Page 41 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

28 Nightmare Japan

order) images are represented, it becomes obvious that not only is Devil’s
Experiment not a ‘snuff movie’, but that its categorization within the
documentary – or, for that matter, the ‘mockumentary’ – genre is
problematic at best. The film appeals to documentary conceits by
mobilising the notion that its content constitutes ‘found footage’ (the
images we watch were, after all, ambiguously ‘obtained’, and its aesthetic
is, at times, consistent with the conventions of ‘direct cinema’,
particularly in the implication that the images represent a directly and
intimately observed ‘reality’. At the same time, however, the director
creates a text that by turns establishes and frustrates audience
expectations regarding the text’s documentary authenticity. Any initial
anxiety or dread conjured by the potentiality of seeing something illicit,
culturally aberrant, or taboo is soon countered by meticulously staged and
edited sequences that, as we shall soon discover, variously destabilise the
viewing process. Indeed, Satoru’s editing, as Jack Hunter observes in
Eros in Hell: Sex, Blood and Madness in Japanese Cinema, reveals a
remarkable level of technical sophistication and artistry that designates
the film as ‘professional’, if not downright ‘well crafted’ (Hunter 1998:
145):

[U]tilizing such techniques as slow-motion, freeze-frame, fades, intercuts,
overhead shots, point-of-view shots, close ups, anamorphs, rapid-fire editing,
captioning and sound tracking in its composition…Devil’s Experiment is, in
fact, an effective and surprisingly low-key meditation on the cumulative
dehumanization that violence causes in both aggressor and victim alike. (145)

Hunter’s assessment of the film as meditative in tone is particularly
astute, as the film’s episodic structure allows for periodic moments of
reflection upon (if not recuperation from) the preceding events, as well as
“setting up,” via the inter-title, the next session of torture.
Furthermore, by repeatedly varying the audience’s perspective
during the torture sequences, Satoru complicates the distribution of the
object, trajectory, and implication of the audience’s gaze. Throughout the
majority of the film, the abuse is lensed in slightly high-angle close ups
and medium shots, heightening the victim’s helplessness at the hands of
her captors and positioning the spectator as an intimate witness to, if not