotional energy of the story. There are two amazing shots that break up the visual tedium. One is a surrealistic scene of the mother clinging to window bars at the hospital which cut to her clinging to bars in some flat terrain that looks like the landscape of an alien planet while the camera speeds back. The other shot, very Twilight Zone-like in style, is the son visiting his mother in the hospital while in the background, the son's new, gorgeous wife walks towards them from the other end of the corridor. Both brilliant pieces of film. Jasper Sharp's book about Japanese sex cinema, Behind The Pink Curtain, gives The Pornographers very little ink. That leads to me to wonder how much impact the film had in Japan and worldwide. The themes and events depicted implicitly (thankfully not explicitly) by Imamura are often disturbing and repulsive to watch. Ogata craves his promiscuous teen step-daughter and eventually possesses, then marries her. The son and the mentally ill mother are drawn to each other in perverse, quasi-sexual ways. The mother and daughter are sexual rivals for Ogata. Ogata makes a film with an older man and the man's severely mentally and physically retarded teen daughter in the movie's ultimate creepy moment. Ogata's associate, formerly not interested in women, describes his new "relationship" with his own sister. A film's success with me is whether I could sit and watch it again, and, with The Pornographers,the answer is no.