‘The 1960s were a major turning point for the way academics and intellectuals thought about cinema as art. Film studies pioneer Annette Michelson, who passed away this week at the age of ninety-six, was at the forefront of shaping those conversations, often taking issue with the critical orthodoxy of the period. In 1966, she returned to New York after spending fifteen years in France, where she was an editor and critic for the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune and a translator of philosophical works by the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. She found the critical milieu in the States ossified by what she termed the “idealist” model of the artist, a construct that had taken hold during the heyday of abstract expressionism. Through her essays for Artforum and October, the journal she cofounded with Rosalind Krauss, and in her lectures at New York University, where she was instrumental in the establishment of the film studies department, Michelson aimed to open new critical perspectives to deal with the challenges posed by minimalism and temporal art such as performance and avant-garde cinema.

‘In its tribute, Artforum declares that Michelson’s film criticism “not only profoundly influenced cinema studies but helped legitimize the medium as a viable subject of scholarship.” And as critic and curator Amy Taubin tells Neil Genzlinger in the New York Times, “she was enormously influential in bringing American avant-garde film to the attention of the museum and gallery world, enabling its current investment in the moving image as a serious visual art medium.”

‘ARTnews senior editor Alex Greenberger notes that Michelson’s criticism “tended to merge philosophy, formalism, and elements of film and art history,” while addressing such topics as “the films of Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Nagisa Oshima, and Stan Brakhage; the paintings of Agnes Martin and Jasper Johns; the sculptures of Robert Morris; the dance works of Yvonne Rainer; and, perhaps most importantly, musings about the relationship between viewers’ bodies and motion pictures.”

‘Last year saw the publication of a collection of many of these landmark essays, On the Eve of the Future: Selected Writings on Film, a volume the includes Michelson’s seminal analyses of avant-garde work by Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, and Michael Snow. But Michelson’s most famous essay, “Bodies in Space: Film as ‘Carnal Knowledge,’” originally published in Artforum in 1969, takes as its subject one of the most popular films of all time, 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Like that black monolith whose unheralded materialization propels the evolution of consciousness through the three panels of the movie’s narrative triptych, Kubrick’s film has assumed the disquieting function of Epiphany,” she writes. Disappointed, perhaps even angry that the film was so poorly received “by a bewildered and apprehensive community (tribe? species?) of critics,” she attributed this initial response to “a crisis in criticism. And still the ‘object’ lures us on. Another level or ‘universe’ of discourse awaits us.”

‘That phrase “the ‘object’ lures us on” is crucial to Michelson’s project. Malcolm Turvey, who coedited Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson in 2003—the book is freely accessible from Amsterdam University Press—emphasizes in his introduction that Michelson was not a theorist, but rather, a critic. Theorists, Turvey points out, tend to analyze a work of art from the top down, beginning with a set of preconceptions built into the theory they’re beholden to, whereas a critic observes from the bottom up, starting with the work itself.

‘For her lively oral history Challenging Art: Artforum 1962–1974, Amy Newman spoke with Michelson about the special film issue she edited in 1973. In an attempt to win then-editor Philip Leider over to the project, she arranged to have him spend an afternoon at Anthology Film Archives, taking in work by the likes of Paul Sharits, Robert Breer, and Hollis Frampton. “And he staggered out,” recalled Michelson, “and he said, ‘I had no idea that this was happening.’ And I said, ‘What do you think I’ve been doing with my time the last five years?’”

‘Michelson was “a titan,” tweets critic Michael Sicinski, “a fierce intellect without whom we wouldn’t be having half the conversations about cinema that we currently have.”’ — David Hudson

 

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Further

Annette Michelson @ Wikipedia
Annette Michelson Archive
ANNETTE MICHELSON (1922–2018)
‘Oshima’s Choice’, by Annette Michelson
‘Censoring Cuba’, by Annette Michelson
Book: ‘Annette Michelson, On the Wings of Hypothesis: Collected Writings on Soviet Cinema’
Annette Michelson and the Post-Revolutionary Project
Letter to Annette Michelson from Stan Brakhage
Book: ‘Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson’
RETRO FILM THEORY FEELS IMPORTANT BUT ROMANTICALLY DISTANT IN ‘ON THE EVE OF THE FUTURE’
L’écliptique du savoir
Conversación con Annette Michelson
Book: ‘October: The First Decade’, by Annette Michelson
Buy ‘On the Eve of the Future’

 

____
Extras

Conversations with Annette Michelson and Steven Poser

Annette Michelson on Sergei Eisenstein

Annette Michelson interviews Elia Kazan

Annette Michelson on Dersu Uzala

 

____
Interview

 

(cont.)

 

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Book

Annette Michelson On the Eve of the Future: Selected Writings on Film
October Books

‘The celebrated critic and film scholar Annette Michelson saw the avant-garde filmmakers of the 1950s and 1960s as radically redefining and extending the Modernist tradition of painting and sculpture, and in essays that were as engaging as they were influential and as lucid as they were learned, she set out to demonstrate the importance of the underappreciated medium of film. On the Eve of the Future collects more than thirty years’ worth of those essays, focusing on her most relevant engagements with avant-garde production in experimental cinema, particularly with the movement known as American Independent Cinema.

‘This volume includes the first critical essay on Marcel Duchamp’s film Anemic Cinema, the first investigation into Joseph Cornell’s filmic practices, and the first major explorations of Michael Snow. It offers an important essay on Maya Deren, whose work was central to that era of renewal and reinvention, seminal critiques of Stan Brakhage, Hollis Frampton, and Harry Smith, and overviews of Independent Cinema. Gathered here for the first time, these texts demonstrate Michelson’s pervasive influence as a writer and thinker and her role in the establishment of cinema studies as an academic field.

‘The postwar generation of Independents worked to develop radically new terms, techniques, and strategies of production and distribution. Michelson shows that the fresh new forms they created from the legacy of Modernism became the basis of new forms of spectatorship and cinematic pleasure.’ — October Books

Excerpt

from FILM AND THE RADICAL ASPIRATION

Many of our best independent film-makers, such as Kenneth Anger, Robert Breer, Peter Emmanuel Goldman, Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, are committed to an aesthetic of autonomy that by no means violates or excludes their critical view of the society in which they manage, as they can, to work.

