Popular reviews

• 

  Review by Dakota Noot ★★★½

  Just like a baby, our podcast episode is out! "Abortion" is radically political and exploitative: marking the debut of Masao Adachi as a pinku director. Of course, we marathoned it with extremely less respectable pink films...with c-sections and BDSM. Doctor’s orders, of course.

  List: Two in the Pinku (Films we have covered so far)

• 

  Review by Lencho of the Apes ★★★ 1

  Radical termite art! Subversive new-wavers imitating/deconstructing/detourning the kind of gynecological fauxcumentary from the fringes of the exploito market that offered titillation in the guise of educational materials. (Adachi would go on to more obviously far-left experimental cinema, but this is one of his earlier projects...)

  Reproductive medicine as mad science, with an unreliable narrator, crazy-eager to communicate his thesis -- he doesn't have any of the right answers, or any of the right questions, but the act of interrogating attitudes toward sex fits directly into the filmmakers' agenda (I'm assuming) … and then the "answers" he suggests to the "problems" he identifies are grounded in the exploitation of women's bodies for male purposes and the complete denial of female agenda.…

• 

  Review by Dakota Noot ★★★

  Sex-ed: pinku style. Masao Adachi corrodes the "sex hygiene" film with live birth, stolen fetuses, erotic massages, and scientific diagrams. "Abortion" is fascinating on paper - but too didactic for me as a film. The doctor's plot comes very...late-term.

  With pink film, I'm familiar with the more commodified brand of Nikkatsu's Roman Porno or trope/fetish-obsessed independent pinku of the '70s onwards. Forcing myself to watch Wakamatsu (even this production: he is not a director or co-director), has shown how nebulous the early genre was. Sex and nudity could be very brief - and not erotic. No one really awakens. Wakamatsu Pro is New Wave for the gutter. Even the doctor is less heinous than all of the pinku doctors to…

• 

  Review by Christopher Velasco ★★★

  This is my second pink film to see a live birth! Yet this is more of a social documentary about Japanese women and pregnancy. It is very positive sex education, but it is also very procedural.

  Dakota and I discuss this and two other birthing /pregnant films on the Two in the Pinku podcast.

• 

  Review by Dave Jackson ★★★½

  Wakamatsu collaborator and revolutionary activist Masao Adachi directs his first pinku: a strange parody of exploitative birth films centring on a gynaecologist obsessed with separating sexual pleasure from reproduction. Fascinating viewing, but not the best starting point for exploring Adachi's work. My full review: mondoexploito.com/?p=12345

• 

  Review by Jack Russo ★★★

  Gynaecological ideology. Like Godard's films of the time - say Masculine Feminine, or 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her - this is essayistic dramaturgy negotiating its sociology as a psychological concern of the protagonist, an almost parodic mad scientist satire concerned with the effort to separate pleasure from reproduction via the creation of an artificial placenta so hollow as to constitute an echo chamber. Adachi & Wakamatsu employ the aesthetics of sexual hygiene films as a form of indoctrination, demonstrations of science attempting to reconcile this conservative shame of desire; the calendar system is an objective measure, but a woman's love of a man is an emotional one. Terashima is presented with many such cases of human impulse, or…

• 

  Review by Iman Rahbar ★★½

  این فیلم تا حد زیادی یک فیلم آموزشی بود و یه بخش زیادی از زمان فیلم، به این صورت بود که شخصیت ها داشتن درباره سقط جنین و بچه دار شدن، اصطلاعات علمی پایه ای میدادن. ولی خب هم راستا با این فرم آموزشی، فیلم داستان خودش رو هم پیش می برد که البته داستان و نحوه ی بیانش هم اصلاً بد نبود. نحوه بیانش یه کم من رو یاد سینمای صامت می نداخت که شاید دلیلش حالت کمابیش بدوی و ساده ی روایت بود (و البته به لحاظ داستانی یه شباهت های جزئی ای با مطب دکتر کالیگاری هم داشت).

• 

  Review by dirtylaundri ★★★

  Separating sex from reproduction... supposedly to free the former, yes, but then again Adachi's film is almost exclusively interested in the latter, to the point of this hardly being a pinku at all. It's all about controlling the inner, biological workings of women, and to go there means negating not only the body as an erotic object, but the outward, visible world in toto; so we get lots of paranoid interiors, a detached voice over, close-ups of indifferent, unreadable faces looming large and white on the screen, and - maybe most importantly - quite a few diagrams which are treated like mystical treasure maps: scientific discourse collapsing into full-scale fantasmagoria.

• 

  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★

  Not quite Adachi’s best, but as blunt as one would expect a movie by him called Abortion to be. The scientist attempts to separate sex from reproduction plays into his usual preoccupation of sex as object and potential political weapon.

• 

  Review by GhosTea ★★★½

  Abortion related films were a short lived sub-genre of Japanese exploitation film , this is probably the first and last film I will see in this genre, not because this was a bad film, but because of what little of these films survived and were translated to English.

  The main sell is that it was directed by Masao Adachi, who wrote most of Wakamatsu's flicks, and directed one of my personal favorites in Gushing Prayer.

  The majority of the film feels like a PSA, explaining procedures, and different body functions in regards to sex and pregnancy. Through the internal monolog of the gynecologist we get a moral look into the practice of performing abortions, and his obsession to separate love,…

• 

  Review by Niklas ★★★

  Wakamatsu's film on abortion naturally approaches the subject in the distinctive style of Koji Wakamatsu, albeit far less scandalous than another Wakamatsu film from the same year. In "Abortion," however, women are portrayed as victims of their sexuality due to an almost inherent irrationality or naivety. The main character, a gynecologist, reinforces this perspective, depicting male sexual offenders as victims of their own sexuality. The film even touches on the conservative notion of equating abortion with murder. While such attitudes were somewhat expected in the 1960s, the issue lies in simplifying perpetrators as mere victims. In cases where women become pregnant due to irrationality or other factors, it often involves two individuals, and individual stories must be considered. Marukido Sadao,…

• 

  Review by Crawlspace Dweller Matt [♥] ★★★

  "My child is the future."

  Abortion is an interesting and fairly atmospheric Japanese film from the 60s that follows a gynecologist who becomes fed up with the problems the inherent connection of sexual lust and unwanted reproduction brings to society, so he decides to use his experience and studies to find a way to separate those two by creating an artificial womb.

  It's presented in the style of one of these faux-educational exploitation movies having the protagonist doctor narrate his thoughts and opinions about sexuality and biology to the viewer while we watch him take care of different patients, many of whom have their own troubled backstories connected to unwanted pregnancies.
  The soundtrack is completely made up of European classical…