Page 45 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

32 Nightmare Japan

horrible and bizarre crime seems to have been performed by the [sic] person of
aesthetic paranoia in some secret place. The 8mm film was considered to be a
vivid and authentic film showing an unidentified man chop [sic] the body of a
woman into pieces and put [sic] them into his collection. Therefore, this film
should not be shown to other people. Hideshi Hibino newly created this video
as a restructured semi-documentary based on the 8mm film, pictures and letter.

Similar to Devil’s Experiment, Flowers of Flesh and Blood at once
conforms to and confounds standard documentary practice. Defined as a
‘restructured semi-documentary’, a genre classification that, in its very
syntax, conflates the expectations of fiction and so-called ‘non-fiction’
filmmaking, Flowers of Flesh and Blood is nothing less than a cleverly
articulated work of cinematic metafiction. A ‘fake documentary’, it
derives the majority of its effectiveness through the skillful application of
familiar documentary techniques, most notably the dramatic ‘re-
enactment’ of events which, for one reason or another, either could not be
captured on film or can not be rebroadcast in their original form. Thus,
from its opening sequence, Hino’s film, informed by documentary
techniques, advocates an understanding of its gruesome content as a
‘restructured’ and, consequently, fictionalised narrative based upon an
already imaginary 8mm film. In the process of crafting this complex and
inventive layering of realistic unreality, Hino creates a text that explores
profound cultural anxieties surrounding gender- and class-based
transformations in Japan’s socio-cultural climate.
Likewise akin to Devil’s Experiment, Flowers of Flesh and
Blood’s primary action consists of increasingly violent attacks upon a
female body punctuated by mainly low angle close ups of the killer
staring directly into the camera’s lens and discussing his next assault
(‘And now her bowels start dancing wildly on her body and bloom many
blossoms.’). These intimate moments of direct address portion the film
into tiny sanguine chapters and, together with numerous lengthy panning
shots, slow fades, and non-diegetic moans and wails, provide periods of
almost poetic reflection. Indeed, the film’s lyricism is perhaps never more
pronounced than during the film’s penultimate sequence, during which a
mournful lamentation of ‘man’s’ descent into hell – a veritable ‘lullaby of
hell’ – plays over the camera’s slow pan through the killer’s ‘collection’,
a combination of exquisitely detailed scrolls depicting warriors and