There is, within “independent” circles another direction or style of effort which I now want to consider, as it represents a militant aspect of a radical aspiration in American film. It is postulated on a conception of film as being, in the very broadest sense, redemptive of the human condition itself. This attitude, however estimable, generates the most difficult and inhibiting contradictions for contemporary radicals. Beneath the burden of redemption, the formal integrity that safeguards that radicalism must and does, ultimately dissolve. I am referring to a cinema represented by the work of Stan Brakhage, and, to some extent, by the criticism of Jonas Mekas – who is sitting in the first row with a tape recorder. I would have wanted, of course, to screen some films or sequences to illustrate this consideration, but must content myself with some quotations from critical writings – and from Brakhage’s voluminous correspondence.

“What’s the use of cinema if man’s soul goes rotten?” says Mekas. “It is not a question of film being good or bad artistically. It is a question of… a new understanding of Life.”

Brakhage, speaking before a gathering in Berlin in December 1965 (and this passage, somewhat longer, is extracted, unlike the preceding ones, not from Film Culture, but from a report on that Berlin occasion in an article, published, according to my recollection, last year in the Village Voice).

“This camera,” said Brakhage,

I take with me everywhere now… I took it last night into East Berlin. I was, from the very entrance, in a state of terror that I had not imagined existed before. Finally, the tension mounted till I felt compelled to take an image, which is the only time when I do work, when that compulsion or need arises directly from something in living. I had nothing to work with but empty streets and a few lights, and as I worked with those, with a fast-speed color film, and I tried to make an impression of my feelings from just these lights as I was there, inside, that which was an incredible experience for me. I have always taken seeing to be anything that comes to me in the form of an image, whether it be closed-eye vision, the dots and whirls and shapes that come when the eyes are closed and that can be seen when they are open. Memory, the remembering of images or the in-gathering of light in the immediacy of the eyes opening. I took images as I could, so that it will reflect the trembling or the feeling of any part of the body; so that it is an extension, so that this becomes a thing to ingather the light… I do not know what I will need to do when I get home in editing to capture the quality of that feeling and to say something of that experience.

Now for many of us, I imagine, and particularly for those who, like myself, have been for some time concerned with contemporary painting and sculpture and the problems of critical method deriving from this development, this statement has a very familiar ring indeed – and highly problematic implications. If, for men like Anger and Breer, or for Resnais and Godard, art and the radical aspiration supply a ground for an ethos, art really does become, for Brakhage, “nothing but a construction in ethics,” and the artist a tintype of the “moral hero.” The rhetoric is that of abstract expressionism, and I dare say that the Rosenberg pages of Film Culture represent in the New York of 1966 the last precinct of the action painter’s active authority.

As a prelude to a brief consideration of the nature and consequences of this authority, here is a passage from an essay on de Kooning by Harold Rosenberg:

Since, for de Kooning, art must discover its form in the actuality of the artist’s life, it cannot impose itself upon its practitioner as other professions do upon theirs. Art becomes a way by which the artist can avoid a way…

By a mutual determination, art and the artist support each other’s openness to the multiplicity of experience. Both resist stylization and absorption into a type. The aesthetic aim to which de Kooning applied the label, “no style,” derives from and is the experience of this philosophy of art and of the self.

In conceiving of art as a way of life, de Kooning makes his engagement in his profession total in the sense of the absorption of a priest or saint in his vocation. The idea is faulty. Painting lacks the structure of values by which ethical or religious systems can sustain the individual.

This lucid expression of reserve from the theoretician of action painting with regard to an aesthetics-as-morality is not ultimately surprising; it is the inevitable recognition of the perils and limits of a certain radicalism and its rhetoric.

Here, however, are Godard’s thoughts on the matter (and we must have some day a Wit and Wisdom of J.L. Godard; he is an aphorist in the grand tradition of Chamfort): “Between aesthetics and ethics, a choice must be made, of course. However, it also goes without saying that each word contains a bit of the other.” “Trusting to luck means listening to voices.” “If the ways of art are unpredictable, this is because the ways of chance are not.” And finally, “Making films resembles modern philosophy, Husserl, let’s say… an adventure, plus the philosophy of that life, and reflecting on life.”

***

Painters, sculptors, and their critics are involved, at this very moment, in a kind of chastening reappraisal of a rhetoric that passed for the thought of action painting, in a critical surveyal of the arena whose space measures the relation of its philosophical assumptions to its metaphors. It may be premature too soon to demand from the independent or underground film-maker (confined, as he is, to an even more marginal position in society) the critical stringency now beginning to inform the reassessment of action painting and its aesthetics.

To return, briefly but more specifically, to the work and thought of Brakhage, I would argue that the notion of the camera as an extension of the body or its nervous system seems to me highly questionable, and that, ultimately it limits and violates the camera’s function. Certainly, this way of thinking calls into question the instrument’s fundamental power as expressed in the metaphor of camera as eye, a marvelous sensitive and flexible one to be sure, that supreme instrument of mediation, which is also the “mind’s eye,” whose possibilities infinitely transcend the limitations of a crude automatism. If cinema is to embody, according to this aesthetic, it does, the drama and pathos of creation itself, then one may ask whether the history of academicism in film – which, as I have already suggested, proposed the substitution of novelistic forms for the theatrical ones – is not thereby simply extended by the uncritical parody of abstract expressionist orthodoxy.

My own feeling is that the work of Resnais and Godard (to mention only artists represented at this festival) constitute renderings of the agonistic dimension which are infinitely more radical and powerful; their “statements” proclaim the recognition of the dynamics of the medium – and this in the most open and least prescriptive manner possible.

These “statements” by no means necessarily exclude the possibility of stimulus or nourishment from other, developing arts. In America, the work of Robert Breer, for example, has an immediacy produced by the elimination of narrative as plot, or plot re-conceived as pro-gress, involving a complex visual logic, high speed of images, the use of subliminal vision. All these factors articulate a cinematic aspiration toward the condition of “object” instantly apprehended, an aspiration shared by our most advanced painting today. Rather than fusing in a con-fusion, this work proposes a situation in which film and painting may converge within a tradition of formal radicalism. These films, in their intransigent autonomy, by no means excluding extra plastic resonances, but animated by a sense of structure as progress-in-time so absolute and compelling that very little else has room or time enough in which to “happen.”

