When Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Shinji Sōmai, Gakuryū Ishii, and contemporaries needed to shirk themselves of the responsibilities and strictures driving Japan’s studio system, they formed Directors Company, an independent production outfit that did what it said on the tin. Their output proved some of the most scorching films ever produced in the country. Despite folding in 1992 from economic pressure, recent years have found cinephilia catching up with its corpus––to say nothing of Kurosawa growing into arguably Japan’s greatest living filmmaker, Sōmai’s been subject of multiple restorations and retrospectives, Toshiharu Ikeda’s Evil Dead Trap remains a perennial October favorite, while Ishii’s influence is simply too vast to count.
To celebrate the collective, my screening series Amnesiascope will present two Directors Company titles at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research on Thursday, January 30: Ryûdô Uzaki’s Farewell Love: Rock Is Sex and Shigeru Izumiya’s Harlem Valentine: Blood Is Sex, both from 1982 and together running 108 minutes. Time in the trenches with lesser-seen Japanese cinema doesn’t prepare one for either experience––a medley of sex, violence, pathos, terror, and plainly startling images––making all the greater their absence from American distribution or home media; January 30 marks an extremely rare chance to see either.
Tickets are now on-sale and synopses for both are below. We look forward to seeing you.
Farewell Love: Rock Is Sex
Rachi has aspirations of becoming a punk rocker. But his tendency towards self-sabotage and a budding sexual addiction makes matters increasingly difficult for him and his band mates to make it big. Co-written by Kiyoshi Kurosawa.Harlem Valentine: Blood Is Sex
In a near-future ravaged by nuclear war, a man searches for his former lover.