Page 44 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Guinea Pigs and Entrails 31

wavering distance from the film’s explicit content. As blood pools from
the corner of the victim’s eye, the point of the needle perforating her
cornea, viewers witness the ultimate articulation of patriarchal authority
as a dominating social (and socializing) force. Through the violent
destruction of the very organ most frequently associated with ‘vision’ and
‘enlightenment’, Satoru presents viewers, through the metaphor of
torture, with an unforgettable representation of an aggressive regime’s
total infusion of the corporeal and social body; the female form is reduced
to an object of abusive inquiry (and inquiry through abuse), its physical
and psychic parameters pushed to – and past – the ‘breaking point’ by an
impassive masculine collective that is quite literally never out of control.
Thus, unlike Buñuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou, which approached the
political by way of a personalised surrealism and the creation of
‘meaning’ through imagistic conflation, Devil’s Experiment confronts
viewers with an externalised hyperreality informed by a logic of
disruption via a mis-en-scène that fluctuates between immersion and
alienation. In the process, it maps an ever-emerging discursive legacy of
brutality, offering audiences a gruesome exposition of a transforming
postwar Japanese body waging a ferocious war with itself.
Flowers of Flesh and Blood, the controversial cinematic creation
of renowned manga artist Hino Hideshi, resembles Saturo’s film in that
Hino, too, uses a written text scrolling against a black background to
frame the film’s primary ‘narrative’. Unlike Saturo, however, Hino does
not set out to create even the faintest illusion that the material the viewer
sees on the screen is ‘real’ (although, given the aforementioned account
of the film’s infamous reception history, the gory content has
nevertheless been understood as such). Rather than transmit the notion
that what we are about to see is actual – i.e. not simulated – violence
captured on camera, Hino posits the film’s content as a re-creation of a
snuff film delivered to a ‘bizarre cartoonist’ with the curiously familiar
sounding moniker, Hideshi Hibino:

It was in April 1985…[that]…Bizarre cartoonist Hideshi Hibino eceived one
horrible parcel from an unidentified person who calls himself an enthusiastic
fan of the cartoonist Hideshi Hibino. The parcel contained one 8mm film, 54
still pictures and a 19 page letter: The letter to the cartoonist that [sic] a