The extraordinary advantage of American cinema today does lie partly in the possibilities of these convergences and cross-fertilizations. It may be that American film is unique in its access to a multiplicity of vital efforts unprecedented since the immediately post-Revolutionary situation in Russia. One thinks of its already established, though still embryonic, contacts with a new music, dance, theater, painting, and sculpture. And all these are, in turn, of course, heightened, and perhaps somewhat endangered, by a forced confrontation with technology in its most paroxysmic and pervasive form.

It is precisely at this point that one may anticipate the difficulties that may soon confront the great figures of European cinema, most particularly in France. If cinema and literature have so wonderfully nourished and sustained each other in postwar France (and this within the context of an antiliterary ontology of film), this is, I believe, in so far as they were both involved in a refining of their respective ontologies: The Robbe-Grillet-Resnais collaboration is, of course, a supreme instance of this kind of intimacy of independent forces.

Interestingly enough, however – and disquietingly so, too – the extra-cinematic, the intellectual context of French film has been (with the exception of Resnais and Bresson) and continues to be, almost exclusively those of Romanticism and Surrealism. In the entire corpus of postwar film, I would cite offhand only four examples of the really significantly composed musical or sound track, and this during France’s remarkable post-Webernian renewal of music: Michel Fano’s serially composed soundtrack for L’immortelle, Henze’s score for Muriel, Barbaud’s interestingly conceived, though questionable, score for Varda’s Les créatures, and above all the utterly remarkable spoken soundtrack of Jacques Tati’s Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot – certainly, the most deeply Webernian of all in its exquisite economy, in its inventive use of silence!

In our country, the questioning of the values of formal autonomy has led to an attempted dissolution of distinctions or barriers between media. Perhaps, however, this is because our social and economic hierarchies and distinctions remain pretty well impervious to the radical aspiration of film-makers and of artists in general. The hierarchical distinctions, the barriers between forms are, of course, infinitely more vulnerable. Cinema, on the verge of winning the battle for the recognition of its specificity – and every major film-maker and critic the last half-century has fought that battle – is now engaged in a reconsideration of its aims. The Victor now questions his Victory. The emergence of new “intermedia,” the revival of the old dream of synaesthesia, the cross-fertilization of dance, theater, and film, as in the theater pieces of Robert Whiteman, the work of Ken Dewey (and both are, significantly, represented in this year’s festival) constitute a syndrome of that radicalism’s crisis, both formal and social.

In a country whose power and affluence are maintained by the dialectic of a war economy, in a country whose dream of revolution has been sublimated in reformism and frustrated by an equivocal prosperity, cinematic radicalism is condemned to a politics and strategy of social and aesthetic subversion.

“To live,” as Webern, quoting Hölderlin, said, “is to defend a form.” It is from the strength of its forms that cinema’s essential power of negation, its “liquidation of traditional elements in our culture,” as Benjamin put it, will derive and sustain its cathartic power.

Within the structure of our culture, ten-year-olds are now filming 8mm serials – mostly science fiction, I am told – in their own backyards. This, perhaps is the single most interesting fact about cinema. Given this new accessibility of the medium, anything can happen. Astruc’s dream of the camera as fountain pen is transcended, the camera becomes a toy, and the element of play is restored to cinematic enterprise. One thinks of Méliès, both Child and Father of cinema, and one rejoices in the promise of his reincarnation in the generation of little Americans making science-fiction films after school in those backyards. Here, I do believe, lies the excitement of cinema’s future, its ultimate radical potential. And as André Breton, now a venerable radical, has said, “The work of art is valid if, and only if, it is aquiver with a sense of the future.”

