KAZUHIKU HASEGAWA AND DIRECTOR'S COMPANY | Offscreen

Kazuhiko Hasegawa was a key figure in the Japanese film industry from the 1970s to the 1990s. After working as assistant director to Shôhei Imamura on Profound Desires of the Gods (1968), he joined the Nikkatsu Corporation, where he worked as scenarist and assistant director on quickie erotic films known as romans porno. There he learnt the knack of combining tight production schedules with the creative aspirations that had first drawn him to cinema. The obligatory sex scenes, designed to attract audiences, allowed him to incorporate sociopolitical themes and experiment with form. Finally, one of his screenplays was accused of using "Trotskyist" ideas to undermine authority, and his contract was not renewed.
 
It was then that Hasegawa directed The Youth Killer (1976), which was awarded the Grand Prix de l'âge d'or by Belgium's Cinematek. This was followed by The Man Who Stole the Sun (1979), a jewel in the crown of Japanese cinema, voted best film of the 1970s by Japanese film magazine Kinema Junpo, and cited as one of his all-time Top Three films by the editor-in-chief of the French magazine Mad Movies. But despite the acclaim and cultural influence in its country of origin, both The Man Who Stole the Sun and Hasegawa himself remained virtually unknown to cinephiles outside Japan.
 
Hasegawa cut short his directing career to go into production, founding Director's Company in 1982, with the aim of furnishing a generation of young filmmakers with a working structure that would allow them creative freedom. Among the talent he attracted from the major studios were exponents of the pinku eiga (softcore) scene such as Shinji Sômai and Toshiaru Ikeda, as well as independents such as punk-rebel Sogo Ishii and creepmeister Kiyoshi Kurosawa (who had worked on The Man Who Stole the Sun as unit production manager). 
 
The agenda promised a line-up of different genres, in which sex and violence rubbed shoulders with some of the most artistically ambitious projects of the decade. Alas, this raft of elevated genre, from slasher movies to arty erotica to black comedy, met with scant commercial success, and in 1992, Director's Company went bankrupt. It would be another three decades before the tributes and reassessments began, together with long-overdue restorations of the films - happily while Kazuhiko Hasegawa himself is still around to hear about them.
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THE YOUTH KILLER

14 March 2024 - 19h00 | Cinematek

Jun stabs his parents to death during a quarrel over his girlfriend, Keiko (Mieko Harada, best known in the west as vengeful Lady Kaede in Ran) but the young couple's plans to run away go awry. Filmed around half-built Narita airport, Hasegawa's directing debut offsets punk nihilism with a catchy Godiego score.
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RETREAT THROUGH THE WET WASTELAND

14 March 2024 - 21h30 | Cinema Nova

Corrupt cops, led by the charismatic Takeo Chii as an antihero who makes Dirty Harry look like Mother Theresa, commit rape and robbery before launching a hunt for an ex-colleague who has escaped from an asylum and is on the run with a schoolgirl. Hasegawa wrote the subversive screenplay for this Nikkatsu roman porno.
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THE MAN WHO STOLE THE SUN

15 March 2024 - 19h00 | Cinema Nova

Hasegawa's influential masterpiece stars Kenji Sawada (aka pop singer "Julie") as a mild-mannered science teacher who builds an atom bomb in his flat and threatens to use it unless the Rolling Stones are allowed to play Tokyo. Bunta Sugawara (veteran of many a yakuza pic) is the cop on his tail. An unmissable cult item.
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HASEGAWA LECTURE: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF KAZUHIKO HASEGAWA AND THE DIRECTOR'S COMPANY IN JAPANESE CINEMA

16 March 2024 - 15h30 | Cinema Nova

 Though Hasegawa directed only two films, he was a pivotal figure in late 20th-century Japanese cinema. In 1982, he co-founded the Director’s Company, a groundbreaking venture that reshaped film production and became a driving force in independent Japanese cinema. This symposium/lecture, conducted by Roland Domenig, explores Hasegawa’s career, significance, and the Director's Company in the context of dynamic shifts in Japanese cinema.
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LUMINOUS WOMAN

16 March 2024 - 17h00 | Cinema Nova

A Hokkaido mountain man, scouring Tokyo's nightclubs for his missing fiancée, meets an unhappy opera singer. Astonishing magenta-tinted visuals and wrestlers fighting to the death against a backdrop of Puccini arias are just some of the weird and wonderful pleasures to be had from Sômai's one-of-a-kind love story.
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LOVE HOTEL

16 March 2024 - 21h30 | Cinema Nova

A failed businessman and a student paying her way with sex work share an intense BDSM experience in a "love hotel" room. Two years later, he's a taxi driver and she's working in an office when their paths cross again in this melancholy but exquisitely filmed pinku romance from Nikkatsu and The Director's Company.
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EVIL DEAD TRAP

16 March 2024 - 23h30 | Cinema Nova

A late-night TV show presenter takes her crew to investigate a deserted factory she suspects was the location of a snuff film, only for her colleagues to fall victim, one by one, to an unknown killer. Seminal Japanese slasher movie with a touch of giallo, a splash of the supernatural - and a totally demented ending.
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TYPHOON CLUB

17 March 2024 - 17h00 | Cinema Nova

Adolescent desires and frustrations bubble over when a typhoon traps a bunch of teens at school without adult supervision. With his trademark long takes, the director captures their youthful blend of anxiety, nihilism - and crazy dancing. It's Sômai's seminal work, and one of the best coming-of-age films ever made.
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THE CRAZY FAMILY

17 March 2024 - 21h30 | Cinema Nova

Mr and Mrs Kobayashi and their two kids move into their dream suburban home, but individual obsessions (schoolwork, J-pop, termites) go into overdrive. Domestic bliss degenerates into slapstick internecine strife and chainsaw mayhem as Ishii literally deconstructs the nuclear family with anarcho-punk exuberance.
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THE MAN WHO STOLE THE SUN

23 March 2024 - 16h30 | Cinema Nova

Hasegawa's influential masterpiece stars Kenji Sawada (aka pop singer "Julie") as a mild-mannered science teacher who builds an atom bomb in his flat and threatens to use it unless the Rolling Stones are allowed to play Tokyo. Bunta Sugawara (veteran of many a yakuza pic) is the cop on his tail. An unmissable cult item.