Nikkatsu Action in the Pacific Northwest
Most of us Subway Cinema-ites have other endeavors that keep us busy during the nine months of the year we’re not working steadily on the NY Asian Film Festival (and sometimes they also keep us busy during festival time, too). While some other members have day jobs, a couple of us are freelancers or otherwise semi- or non-employed and have our fingers in a number of different projects involving film or video.
One of the things I’ve been involved with for the past year or more is a retrospective film series called NO BORDERS, NO LIMITS: 1960s NIKKATSU ACTION CINEMA. It’s basically a touring program of originally eight (now six) films produced in the 1960s by Japanese studio Nikkatsu. From the mid 1950s to the early 1970s, Nikkatsu produced a steady stream of hundreds of “action” films, heavily inspired by Western genre filmmaking that was popular at the time. Many of these took the form of gangster movies, westerns, melodramas, films noir, and the like, and seem to have been equally inspired by American moviemakers and the French New Wave as well as other European auteurs. Many of the films were extremely popular at the time, although virtually none of them were ever seen outside Japan until 2005, when a large series of them was programmed for the Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy. American journalist Mark Schilling, who’s lived in Japan for many years, was the original programmer, and he has recently written a book on the genre—the only comprehensive writing on the subject in English—which was debuted at the first screenings we held, at Austin’s Fantastic Fest in September 2007.
Since then, the series has traveled in various forms to fourteen different venues throughout the U.S. and Canada, and I’ve been traveling with it for the most part, projecting the English subtitles onto the subtitle-less prints via a digital slideshow; this is the only way these films can be seen in English, since none of them are available on video anywhere in the world except Japan, and even there only a handful have come out on DVD. It’s been a great experience, and several U.S. home video companies have learned about the genre through this series and purchased various titles for release on DVD here. But as of early August, the final set of screenings will have happened, the prints will be shipped back to Japan, and I’ll have to find some other underpaying pursuit to occupy my time with.
As I write this, I’m en route to Seattle, where four films from the series will be presented at the NW Film Forum, from July 25-28. After that, I travel to Vancouver to present six films from the series at the legendary Pacific Cinematheque, from July 31 - August 4. Both of these cities have substantial Japanese populations and are well-known for their Asian film scenes, so I’m hoping for good audiences at both venues. If you happen to live in either of these cities, try to stop by and see some of the films. They’ve all been real discoveries for the audiences exposed to them up until now, with many people calling them some of the best classic genre films they’ve ever seen coming out of Japan. Imagine spending your entire life not knowing about or having seen any movies from American Independent Pictures in the 1950s and 60s, then suddenly running into the works of Roger Corman and others by accident. That’s something akin to the experience of discovering Nikkatsu Action, and it’s made die-hard fans out of many of the audience members who’ve attended the screenings. I hope you’ll be able to see these films at some point in the future, either on the big screen or in some of the forthcoming DVD releases. For an Asian cinema fan, they’re a missing link between the works of Akira Kurosawa and Takashi Miike, and a treasure unto themselves. —MW
(Read a review of the films in the series from Fantastic Fest)