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Right, it’s October now. What took it so long? I’m going to ask Gisele if she still has that BJD and a pic of it if so. I would think maybe. It might be a little worse for wear. Nuit Blanche was funnish. Not as much as I’d hoped, but there were a few cool, trippy things here and there. Love did his best under the circumstances. How was your weekend? Eek, an insect protein bar? Have you actually eaten one? I think I’d rather die, or, well, do almost anything else. In theory. But I do hope it sped love up. Love making the price of round trip flights from Paris -> Los Angeles drop very dramatically, G. ** Tea, Hi. My blog is often too cool even for me, if that helps. I totally get the pescetarian option, but I always hated eating fish and refused to eat it even when I was a little kid. I’m not sure why. You can be vegan without too much expense if you always eat at home and are okay with very basic meals, which I luckily am. Oh, right, macarons are doable for you. That’s not bad. I’m tempted to guess what your other two wishes are, but I won’t, ha ha. ** Jack Skelley, Jock!!! My pleasure, and thanks for alerting her. I hope she didn’t mind or think I short-shrifted (sp?) her or something. How was Autofiction Night? What’s with Stories and Autofiction? Is it Autofiction Month or something? Did your Disney thing go down a storm? A post on Ahegao! Okay, that’s a pretty great idea that I had never begun to think of. Wow. Consider it seriously attempted ASAP. Mega-week! ** Ian, Hey there, Ian. Very happy to hear about your life’s peachiness! Certainly well deserved. Mine’s sort of lemony. But I like lemons. I’ve never heard of the novel ‘Cialis, Verdi, Gin, Jag’, but I will investigate it post-haste. The name alone is Sirenic, much less with your rec. Thanks! Anytime on the guest post, thank you! I hope your book’s delay isn’t too delayed. Happy Monday. ** Kyler, Hi, Kyler, old pal. I tend to stay away from TV series in general. I fear time suckage. And I am a wee bit post-Dahmer interest, but of course I will check it out at some point. It seems to be quite the social media obsession, which is interesting. I hope Halloween has begun and is proceeding well in your neck. xo ** h now j, Hi! Will do re: possible extended LA dates. Huntington Gardens is always a treat. George Miles lived/grew up about four blocks from it. Your new pad sounds really, really nice. Congrats. Not an easy thing to find a dreamy place in your area. Cool. Yes, ‘Crowd’ is playing at BAM quite soon, in fact. Also in Montreal. A little US tour thing. Hugs from me and Paris! ** Adrian Hall, Hi, Adrian. Really nice to see you. Thanks for the correction. I haven’t seen ‘Naimi’, but I will now, thanks to you. I hope everything is extraordinary well with you! ** Bill, My great pleasure, natch. I know nothing about that film or Johannes Grenzfurthner, which seems like a wound in my knowledge. Huh. I’ll check it/him out, maybe make a post if there’s enough re: his stuff. That’s always the best way for me to get know an artist. Happy week ahead! ** Russ Healy, Hi, Russ. Welcome back. That conference certainly sounds valuable. Thank you so much for the very kind words about ‘I Wished’. Oh, you know, my therapy bout was very helpful and really did make a big difference. My therapist meant well. I could see her point, I just didn’t want to see it at the time. And it left George roiling in my head, which ultimately was for the best, I guess. But thank you for the commiseration, and I do feel myself wishing you’d been in her chair. Anarcho-therapist, nice. Very, very interesting to think about. I do think anarchism can encompass every aspect of life really well. I, of course, relate to what you say about attachment <-> autonomy. I find it totally possible, if, you know, confusing sometimes. But I do believe confusion is the truth, so that helps. With luck, October will in fact be pretty productive on my end since the plan is really get Zac’s and my new film organised and ready. Not to mention all the haunted house attractions I intend to traverse. Yours too: busy, good October. Thanks for the ‘MD’ tip. Will do. Take good care. ** Steve Erickson, That would seem to be the case. Look forward to your NYFF overview. Everyone, Here’s Mr. Erickson’s New York Film Festival overview for Gay City News for your delectation. ** _Black_Acrylic, Feeling better and in better spirits is plenty to report. That’s core stuff. I am somewhat aware of Truss’s horrors, yes, and, oh shit, of course her crap might affect your flat purchase, fucking hell. Man, what a fucking labyrinth you’re in. I hope, I hope whoever’s in charge of handing your new place over to you is as unswayed by the current mess as possible. ** Jamie, Hey, Jamie. My weekend was alright. Nuit Blanche happened, and it had its fun aspects. And a bunch of film stuff that I won’t bore you with but all of which seemed fairly positive. Yeah, things are looking better. Really looking forward to getting to LA where we can finally get things moving and in place. What’s wise, vis-a-vis writing, in my opinion, is to chase what you’re inspired and excited to chase, and pre-set plans or directions that seemed logical should be the first thing to go if need be. So, yeah, head into the draft if that seems both pleasurable and triggering in the good way. How’s that working out? I hope your Monday has exceptional production design. Love from a light saber, moi. ** Misanthrope, It’s good to get slammed on occasion. Oh, wait you meant with work. Never mind, ha ha. Fingers massively crossed about your mom’s test. Oh, right, the hurricane. I’m glad it’s only being palsy-walsy. I have no interest in seeing that movie. Sorry for the sacrilege, but I’ve already seen enough of Harry Styles to last me a lifetime. Ive just finished setting up an LLC, and that was taxing and expensive enough. ** Robert, Howdy, Robert. I can sort of imagine, I guess, and yes, when I do, my imagination feels really weird. Ha ha, funny/scary: that wifebeater dude. My dad used to always say things like ‘my Jewish friend’ or ‘this Jewish woman’ or ‘the Jewish guy who works at the bank’, etc. He never pre-identified people of other ethnicities that way. It always struck me as extremely peculiar. No irreverence, no. English translations of Japanese movies or, well, Japanese a lot of things are often hilariously weird. I assume that’s on purpose, but I don’t know. I’ve been good, really busy getting ready to make Zac’s and my new film mostly. And enjoying the fall. Fall suits Paris. But then every season does. That’s interesting that therapy might have poisoned your writing. What kind of therapy was it? Mine was a kind of super mellow type. Maybe it was called ‘object-relations’ therapy? I can’t remember. It didn’t really effect my writing, I don’t think? I’ve never actually thought about it, though. Huh. What’s up with you at the moment and/or this week? ** Okay. I thought the blog would take a little break from Halloween today to concentrate on this inspiring book by the late great writer/thinker Annette Michelson, who you may or may not know? See you tomorrow.

* (Halloween countdown post #8)

 

‘Hisayasu Satō is a Japanese exploitation film director. He has worked prolifically in the genre of pinku eiga films, which refers to Japanese films that prominently feature nudity or sexual content. His best-known works are the 1992 pink film The Bedroom and the 1996 V-Cinema splatter film Splatter: Naked Blood. He is known for his “sledgehammer” filmmaking style, and using his exploitation career to tackle serious subjects like obsession, alienation, perversion and voyeurism.

‘Satō is a very prolific director, having directed about two dozen films in 1988 and 1989. To date, he has directed more than fifty films dealing with eroticism, sadism, and horror among the lower classes of Japan. He is famous for his “guerilla shooting technique” in which his actors appear on location in public and incorporate unknowing bystanders into the film. One notorious example of this technique can be seen in Widow’s Perverted Hell (1991) in which the lead actress, nude and bound in S&M gear, appears in a busy downtown location and begs confused passers-by to help her masturbate. Allmovie comments, “Like Divine’s memorable strut through the streets of Baltimore in Pink Flamingos, this scene was shot guerrilla-style, with no planning, and some of the reactions from unsuspecting pedestrians are priceless. Intended as a dark meditation on the unhinging effects of grief, the mondo aspects of its climactic scene makes the rather lackluster Mibojin Hentai Jigoku worth seeing.”

‘Satō’s 1987 film Temptation of the Mask was important for several reasons. One of the first gay films produced by a major pink film director, the film also brought together three members of the shitenno for the first time. Takahisa Zeze worked as Satō’s assistant director for the film, and through him began hiring future-director Kazuhiro Sano as an actor in his films. Zeze later recalled, “I remember once there was a gay pink film, and Satō wanted to use Sano, so I was the go-between and negotiated with him to appear in it. That’s how we all started working together.”

