Blind Beast

1969 Directed by Yasuzo Masumura

Watching a Japanese "pinky" violence film delivers more than nudity- the category itself conjures images of bloody violence and torture- but many of the films delve deeply into topics of a reflection of Japanese society. What one does when they debase themselves and lose honor within society- when they infringe upon social taboo.

Blind Beast is a tactile film. It revolves around the kidnapping of a blind sculptor's muse- but what starts as obsessiveness about her figure turns into a film about exploring our primal selves. The set pieces stand hugely- discomforting to the viewer as enlarged ears, eyes, and breasts, hands, etc. are disconnected and repeated. The Direction ensures that you watch this film not through the sense of sight- but through the sense of touch of the blind sculptor. To consider his point of view even in the first scenes where he obsesses over a sculpture of the muse he hunts out.

The room he develops becomes like an abstract womb, a cavernous variety of otherworldly surrealism that no others will ever step foot. His mother gives all of this to her son, but the soap opera between them shifts with her son's obsession for his muse. Trapped and forced into this situation, the response of the muse to this endeavor is where the delight of the macabre sets in.

This turn becomes an affront to the civilized society. The world of the Blind Beast becomes itself, looking at the dissonant pleasure of the sculptor and his work. Splashes of the flesh- of unyielding liberation in hedonism that consumes all else. What is left is oblivion. This goes directly to the nonsensical erotic grotesque that Japan's Edgar Allen Poe- Edogawa Ranpo- delights in. It's not a film to be thought through- but fully felt with your own individual senses.