COURSE BLOG for GWSS 3307: Feminist Film/Media Studies (Fall 2007)

My final project was on Japanese Pink Cinema or Pinku Eiga (as most of you know because I presented it in class). The most significant characteristics of Pink Cinema are the combination of ultra violence and sexuality. Commonly the plot of these films is about a woman or a young girl who has had something wrong done to her, such as betrayal or rape, and thus she seeks revenge on the men who did her wrong by using her sexuality and extreme violence. Pink films are commonly described as soft core porn or sexploitation films. However, Pink Cinema offers a much more complex product than adult film in the United States due to the distinct art house style of the films, the regulations of Japanese cinema, and the complexity of the representation of gender. In my paper I argue that due the limitations on Japanese filmmakers, the sex scenes in pink films are often long, drawn out and present the female and her body in a repressed context.
In my presentation I analyzed a pink film from 1972 titled Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion directed by Shunya Itso. It is a part of a series of “women in prison films� called Scorpion.
These are the sources I used for my paper:

Burch, Noel. To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema. University of California Press, 1979. 351-354.
Desser, David. Eros Plus Massacre: an Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema.
Indiana University Press, 1988. 99-107.
Harritz, Pia D. “Consuming the Female Body: Pinku Eiga and the case of Sagawa Issei.�
in media res 1.2 (2005) 5 December 2007
.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.� Feminism and Film. Ed. Ann E. Kaplan. Oxford University Press, 2000. 34-47.
Turim, Maureen. “�The Erotic in Asian Cinema.� Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography, and Power. Ed. Pamela Church and Roma Gibson. British Film Institute, 1993. 81-88.