‘Satō’s second gay-themed film was Muscle, also known as Mad Ballroom Gala (1988), a tribute to Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini. For this film, Satō was awarded the grand prize at the Berlin Gay and Lesbian Festival in 1993. From this and later films like Hunters’ Sense of Touch (1995), Satō has gained a reputation as one of the few directors who can competently alternate between gay and heterosexual-themed pink films.

‘Satō’s 1990 film, Horse and Woman and Dog, another film featuring Kazuhiro Sano, became a success due to its scandalous scenes involving bestiality between the three characters in the film’s title. Another controversial, but highly regarded film from Satō is Promiscuous Wife: Disgraceful Torture (1992), for which the director hired the Paris cannibal, Issei Sagawa (aka Kazumasa Sagawa) to appear in a cameo role.

‘Famed for the offensiveness of his films, Lolita: Vibrator Torture (1987), dealing with a homeless man who rapes and murders women, is often singled out as Satō’s most repulsive film. In his later works, Satō has collaborated with the female pink film writer, Kyoko Godai. While the violence in his films has sometimes been less extreme since this collaboration, the Weissers, in their Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: The Sex Films call Godai and Satō’s work on Uniform Punishment: Square Peg in Round Hole! (1991) “Perhaps the most mean-spirited satire on film.”. The film deals with a religious cult who worships a maniacal young woman who spends her nights hunting the city for people to rape and kill with the help of a male slave. Allmovie judges the film a “perversely entertaining jet-black satire” and a “dark but highly watchable softcore effort.”

‘Yoshiyuki Hayashida, editor of P*G magazine—currently the leading journal on pink film—and founder of the Pink Grand Prix, became a fan of Satō’s work and wrote a script using many of Satō’s major themes. Satō filmed the script as Uniform Masturbation: Virgin’s Underpanties (1992). Though Satō’s style seems to have softened somewhat as the 1990s progressed, he was still capable of producing such works as Splatter: Naked Blood (1996), which, Allmovie warns, “contains one of the most appalling scenes in Japanese horror, with a young woman mutilating and eating her own body.”‘ — collaged

 

___
Stills

 

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Further

Hisayasu Satô @ IMDb
HS @ Letterboxd
HS @ Facebook
CHALLENGE FOR HISAYASU SATO’S THE BEDROOM
‘Pink Devil’ HISAYASU SATO talks about his irrepressible desires
INTERVIEW WITH HISAYASU SATO
The Hisayasu Sato thread

 

_____
Extras

Interview Hisayasu Sato

Hisayasu Sato on “The Bedroom”

 

______
Interview
by Nakashima Yasushi

 

Q: In order to make a living, do pink film directors have to shoot as many films as possible in a short period?
A: Yes, but pink films aren’t always profitable and you sometimes end up bearing some of the loss. It’s a very hard industry. The budget is always small from the beggining, but when shooting starts it’s hard to keep it as low as the producer wants. Because you want to make a good film, so the spending rises.

Q: So if you keep costs low then your fee will automatically be higher?
A: Yes, I guess so.

Q: But I guess it’s difficult to work in that way… Is it the same for actors and actresses?
A: (Laughs) I don’t tend do ask what they do, but I’d guess most have a second job. For actresses when they’re young, they get offered many projects but as they get older, roles for them in pink films become less and less. Up to a certain age they might be able to make a living from it. But you can be young or old, a man or a woman, it’s hard to make a living out of it without some kind of a second job.

Q: Adult video is another thing they try, I guess?
A: Well, I suppose, but it depends on how the AV industry is doing.

Q: Is there much difference (between Pink and Adult Video) ?
A: I suppose the main difference would have to be the subject matter.

Q: Is working in pink films just like studying at film school, where you learn new technical skills?
A: (Laughs) At the time, it was very difficult to become a director, after having only three years of assistant director experience. I was 25 years old when I became a director, and it was almost impossible to have such an opportunity elsewhere. It’s different now as many young people do good work in the TV film industry, but that’s how it was for me at the time.

Q: I guess it’s difficult to get into film…
A: Yes, that’s right.

Q: What do you think the biggest differences are between Japan and the West in understanding your films?
A: Well, how can i put it? As regards to my own films, because i’ve been influenced by western culture since i was a child, you’d think my films would be rather westernized. But when I make a film, my origins are clearly projected on the film and it seems obvious. At the end of the day, I’m japanese, and I think that’s something unexplainable very deep in my soul. For example, the coolness and brutality you sometimes see in my films are things I don’t think about all the time but it’s naturally portrayed in my films. If I and a western director were both given the same screenplay, the two films that we’d both make would probably be very different. And that’s something very difficult to analyze and explain.

Q: …
A: Japan is turning towards individualism more and more thanks to western influences. It used to be as if you would open a door to a big room and your parents and grandparents would be there in the family environment, but now they’re in small private rooms and society has become rather twisted. Japanese people are known for liking to be in a group, such as when they go abroad. So it seems that even now, although we all have small private spaces we still like to feel that we belong to a group and experiencing human contact. That’s why you hear of young kids creating a fictional family or friends in their own fantasy world that they can control through their computer. I think it’s very unnatural behaviour.

Q: So you think it’s rather twisted when kids rely on fictional families?
A: I see a very strange world full of twisted and selfish emotions. Kids decide how to perceive reality on their own.

Q: How did you come to make “Survey Map of a Paradise Lost”?
A: I was asked to shoot a film that used an eavesdropper as a subject and I saw Francis Ford Coppola’s film… what was the title?

Q: “The Conversation”?
A: Yes, “The Conversation”. I like that film. At that time, there was a story on the news that a member of staff at NTT (Telecom) had been exposed as an eavesdropper and I thought that it wasn’t really suited to be an regular entertainment film, so I decided to make into a pink film by using the incident at NTT and I expanded the story into a complete fiction.

Q: In the film, you used NDT instead of NTT.
A: Yes, I changed the name.

Q: But it’s quite obvious, isn’t it?
A: (Laughs) Yes, it is!

