Reflection on Proposal 30/09/25

I wrote my original proposal for the MSC almost a year ago the outline was inspired by select pink films and how they were percieved by the public. since then I have been able to delve deeper into my research of pink films. Pink films were a genre of explicit films that,due to the hush hush and low budget nature of production, allowed several radical directors to come up through the studio system. Select directors who worked in pink include Suijin Sezuki, Nagisa Oshima, Koji Wakamatsu, Masao Adachi, Yumi Yoshiyuke and Masaru Konuma to name a few. The films of these directors were censored not just for explicit context but for their political messages which at times directly tied into major historical events and movements such as the anpo protests, second wave feminism, psychology, philosophy and the Japanese new wave (though the title was coined by the japanese studio system i’m employing it here as a quick summation of a very varied selection of films) The blending of all these elements is something I find deeply facinating 

Jasper Sharp’s Behind the pink curtain was an invaluable resource and helped me come to understand the power and history of the genre. Going back to my original outline i had based my idea on a passage from Jack Hunters “Eros in hell” In Eros Hunter likens the pink film  to a dream where entering the cinema is getting drowsy, when the lights dim you are falling asleep, the film is the director’s dream being projected at you and the matinee is you waking. This really changed the way I viewed more surreal movies and was something I wanted to replicate. The proposal also took elements I saw by attending art shows and film festivals (weird weekends 2025 specifically)  where work was being displayed in unconventional ways. I intended to combine a gallery set up consisting of three rooms that viewers would have to pass through before seeing the film to recreate this idea of film as psychic visions and further separate them from their everyday surroundings. I think upon reflection this is something I still want to persue however the films I want to make will have different artistic goals than before and will reflect the research I have done since the proposal. 

After writing the original outline I continued to work on my pink film research as a hobby between shift work. I became more interested in the idea of censorship around these films as it is an important aspect of their historical context. This was also as we are seeing a massive push back culturally to more overtly sexual or violent work. My aim was to expand the scope of my proposal to include discussions around famous art censorship cases (UK based censorship around books like the well of loneliness and lady chatterley’s lover) I was able to get in touch with Jasper Sharp regarding some select quotes brought up around the trial of Black snow which lead me to the book “the art of censorship in postwar Japanese cinema” and “the pink book The Japanese Eroduction and it’s contexts” Both of these works helped inform how i wanted to look at the project going forward especially regarding how current certain pink film were on release. I have also been researching the new genration of filmakers who were inspired by pink film. mainly the works of Hisayusu Sato.

but I didn’t pursue it much further until i was able to get access to the Glasgow uni Library where i have been reading Eros plus massacre by David Desser, Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations, edited by E ann Kaplan and Ban Wang and Politics, Porn and Protest by Isolde Standish. The theory present in these books particularly regarding how historical trauma has manifested on film has been very interesting to read. I would like to relate ideas therin to recent major events like covid, government pushback to LGBTQ rights, here as well as abroad, current violence around the world and our always online media in the same way that select pink films held a mirror to the societies they were released into. Though I will definetly be starting small and seeing what comes out of viewing the filmaking process in this way before fully commiting.  

One of the first points made in “Trauma and cinema” is that traumatic events are sometimes not properly absorbed at a conscious level hence why they often reccur in the form of dreams or subconscious behaviors, then relating that to long running themes and motif present in certain films. I feel that tying that in with the idea that films are psychic visions from the filmmaker would lead to some interesting results. I would also like to relate these films through the lens that is often brought up when discussing the horror genre. That being that successful genre films tell you what the society they were released into fears. I have also been reading Kier-la Jannisse’s book “house of psychotic women” which further ties together the ideas of societal fear, personal fear and trauma. In the run up to the final project i would like to create films that keep the ideas mentioned above in mind.

Though this is all still theoretical I do have some experimental films planned regarding subliminal messaging. I chose to look at this topic as a way of easing into themes of subconscious that I aim to look at in my work.