Sadly, director Koji Wakamatsu has died at the age of 76.
This was a year which had been particularly consecrated to him: "11/25: The Day He Chose His Own Fate", his film on the last days of Mishima, which was presented at the Festival of Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section, "The Millennial Rapture" at the Venice Film Festival, and along with the two premiers, "Petrel Hotel Blue" at the Pusan Festival, where, less than two weeks ago, he received the prize for Best Asian Filmmaker of the Year. In Miyagi, his hometown, this autumn he also received a prestigious award honoring this Japanese artist, above and beyond the world of film.
And yet, until 2007, only a handful of particularly avid critics and cinephiles knew the films of Koji Wakamatsu, this prolific Japanese filmmaker, with his oeuvre of more than 130 films spanning 50 years since the 1960's.
So what explains this "oversight"?
It might be because Koji Wakamatsu, a self taught director, started his career in Tokyo on film sets as… a yakuza, overseeing the smooth running of shootings in the underworld neighborhood of Shinjuku! Young, feisty and (already) rebellious, he would soon be sent to jail after a brawl. From his time in jail, he would retain a taste for revolt against authority but also a desire to express himself by other means than through actual violence. Once released, he renewed his acquaintance with the producers who he had protected during filming and was able to work as an assistant on the sets of TV productions. Thus he learned the craft, by observing its environment and through doing odd jobs. One day, a TV producer gives him his big chance: he grabbed it and showed himself to be an excellent director. But from the 1960’s, Wakamatsu, who had not lost anything of his thirst for rebellion, decided to create his own production company, Wakamatsu Production, in order to make movies like he wanted to: using the camera as a weapon and cinema as a means of touching the public. Thus was born the most rebellious of Japanese filmmakers.
Thanks to cinema, Wakamatsu could finally "kill" authority on the screen, making films which were ever more subversive than the last; where policemen, politicians and bosses were mere exploiters to be eliminated by any means necessary! Obviously, such a creative rage could only count on itself from many points of view: Wakamatsu never received public funding and therefore naturally he himself fulfilled all sorts of roles (artistic as well as technical) and began to involve his friends and collaborators in a guerrilla economy which would be the hallmark of the "Wakamatsu method": filming in 3 days, at night, with commissioned films he directed in parallel during the day, paying his actors in kind (meals, wine, alcohol...), the use or even destruction of his own personal property for the purposes of filming, editing in just a few hours (because each scene was shot in a single take), there are a great many examples. This makes it a little easier to understand why Wakamatsu was sometimes able to produce up to ten movies in a single year! Actually, thanks to his multiple skills, Wakamatsu will even later produce his friend Nagisa Oshima’s "Realm of the Senses".
Eventually, always concerned that his political messages would reach the largest number of people (that was the whole point of cinema for him: not as an end in itself, but rather as a tool, a weapon), Wakamatsu appropriated the pink genre, a mixture of sex and violence, born in the mid-1960’s at the initiative of Japanese studios in order to stem viewers’ disaffection for cinema in the face of the advent of television. It was this type of cinema which then became known among the most cutting edge critics and cinephiles early on: political and subversive films, but which were also experimental (Wakamatsu had discovered "Breathless", by Godard, and learnt a great lesson in liberty and freedom from conventional cinematic vocabulary), which few would qualify as avant-garde. It started in 1965 at the Berlin Film Festival when the "Secrets Behind The Walls" provoked a diplomatic incident with Japan which considered Wakamatsu’s film as a national disgrace. Then in 1971 "Violated Angels" and "Sex Jack" were shown at the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes, a pretext for Koji Wakamatsu and his faithful writer, Masao Adachi - both monitored by the Japanese authorities because of their alleged links to the Japanese Red Army - to come to France ... before going on to Lebanon to film George Habash’s PFLP camps.
His militant film activities led Wakamatsu to be banned from entering the United States, Russia, and, until recently, China. And yet Wakamatsu never belonged to the Japanese Red Army or to any other group. Therein lies the mystery and misunderstanding about his character: considered a left-wing activist, Wakamatsu disconcerted some, when he criticized the fanaticism of the United Red Army, or when he made a movie about the nationalist Mishima ("11/25: The Day He Chose His Own Fate"). And yet, by carefully examining his filmography, there are indications of revolt, obviously against authority, but also against collective action, often corrupted by the reproduction of power and authority within itself. Just like his films in which there is often a lone hero who eventually takes individual action, Wakamatsu essentially believed in the commitment of the individual man. But the premise of solitary commitment also runs the risk of isolation and misunderstanding: fiercely anti-system, the “Wakamatsu system” relies only on itself, as has already been said. That is why only a handful of critics and diehard cinephiles knew of (or disregarded) Wakamatsu’s films.
And so in France it took until 2007 for the name of Wakamatsu to return to centre stage, with the release of "The Embryo Hunts in Secret" (1966), awarded an 18 certificate! A subversive and feminist film, this Wakamatsu work was said to be "degrading for the image of women"! Q.E.D.
Subsequently, “United Red Army” (2008) caused trouble among the politicized admirers of Wakamatsu who did not understand why the filmmaker dwelled on the darkest hours of the United Red Army, the ill-fated branch of the Japanese Red Army. An uncompromising 190-minute film, "United Red Army" was nevertheless the film which would reconcile Wakamatsu with the "general public" (in the sense of a wider audience of cinephiles) because it was the most worked film from the director: a thundering mixture of documentary archives, fiction, genre film and political film, set to the hypnotic music of Jim O’Rourke, "United Red Army" is a movie which will go down in cinematic history, the fruit of the wrath of a rebel, and not the propaganda film which everyone expected. Wakamatsu did not make movies to please the public, but rather because they were necessary, and only following instructions from his heart, as he said recently in Busan.
Other major events will follow: in 2010, "Caterpillar" earned Shinobu Terajima the Silver Bear for Best Actress, which Wakamatsu wanted for her, then a tribute to him by the Paris Cinema Festival in the same year, and finally an impressive retrospective of 40 films devoted to Wakamatsu’s work by the Cinémathèque Française.
Nevertheless, nothing changed in the Wakamatsu method: he wrote, filmed, self-financed and distributed his films with the same frenzy, the same instinct for revolt, and the same generosity, without ever worrying about the rest. Upcoming projects included a film about Korean comfort women and a film about Japan’s nuclear experiments-two hot topics, which were not so surprising, coming as they did from Wakamatsu. Indefatigable, indestructible, when it came to filming, we must trust he died without regrets, because the worst possible idea for him would have been to have gone out in the middle of filming. He has left us a precious legacy to discover and rediscover, through his impressive filmography of course, but also through the story of a man who forged his own life alone, and for whom cinema has never been anything other than a means and never an end in itself; to that effect, Koji Wakamatsu is definitely an extraordinary lesson both in life and in cinema.
Bich-Quân Tran