Q: So you used the social conditions of the time as a motif.
A: That’s right. And I’d always been intrested in the subject of eavesdropping. I think there’s a kind of thrill in secretly listening in to someone else’s conversation using electronic waves. And if you take it a stage further, it’s like you’re invanding someone’s mind, almost like telepathy. It’s almost a realization that people have two faces. They might be wearing a smile on the outside but you can see they probably aren’t smiling on the inside. And you see the two faces that human beings have. That’s what i wanted to portray.

Q: Talking about the actors. How about Ms. Ito?
A: Yes, Kiyomi Ito…

Q: Kiyomi Ito seems to be the heroine of your films at that time.
A: Yes, she’s been the heroine since i shot my debut film. She’s actually the same age as me.

Q: Is she the best actress that you’ve used?
A: The best actress? I guess so. Well, she’s not the sexiest actress, and she’s very short. So, I didn’t like to use her because she is sexy, but because she has individuality and a strong personality. She’s very different to others from the mainstream. She’s good at bridging the gap between herself and the mainstream.

Q: So you like her expressive qualities?
A: Not only that, but also her way of thinking and personality. Technically, she isn’t the best actress or anything, but she adds something extra to what i wanted to portray. She enhances the atmosphere. She breaths life into a film as if she’s dancing. I’m not saying she actually dances, though (Laughs).

Q: She adds meaning to your vision?
A: Yes, that’s right. She understands what i want to portray very well. So I cast her as a leading character in many of my films.

Q: I couldn’t find much for Kiyomi Ito’s personal profile, but it is right that she started working on original video?
A: Video.. well I think she was doing many things. But originally she belonged to a theater company and worked in the costume department. And I believe she was doing that sort of video work as well as film work as part-time jobs in order to make a living. I guess she was about 22 years old when she started pink movies. I first met her at an interview when I was an assistant director.

Q: I see. You were a interviewer then?
A: Well, I had to do casting as well and that’s how I met her. I saw this dull quiet-looking girl walk into the cafe we were casting in. And she said “good-afternoon” in a very soft voice. We were looking for an actress for a comedy, so we thought she wasn’t suitable at all. But we used her for SM films a couple of times and that’s how we started working together. A director called Umezawa, who’s dead now, directed those. Anyway, she’s been in so many films. I guess she was in around 100 films a year. Now she owns a hostess club in Golden Town.

Q: So most of the actors have come from some kind of acting background?
A: Well, some of them are from theater and others are from Adult Video. We get different types of people all the time. We sometimes get actors from drama school. Actor’s backgrounds are getting broader and broader nowadays.

Q:…
A: I just remembered about Rio Yamagawa. “Survey Map of a Paradise Lost” was her last film. She didn’t even turn up for the post-recording.

Q: Is that so?
A: Yes! (Laughs) Perhaps I shouldn’t have tell you this.

Q: So, it’s not her voice?
A: No, it’s Kyoko Hashimoto’s. Do you know her?

Q: Do you mean…?
A: Yes, Yes. I think she was the most popular pink actress at the time. We asked her to do the job on the day of post-recording. So it ended up being a better film.

Q: There’s a scene on the top of a building.
A: Wait a second. Do you mean the last scene?

Q: I think it was in the middle of the film…
A: Ah.. I think it was the scene I shot in New State Mega

Q: It’s when they’re talking about Yukiko Okada commiting suicide.
A: Yes, Yes! She’s talking about the lunchbox shop. Yes, I remember now.

Q: After that scene, she’s wearing red clothes, and the scene is shot with a kind of blue effect.
A: I got you. Yes I remember. That was the top of our production company’s building. It was called New State Mega. At the time, we used that location quite a lot.

Q: So, it’s Rio Yamagawa in the film, but it’s Kyoko Hashimoto’s voice?
A: That’s right. I spoke to Rio the day before and told her what time the post-recording session would be. But she didn’t showed up for recording. A couple of months later, I was reading a magazine and saw a face that was very familiar. She looked like Rio but her eyes were different. She’d had cosmetic surgery and went into Adult Video under a new name.

Q: So it was her re-debut?
A: That’s right. She had a very strong personality, but she was originally from Northern Japan. And she had a very strong accent. But Kyoko Hashimoto came in and voiced her character in the film. So everything turned out okay.

Q: So, when you shot “Survey Map of a Paradise Lost” did you complete it within four days?
A: Well, I’m not sure if we finished everything within four days. It might’ve taken five days to finish everything. We normally use twenty reels of film with one reel containing about 400 feet. So in total it’s around 80 minutes and the finished film should be an hour. And there’s unused film between takes that we have to cut. Anyway, the editing process takes around a day to complete. We edit it to a rough version and then we start to tweak it. After that we move onto post-recording. And as we’re doing that we’re still tweaking one or two bits, but we do that in one day too. We work in a studio to create any necessary sound effects such as the incidental noises that aren’t picked up during filming. Then we spend a day on dubbing. We call it MA. That’s how we complete a film. Because we used quite a lot of video shots it took a comparatively long time to edit the footage into a film. There were times when we couldn’t find the necessary footage and realized that we’d shot over the scene and deleted it. (Laughs) So we do sometimes have this kind of trouble. That’s what caused us to delay the completion of the film. Also when we get into a shoot, there’s a strange atmoshphere. I tend to become absorbed in the process and it’s hard to maintain a normal mentality in such an environment. I got very excited and the tension is very high. I forget the time and I don’t get tired even if it turns into a night shot. It doesn’t seem to matter. My mind is fully awake. Not only with “Survey Map”, being on location is always exciting, it’s just like being in a film itself. I got very emotional.

Q:…
A: I think it was this film… Sorry my memory is not that good. Anyway in the film, Kiyomi Ito’s character has an itchy skin condition that she has to scratch. So she can’t have normal sex with her husband, and he has to apply a lot of lotion to her and chill her skin during intercourse. So that portrayed a kind of itchiness, which is accompained by pain. In Japan, people call sex scenes, “a wet place”. So we tend to think of wet skin as being very erotic. So when I shoot a sex scene, I tend to consciously use wetness. I like using a mucous membrane or imagine sex in amniotic fluid. For this film, I wanted to look at things from a different perspective and decided to use a slightly different visual expression using such scenes.

