Yasuzo Masumura: The innovator of the Japanese New Wave

The great Japanese director, Yasuzo Masumura, has been a student of Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti and Kenji Mizoguchi, and has directed more than 65 feature films. For its 17th edition, the Athens International Film Festival presents the most important moments from the inconceivably long filmography of the most ‘European’ Japanese director.

The extensive retrospective includes a wide range of films, from Masumura’s debut “Kisses” until the most extreme title of all, the perverse, camp “Blind Beast”, in order to cover all thematic grounds.
“Kisses” was Yasuzo Masumura’s first feature and the film that turned Europe’s attention towards the great Japanese auteur. A forbidden love, a feel of French cinematic avant-garde and the freshness missing from Eastern cinema; all of these can be found in the film that added Masumura’s name to the list of the most promising auteurs.

“Giants and Toys” is a colourful pop creation, a film satire “in colour”, which has been called the “Mad Men” of the 70s Japanese reality. Following “Kisses”, it adds a completely different note in this exhaustive retrospective and bombards us with images representative of the pop art movement, before it was a movement, even in the US. “Giants and Toys” reveals Masumura’s enormous talent in all its glory and undoubtedly places him among the international cinematic geniuses.

“Manji”, released in 1964, comes to subvert any suspicions of a linear approach to Masumura’s work. Perhaps the most advanced film this cult director had to show at the time, “Manji” takes Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s novel of the same name and gives it an enormous boost. It manages to be seen as the most advanced masterpiece of the time, putting on the cinematic agenda scenes of lesbian love and team suicides, while it also introduces to us Masumura’s favourite muse, the femme fatale and sex symbol of the time, Ayako Wakao.

Another one of the festival’s suggestions, which demonstrates the ultimate collaboration between Ayako and Masumura, is “Red Angel”. This anti-war masterpiece, taking place during the World War II, contains some of the most horrific and extreme scenes ever committed to film until today. Rape, humiliating acts, despair and degeneration of the human existence are turned into sweet metaphors about human relationships and woman’s place in society, making “Red Angel” a film you don’t forget easily.

From this retrospective, we could not have left out Masumura’s most particular and extreme creation which bears the title “Blind Beast”. The story of the most perverse blind artist, who kidnaps a model and locks her up in his laboratory, which happens to contain fewer symbolisms than one can probably meet in hell, is a story of passion full of sex, delirium, perversion, extravagance, blinding Technicolor, camp excess and sadomasochistic elements.

The Athens International Film Festival recommends the Japanese pioneer as a special visual experience, which conveys the sense of freedom beyond the conventional context and social barriers. New titles will soon be announced, titles that will conduce to an overall picture of the work of one of the most important directors of world cinema.