Sex Every Afternoon: Pink Film and the Body of Pornographic Cinema in Japan.

Abstract

Sex Every Afternoon: Pink Film and the Body of Pornographic Cinema in Japan is a critical reconsideration of the modes and meanings of the Pink Film; a form of soft-core, narrative, theatrical adult film produced in Japan from the 1960s to the present day. Focusing on the period between the early 1980s and the early 2010s, I combine fieldwork with historiographical and theoretical reassessments to explore this industry through the three main dimensions of its contemporary existence—the pro-filmic spaces of production at shooting locations and in studios, the imaginary and remediated realms of the pornographic image on movie and TV screens, and the physical environments of the adult specialty cinema network in Japan. In counterargument to a growing body of knowledge that has, since the rapid spread of adult video formats in Japan in the early 1980s, emphasized the material and contextual specificities of Pink Film and reified the format as an essentially filmic, distinctly theatrical, and particularly Japanese cinema, I examine the ways in which Pink Film has acted instead as a (re)productive point of translation between presumably disparate moving image technologies and audiences. I challenge the assumption that pornographic film, as a ‘body genre,’ has the unusual power to directly address or affect spectators’ bodies. I argue that while Pink Film does exhibit an intimate relationship with the bodies of producers and performers that create it, the films themselves focus as much on the spectacular coupling of media technologies as they do the simulated sexual contact of actors in the frame. I also show how adult cinema customers often have no interest in the movie at all, and instead utilize these spaces in ways that are directly disputed by theater management and disavowed by filmic narratives. Sex Every Afternoon recalibrates the ‘bodies’ of this body genre to align with the real people who create Pink Films. It issues a challenge to film and pornography studies by arguing that a close textual and contextual evaluation of this medium reveals that the romantic relationship between the moving image and the living spectator is, at best, uncertain.