Q: I guess you needed a lot of effort to make that happen…
A: Yes, It’s like I said earlier about eavesdropping, trying to get into other people’s emotions of what they are thinking deep down. I wanted to portray communication, not just linguistic communication, but communication through human senses. But communication through the body inevitably distorts the messages. But their desire to share something with someone drives them mad. Then their sense of touch becomes dysfunctional. Then we realize how vulnerable the human senses are. Well, that was the kind of thing i was thinking when i made this movie. I think human beings are leading a more and more twisted existence. For example, you hear that because of poor construction standards, we’re actually unconsciously inhaling harmful substances such as asbestos. When talking about our culture, we’re becoming somewhat disabled. Because of all the problems that you hear about nowadays and looking at our current society, I can’t help think there is a link.

Q: So the electric shocks you used are a way of communicating?
A: Oh, well yes. They are. A lot of time in my films, the theme or subject I use is carried across from the other films. In my film, “Abnormal Ingyaku” (Re-Wind, 1988), I wanted to portray a reality that only exists in the film. And with “Survey Map” I explored the relationship between man and machine. I think i wanted to portray a human being replaced by some sort of eavesdropping device or a person that has become a kind of telephone receiver.

Q: A human as a machine.
A: Yes, just like a machine. The communication between the a receiver and a transmitter represents human communication.

Q: They’re human, but not totally.
A: Right.

Q: “In Survey Map”, Rio Yamagawa plays a girl called Midori. Do you think Midori was the victim, or was she the assailant?
A: Such a difficult question (Laughs).

Q: She was trying to trick Kihara but at the same time she was also being abused by him.
A: But human beings are victims and assailants at the same time. That’s how our existence works in everyday life. We use a lot of metaphor to portray reality. So I’m not interested in categorizing individuals as just victims or assailants.

Q: So she can be both?
A: Yes. And she flips from one to the other. Even more if she’s a teenager, because teenage years are a very sensitive period and teenagers can experience two very opposite worlds. Midori’s a sensitive girl, but she can’t yet fully understand what she really is. And she can’t controll her emotions. I’m interested in that kind of mentality. A personality that is totally fluid. She’s sensitive but at the same time possesses cruelty. As if she’s carrying a concealed knife.

Q: Is it more evident because she’s a girl?
A: When she’s thinking of death, she’s kind of in a fantasy world but ends up mixing this world with reality and committing a crime.

Q: Is “Survey Map” a film that portrays hatred towards women?
A: I think the film portrays respect towards women! (Laughs) I adore the fact that women can possess a kind of poison. The side they think is in their womb. It’s something very mysterious that, as man, I can’t understand. Only the actresses in the film can do this and add a delicacy and a sensivity so I have to entrust it to them.

Q:…
A: We talked about the electric cable scene earlier. Anyway, that’s their way of feeling their nature as women and making it tangible. I’m not talking about the pain, it’s more of an exchange of love for them. It’s not abuse; it’s something mutual between men and women. Because she wants to understand a deeper side of her man, she uses her body to communicate. And the pain isn’t something important to her and she wants to tap into the emotions and minds of men. If I call it love, it might sound too much but she does that because she wants to penetrate into men’s emotions.

Q: So it’s not hatred.
A: No, it’s not.

Q: You were saying that it’s one way that love can be expressed. And you’re not wishing to humiliate women.
A: I used this kind of expression in the film but actually some of my films use a completly opposite portrayal. One of my films is about the lives of gay men and that film has the same theme but portrays things in an opposite way. But i can’t deny that is much easier and more effective to portray this theme using a female body.

Q: Out of all your films, how would you rank “Survey Map”?
A: It’s one of my favorites. The films i shot from 1988 to 1989 are probably my best films. I managed to shoot the films I wanted to in that period. I think i shot around five or six films that year. But I managed to shoot what i wanted for all the films.

Q: So, they are your greatest films.
A: (Laughs) Greatest films! You can say that!

Q: In any case, your best films
A: Yes, I suppose.

Q: Thinking about how society was at that time was there anything that consciously affected you?
A: Well, it was just before the crash of the bubble economy. Everyone seemed to be weak and idolizing money. But my life was very hard. So there was this massive gap between society in a bubble economy and myself trying to shoot pink films. And I asked myself: “Has something gonw wrong?”

Q: So the feelings you had led you to shoot these kind of films?
A: Yes, I suppose so.

 

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16 of Hisayasu Sato’s 63 films

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Wife Collector (1985)
‘Anyone not familiar with Hisayasu Sato’s work should be advised that his films are not for the timid or faint of heart. Wife Collector is no different as it explores the sexual perversions and taboos which many people are too frightened or timid to explore. The narrative follows a voyeuristic taxi driver who takes advantage of un-expecting woman who enter his cab. He films his victims, adding to his massive video cassette collection of his forced upon sexual conquests. The other half of the narrative follows a young woman, who after getting raped, finds that her normal sex life lacks excitement. Of course, these two character’s lives intersect, as their sexual perversions match-up.’ — Rowe Reviews

Watch the entirety here

 

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Uniform Virgin: The Prey (1986)
‘A viciously sadistic tale of an orgy of rape and violence in a Japanese high school.’ — MUBI

Trailer

 

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Gimme Shelter (1986)
‘Director Hisayasu Sato has the rind cracking again in one of his better movies, a brutally satiric expose of a morbidly dysfunctional Japanese family, highlighting a gross and perverted edge that hews closely with the format of many of his sex-themed melodramas. However gloomy and grim, GIMME SHELTER actually succeeds as a comedy, albeit one filled with too many moral border crossings to count.’ — jfrentzen

Excerpt

 

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Temptation of the Mask (1987)
‘Satō’s 1987 film Temptation of the Mask was important for several reasons. One of the first gay films produced by a major pink film director, the film also brought together three members of the shitenno for the first time. Takahisa Zeze worked as Satō’s assistant director for the film, and through him began hiring future-director Kazuhiro Sano as an actor in his films. Zeze later recalled, “I remember once there was a gay pink film, and Satō wanted to use Sano, so I was the go-between and negotiated with him to appear in it. That’s how we all started working together.”‘ — Wikipedia

Watch the entirety here

 

