The Karlovy Vary festival highlighted the amazing films of Yasuzō Masumura, an almost unknown director in the West.
Yasuzō Masumura in the movie Blind Beast (1969) a blind sculptor has built a studio with noses, ears, lips, breasts, hands and feet protruding from the walls. It works in surrealism by Luis Buñuel to the wildest imaginations.
The artist captures a young woman as his model. Their relationship has a sadomasochistic end Nagisa Ōshima The realm of the senses (1976) to feel tame. But Blind Beast is not nearly as well known as Ōshima’s classic.
Blind Beast saw in Helsinki a couple of years ago in the WHS Union theater’s Piiska series. The show was exceptional, as Masumura’s work is poorly known in the West. In July, the Czech Karlovy Vary Film Festival highlighted it with a series of 11 restored films.
An authority in the film industry Variety magazine named it series as the festival’s biggest event. Retro can elevate Masumura to the ranks of Japanese champions.
Masumura (1924–1986) studied film in Italy, where he was taught Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti. In Japan, he worked, among other things by Kenji Mizoguchi as an assistant director before starting to direct in 1957.
In his wildest film Blind Beast Masumura mixes horror and Japanese softcore porn. He drew the eroguro genre from the tradition of grotesque eroticism that flourished in the 1930s.
Masumura’s films often have features of exploitation, but the films are made stylishly. They are basically carefully thought out melodramas. In it, Masumura becomes a director to Douglas Sirkwhich set emotions ablaze in Hollywood.
All Mixed Up (1964) was one of the world’s first lesbian dramas.
Capturing a woman as a model sounds like chauvinistic subjugation, but Masumura often photographed strong women as well. All Mixed Up (1964) was one of the world’s first lesbian dramas.
In the frenzy of Whoreise At Spider Tattoo (1966) a woman avenges the wrongs she experienced in the Edo period (1600–1868). Masumura took influences from ukiyo-e woodblock prints for his most visually beautiful film.
in Red Angel (1966) nurse works in military and field hospitals in China during World War II. The legs and arms of wounded soldiers are amputated there day and night.
Masumura shows the horrors of war without spectacular battles. Only at the climax do we visit the battlefield, but even there the blood tastes bitter and death is pointless.
War and militarism also appeared to be treacherous In Hoodlum Soldier (1965), in which two rebels create an army in absurd chains of command. Like hard-boiled adventures of Švejk.
Masumura dealt a lot with the rapid modernization and westernization of post-war Japan.
In his first masterpiece, a comedy Giants and Toys (1958), competing candy factories spy on each other’s marketing strategies as in war. The advertising world appears more cynical than Mad Men in the series.
At Giants and Toys has features of early pop art. In the opening credits, the image of the working-class girl who was grabbed as the star of the advertising campaign repeats as a series as if four years later Andy Warhol Marilyn– in the portrait.
The comedy Giants and Toys (1958) has features of early pop art.
Masumura often contrasts the interests of the individual and the community in the Japanese disciplined atmosphere, both at the business world and at the level of society. He defends the individual, but does not release his people from responsibility.
Good and evil intertwine like yin and yang. Masumura’s characters betray their own ideals in the greed fueled by capitalism and consumer society.
Next year will be the hundredth anniversary of Masumura’s birth. He directed 58 films. The Karlovy Vary series focused on the beginning of the career in the 1950s and 1960s. It left me hungry to see more.
In Masumura’s Red Angel (1966), a nurse works in Chinese military and field hospitals in China during World War II.
#Column #Japan #director #ahead #time #films #unknown #Europe
