Tags
Language
Tags
March 2024
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
25 26 27 28 29 1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
31 1 2 3 4 5 6

Affairs Within Walls (1965) Kabe no naka no himegoto

Posted By: Someonelse
SD / DVD IMDb
Affairs Within Walls (1965) Kabe no naka no himegoto

Affairs Within Walls (1965)
DVD5 Custom | ISO | NTSC 16:9 | Cover | 01:15:30 | 4,00 Gb
Audio: Japanese (日本語) AC3 2.0 @ 448 Kbps | Subs: English (added)
Genre: Thriller, Drama

Director: Kôji Wakamatsu
Writers: Kôji Wakamatsu, Yoshiaki Ôtani
Stars: Hiroko Fujino, Kazuko Kanô, Aya Mine

Filmed in black and white, Secret Acts behind Walls opens with bleak shots of concrete blocks of flats before closing in on a couple in bed, injecting drugs, the woman caressing her lover’s keloid scar, calling him ‘an emblem of Hiroshima, of Japan, an anti-war emblem’. This confrontational opening is followed by a tightly framed study of the oppressive lives led by a number of the block’s residents. The couple are revealed to be disillusioned lovers whose youthful ideals have come to nothing. In the opposite building, a young student is driven mad by sexual frustration while his attractive sister has her first relationship with a man. Obsessions and dissatisfactions heat up slowly, bringing the characters together in a violent denouement.


Also Known As: Secrets Behind the Wall (1965)

There’s something oppressive about the setting for Koji Wakamatsu’s Secrets Behind the Wall - an anonymous and expansive apartment complex erupting from the Japanese countryside like a bleak monument to the nation’s post-war prosperity. The opening shots of the film are from the perspective of a single voyeuristic eye that watches over building after indistinguishable building, impersonal stacks of windows, gutters, porches and clotheslines unique only in the numbers plastered onto their sides. Director of photography Hideo Ito crafts a disorienting montage out of the flatly mundane, with Wakamatsu’s provocative spirit bursting into evidence as a final wide shot of the complex cuts to a hard close-up of a hypodermic injection.

Affairs Within Walls (1965) Kabe no naka no himegoto

It’s an unsettling start, possessed of subtle ferocity, and serves as an oblique introduction to the dual perspectives from which the story will progress. The first is that of a middle-aged housewife who is perpetuating a years-old affair with a survivor of Hiroshima with whom she had become involved during the post-war student peace movement. The man, a former leftist activist, has now grown into a prototypical businessman with only an atom bomb-gifted keloid scar to separate him from anyone else. The housewife, who had herself sterilized out of devotion for her activist lover, is now strapped into a marriage of convenience with an uninteresting union chief who spends more time on the road than at home.

Affairs Within Walls (1965) Kabe no naka no himegoto

Secrets Behind the Wall juxtaposes the infidelitous contemporary relationship with flashbacks of their impassioned meetings in the past, their love for each other having gone the way of the post-war hope for peace among nations. The man has grown into the new world like the rest, hiding his atomic scar under a button-up shirt and turning a profit as the Vietnam War sends the stock market into fits. The housewife has fared worse, the affair serving as her only escape from a dull life of Cold War anxiety and regret over the self-destruction of her ovaries. ”This is no better than a placebo,” says the man early on. He’s speaking of the injections he takes to keep his keloid in check, but the comment takes on a broader meaning in the context of an affair that has grown empty, perfunctory.

Affairs Within Walls (1965) Kabe no naka no himegoto

The contrary perspective is that of the complex’s voyeur, a lazy and unmotivated high school boy stuck at home under the pretense of studying for university exams he failed the year before. He splits his time between peeping into other apartment buildings with a telescope, reading pornographic magazines, compulsively masturbating and eying his similarly-aged sister in a lecherous fashion. On the surface he seems a perfect example of the disaffected youth of any generation, but beneath it’s clear that something far more sinister is simmering.

Affairs Within Walls (1965) Kabe no naka no himegoto

Broadly categorized as a pink film, Secrets Behind the Wall explores the human sexual impulse with a coy frankness, eschewing overt nudity in favor of close-ups of faces, hands, feet (an intriguing by-product of Japanese censorship laws that’s hardly limited to this film). The frequent encounters progress in Wakamatsu’s typically provocative style, blending political statements and violence with the expected eroticism. An opening flashback to the affair between two peace activists shows the couple making love before a large portrait of Stalin (arguably the most famous visual of the film), with the woman’s adoration for the man’s keloid inter-cut with shots of student protests and atom bomb blasts.

Affairs Within Walls (1965) Kabe no naka no himegoto

The convergence of sex, politics and violence occurs frequently, the latter’s presence as subtle as hypodermic injections or as overt as rape and murder. The intrinsically violent nature of sex itself is explored, as the sister of the voyeur loses her virginity to an older man who assumes her to be more experienced. Rather than exploring the subject in the romanticized manner common to Western erotica Wakamatsu frames the event as a minor tragedy, with the man apologizing solemnly as the sister silently cries.

Affairs Within Walls (1965) Kabe no naka no himegoto

Things take a darker turn when she returns to the family apartment, where her brother’s sexual compulsions are beginning to manifest as something more predatory. Here Wakamatsu makes the viewer most complicit in the brother’s voyeurism, his camera ogling the young woman as she showers. As she exits the bathroom the brother takes an opportunity to attack, wrapping a towel around his sister’s head and beating her mercilessly. His intent at an incestuous rape is hindered by his own newfound impotence, leaving him no recourse but to bludgeon his victim with sausages ripped from the family refrigerator. Meanwhile the housewife sits at home, alone, unaware of the potential for danger when an unknown young man comes knocking…

Affairs Within Walls (1965) Kabe no naka no himegoto

Secrets Behind the Wall struck me as having a subtle Hitchcockian influence, both in its focus on a troubled voyeuristic youth (Psycho) and in its location (Rear Window), though this could all be coincidence. Its construction remains oppressive and claustrophobic throughout, the audience restricted to just a handful of banal apartment interiors. Even the timing of the shoot seems to have been calculated, or at least proved advantageous, as a brief excursion beyond the apartment walls reveals a courtyard lined with lifeless trees.

Affairs Within Walls (1965) Kabe no naka no himegoto

I find Wakamatsu’s films to be something of a challenge to discuss as they so often go against my past experience. Secrets Behind the Wall is no exception, having been created to evoke and comment on a specific moment in Japanese history and with little intent to entertain (at least in the traditional sense of cinema as escapism). Wakamatsu’s politics can be difficult to grasp, and though he makes frequent reference to contemporary events (the Hiroshima bombing, the peace movement, poltical scandals and the Vietnam War) his purpose, beyond some obvious moments of provocation, remains unclear.

Affairs Within Walls (1965) Kabe no naka no himegoto

Brilliantly photographed by frequent Wakamatsu collaborator Hideo Ito (The Embryo Hunts in Secret, Go Go Second Time Virgin) and with a grim, Toru Takemitsu-esque score from Noboru Nishiyama (The Living Skeleton), the film still makes for a compelling watch even if its intellectual ambitions are too often opaque. It’s notable among Wakamatsu productions for being the last of his collaborations with Nikkatsu Corporation, with whom the director had a brief but prolific relationship (he directed 7 other films for the company in 1965 alone). The rest of Wakamatsu’s career would be as an independent, with his Wakamatsu Productions still churning out politically charged productions (most recently United Red Army and Caterpillar) today.

Affairs Within Walls (1965) Kabe no naka no himegoto

Special Features:
- Interview (in Japanese w/o subs)
- Trailer
- Photogallery

Many Thanks to Original uploader.


–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––