When Japan’s oldest film studio faced financial collapse in 1971, it made a move nobody saw coming. Nikkatsu ditched mainstream productions entirely and pivoted to erotic cinema.

The gamble paid off. For 17 years, the studio’s Roman Porno line became a proving ground for young filmmakers who would define Japanese cinema in the decades to come. Now Japan Society is celebrating 55 years of the genre with a 12-film retrospective running November 20 through December 6.

Roman Porno wasn’t your typical softcore fare. Shot in 35mm color with actual studio resources, these films had to follow strict rules: a sex scene every 15 minutes, 70-minute runtimes, 10-day shooting schedules. But within those constraints, directors found remarkable creative freedom. Future auteurs like Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Shinji Somai cut their teeth here.

The series opens with a 35mm import of Noboru Tanaka’s A Woman Called Sada Abe, which beat Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses to the screen by a year. Other highlights include Tatsumi Kumashiro’s The World of Geisha, praised by François Truffaut, and rarely screened gems like Love Letter, Nikkatsu’s most successful Roman Porno release.

The genre wasn’t without controversy. In 1972, Tokyo police raided Nikkatsu’s offices despite the films passing Japan’s official rating board. The resulting eight-year obscenity trial ended in acquittals and became the last time a film was prosecuted for obscenity in Japan.

For aspiring filmmakers stuck outside the crumbling studio system, Roman Porno offered something rare: a chance to make art on someone else’s dime.

A Vietnam vet escorts his dead comrade’s body across America by train, slipping between memory and madness as the country around him tries to look away.

That’s the setup for TRACKS, Henry Jaglom’s 1976 post-war head trip starring Dennis Hopper, and it’s finally getting the treatment it deserves. A new 4K restoration is screening at New York’s Roxy Cinema on November 11 and 22.

Jaglom shot TRACKS in that raw, fractured style that defined the New Hollywood mavericks. Hopper plays the sergeant haunted by what he saw overseas. Dean Stockwell and Taryn Power (Tyrone’s daughter, in one of her first roles) drift in and out of his reality as the train rolls on. J. Hoberman called it “visceral and discomforting,” both a road movie and the first real post-Vietnam film. Variety said it was “incisive, revelatory.”

The film screened at Cannes in 1976, then got buried. Jaglom, who got his start editing Easy Rider with Jack Nicholson, spent decades carving out his own weird corner of American indie cinema. Hope Runs High is bringing this one back.

For anyone tracking the unsung films of the ’70s, this restoration matters. TRACKS captures a moment when America couldn’t process what it had done, told by a filmmaker who refused to play it safe.