Blind Beast

The traditional visual art of Japan – such as popular woodblock prints and handscrolls – was a shaping influence on the films of Yasuzō Masumura. He used its subject matter, disposition of space, and compositional novelty in his mises-en-scène, while its embodiment of tradition and national identity were invoked and upended in historical films like Seisaku no tsuma (Seisaku’s Wife, 1965). The art world itself, by contrast, could be a direct source of social transgression and personal liberation. In Manji (1964), Sonoko (Kyōko Kishida) meets Mitsuko (Ayako Wakao) at an art school life drawing class, initiating an affair that challenges norms of gender, marriage, and institutional control.

Mōjū (Blind Beast, 1969) takes this transgression to its logical – or illogical, even alogical – conclusion. Aki (Mako Midori) is a model for the photographer Yamana who specialises in modish scenes of bondage and extreme nudity. During an exhibition of his latest pictures, Aki visits the gallery, and finds a blind man fondling her nude statue (beloved Masumura regular Eiji Funakoshi as Michio). She feels as if he is molesting her actual body by a kind of sympathetic magic, and flees. Sometime later, exhausted after an intense session with the photographer, Aki hires a masseur to visit her apartment. It is the same blind man, and he fondles her body with the same inappropriate intensity. When she objects, he drugs her and, with the help of his mother (Noriko Sengoku), abducts her to an abandoned warehouse beyond the city limits. When she comes to, Aki finds herself in an artists’ studio. The walls are covered in outsize sculptures of body parts – huge, ‘staring’ eyes; ears, lips, breasts – the floor filled with massive statues of reclining female nudes. After several abortive attempts to escape, Aki begins a self-destructive affair with the sculptor.

Blind Beast is based on the 1931 novel Mōjū by Edogawa Rampo and adapts the first of six interlinked stories featuring a blind, serial killing sculptor.¹ This was the year the Japanese government embraced fascism by invading Manchuria, the setting for several key Masumura films.² Mōjū is a black comedy, an early giallo, and a satire of Japanese modernity that Rampo genders female and confronts with a return of repressed primal impulses. The ‘Blind Beast’ is a kind of proto-Bond villain or human Godzilla, hiding in each story waiting to wreak sexual depredation and murderous dismemberment on his female victims. The reader’s anticipative relationship with the killer – when will he turn up in this story? What inventive way will he find to kill this victim? – is perversely pleasurable and prevents any empathy with those he torments.

Masumura’s films are deadly serious – or deadly comic – and allows his viewer no such comforting distance. In Blind Beast he follows the first story closely until the moment of the consensual affair, which quickly fizzles out in Mōjū, leading a bored Beast to dispose of his victim and move on to the next. In Blind Beast, however, the decline of a ‘conventional’ sexual relationship is only the starting point for something radically different. It leads to a new phase of physical experiment and spiritual transcendence, in rituals that take place over the body of the now-dead mother, buried underneath the floorboards. Masumura’s most radical change to Mōjū is to give his heroine a voice – she narrates and orders her seemingly grisly experience, even beyond the point of extinction. 

Masumura has often been accused of eclecticism – he made too many diverse types of films in too many styles to forge the ‘signature’ of the auteur. But it is the thematic, stylistic, and imagistic links that Masumura makes across different films that makes their unity so distinctive – and disturbing. Michio’s studio may, perhaps, have reminded contemporary viewers of the recent war, or of nuclear bunkers and threat of annihilation. Masumura had already shown a world on the brink of annihilation in his most famous film Akai Tenshi (Red Angel, 1966). There the surgeon amputated and unceremoniously flung limbs to the floor, foreshadowing the body part artworks of Blind Beast. Conversely, the bright sex comedy Chijin no ai (Love for an Idiot, 1967) also focuses on the affective power relations between an amateur artist and his model – its ‘Swinging Sixties’ style influences the beginning of Blind Beast and signifies the world Aki will leave far behind.

It is in its depiction of the world of art that Blind Beast proves distinctive. Rampo’s book depends for its context on the emergence in 1920s Japan of international modern movements such as Cubism, Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism – all in different ways engaged in ‘deforming’ the body and space, and predictably often shocking those used to traditional Japanese art. Masumura’s visualisation of Michio’s studio follows Rampo closely, yet also convincingly belongs to the late 1960s – doubtless because much of the art of the 1960s, from Pop and Conceptual Art to installation and performance, revisited ideas first explored in the 1920s.

Blind Beast serves as a compendium of various national and international trends in contemporary art. The walls filled with sculpted body parts references the work of self-taught sculptor Tomio Miki, who became famous for arrangements of dismembered ears in works such as Fifty Fragments of Ear and Untitled (Ears) (both 1964). Tetsumi Kudō’s ‘X-rated cages’ of the early 1960s comprised body parts such as heads and penises. The tangled sex scenes in the film’s final third, presented on the sinuous ‘stage set’ that is the oversize naked sculpture, are inspired by contemporary performance art, from the antics of the Japanese Gutai group to the feminist erotics of Carolee Schneemann. The film’s outsize female nudes reference both the anti-feminist Allen Jones, who turned sculpted women into furniture, and feminist Niki de Saint-Phalle, who invited visitors to enter her giant female figure HON (she) through her vagina.

Michio is an untrained artist seeking to bypass tradition institutions to create new ways of experiencing art, and constructs monumental, immersive environments. This reflects the renewed interest in ‘Art Brut’ (raw art) and ‘Outsider Art’ at this period – Roger Cardinal’s influential survey Outsider Art would be published in 1972, and feature figures such as the postman Ferdinand Cheval, who spent 33 years building his ‘Palais idéal’, a gigantic stone castle inspired by a dream. Blind Beast was released only months after the death of Dada magus Marcel Duchamp, who had been in alleged retirement from the art world for decades. It was discovered that he too had been working in secret for twenty years on a sexual environment, the installation Étant donnés, wherein a nude woman sprawled across a landscape can only be glimposed through a peephole.  

The focus in Blind Beast on lovers secluded in their own private world away from Society and History, and the ritual acceleration through violence to self-annihilation, look forward to one of the most (in)famous of all Japanese films, the 1930s-set Ai no corrida (In the Realm of the Senses, Nagisa Ōshima, 1976). Oshima was one of Masumura’s first admirers, claiming that with his debut Kuchizuke (Kisses, 1957), the new generation took its place in Japanese cinema as an intense, irresistible force that no one could ignore’.³  

Aki is one of many Masumura heroines who must problematically undergo physical ordeals (abduction, incarceration, assault), in order to achieve inner strength. In Blind Beast, Aki exchanges conventional sight for insight. She begins the film by running away from what she sees, running from her sensual power to conflate sight and feeling. Her imprisonment opens with a black screen as she tries to adapt to Michio’s unlit studio. The film approaches its climax as her eyes atrophy, but she finds the fulfilment she never did as a ‘free’, sighted, alienated, modern woman. By the end, Aki is as much the ‘blind beast’ of the title as Michio, her ecstatic carcass butchered by the sculptor just as her image was fragmented by the photographer Yamana in the film’s opening sequence. As with all Masumura’s masterpieces, Blind Beast presents an unsettling vision that goes beyond mere vision.

Mōjū/Blind Beast (1969 Japan 85 min)

Prod: Kazumasa Nakano Dir: Yasuzō Masumura Scr: Yoshio Shirasaka, based on the book Mōjū by Edogawa Rampo Phot: Setsuo Kobayashi  Ed: Tatsuji Nakashizu Mus: Hikaru Hayashi

Cast: Eiji Funakoshi, Mako Midori, Noriko Sengoku

Endnotes