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Rape Climax (1987)
‘Hisayasu Sato helmed this peculiar tale about a woman known as Locker Baby because she was left in a bus station locker as an infant. Locker Baby is raped by a man clad in black leather, traumatizing her still further, and driving her to sensory-deprivation therapy.’ — MUBI

Excerpt

 

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Celluloid Nightmares (1988)
‘A gruesome snuff video is found in a sex booth. It shows a young woman who is tortured, killed, and dismembered by an unknown sadist. The deadly blade is hidden inside the camera itself. Hisayasu Sato’s regular Kiyomi Ito begins to investigate the videotape.’ — Letterboxd

the entirety

 

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Survey Map Of A Paradise Lost (1988)
‘One of the infamous “Four Devils” of the Japanese pink movie scene, Hisayasu Sato delivers an original and thrilling whodunit that moves through the layers of reality. Reporter Nukada’s next big assignment is the secret world of Japanese phone sex clubs. He gets in touch with Midori, a part-time employee at the Banana Club, but is startled to hear she’s been implicated in the bloody death of a client with perverted tastes, Kihara. Sensing a bigger story, Nukada uncovers a link between Midori and the late Kihara’s wife and realizes that the situation is much more complex than he imagined. And in this world of blood-play and electro-sex, the biggest shock has yet to be announced…’ — archive.org

the entirety

 

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Muscle (1989)
‘The film is centered around Ryuzaki, an editor of Muscle Magazine. On his latest assignment, Ryuzaki attends an experimental play, where he first notices Kitami. Infatuated by Kitami, the two begin a passionate relationship that starts off tender but soon enough Kitami’s more sadistic tendencies come to the surface. Sadomasochistic games become the norm, and during one particular passionate excursion involving knives, Ryuzaki cuts off Kitami’s arm. Jump forward a year we find Ryuzaki being released from jail, setting out on a journey to find Kitami, the man Ryuzaki has fallen deeply in love with. Hisayasu Sato’s Muscle is a film about the darker aspects of love, passion, and obsession, with Ryuzaki being a man who becomes infatuated with Kitami after experiencing such passionate pleasure. Shot with an oppressive sense of depth and color, Muscle feels almost like a nightmare, as Ryuzaki searches far and wide for Kitami, visiting every sex club and back alley possible.’ — Rowe Reviews

Watch the entirety here

 

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The Gods Have a Nervous Breakdown (1990)
‘Lesbian-themed tale of a schoolgirl who entices her gullible female teacher by positing that they are predestined to dance together on the day the world ends.’ — MUBI

Excerpt

 

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The Bedroom (1992)
‘A sordid sex club provides the setting for director Sato Hisayasu’s lurid tale of lust, murder, and drugs in underground Tokyo. As with many of the other hostesses at “The Bedroom,” Kyoko indulges in the powerful hallucinogenic “hallusion” as a means of taking herself out of her bleak surroundings while various men pay a hefty fee to have their way with her. When the horribly mutilated bodies turn up indicating that a maniac is on the loose, Kyoko suspects her lover Kei may be the man responsible for the unthinkable crimes. Little does Kyoko realize that the truth is far more disturbing than she could ever imagine.’ — rarefilmm

the entirety

 

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Love – Zero = Infinity (1994)
‘Takeshi, an alienated young man spends his lonely days obsessively following total strangers. He is employed to observe the movements of a beautiful but disturbed doctor, whose behavior is causing concern. As Takeshi continues to track her, a bond begins to grow between them, a bond which can only end in tragedy…’ — Letterboxd

Excerpt

 

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‎Rafureshia (1995)
‘Rafureshia only reaches about 63 minutes in length, but the hour-and-change run time is absolutely packed with entertaining depravity. This film opens with incest, closes with an on-the-road orgy, and everything in between manages to tingle the erogenous zones while simultaneously provoking cringes. That might be a rare feat when discussing another filmmaker, but we’re talking about a Hisayasu Sato movie, so that is pretty much par for the course. This one really has a little bit of everything: a metric ton of nudity, pixelated blow jobs, a plethora of incest, pleasurable (?) rape, amnesiac transvestites, close-up shots of tongue kissing lesbians, sword fights, psychic advice, Cinderella-style searches, a madam receiving cunnilingus while watching a woman attack a man dressed as a baby with a chainsaw…and that’s not even half the story!’ — Horror News

Excerpt

 

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Splatter: Naked Blood (1996)
‘Hisayasu Sato’s 1996 film has been long revered and condemned as one of those disturbing, disgusting and not worthy of commentary films for an exceptionally long time. However, upon closer inspection of Splatter: Naked Blood it is clear to see that Sato explores male vulnerability and the perception that young men must follow in their father’s footsteps in order to make headway in the world and be seen as ‘the man’ of the family. This tradition is not only a concept in Japanese culture, but across the world there is a predetermined conception that young men in families should be the ones that ‘replace’ their father if the man is not present or is eradicated due to uncontrollable circumstances. But within this causes a problematic trope, one that leads these young men to self-sabotage and a disturbing incestous protection for their mothers or female siblings. Which in Splatter: Naked Blood becomes the unbreaking and devastation of Eiji, destroyed by his own shortcomings.’ — Zobo with a Shotgun

the entirety

 

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Love & Loathing & Lulu & Ayano (2010)
‘Based on a book of interviews with porn film day players, this exuberant, anime-influenced movie about life on the bottom rungs of the adult film business focuses on a young girl who finds life in the porno business is a chance for her to escape her humdrum, everyday existence. Now, if she can keep her double identity safe from a veteran (and jealous) actress and a creepy stalker… Love and Loathing and Lulu and Ayano is a tweaked out, anime-esque trip down the porno rabbit hole where the worst thing you can do isn’t a gangbang video, it’s to be unprofessional.’ — filmlinc

Trailer

 

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Hana-Dama: Phantom (2016)
‘”HANA-­-DAMA” is a flower which blooms in a wildness, and the symbol of the mundane world. People explode their desire and lose their rationality when it blooms.’ — Cinando

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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The Eye’s Dream (2016)
‘Hisayasu Sato directs a paranoid film where the borders between fantasy and reality are very thin, and is filled with abnormal eroticism and sadism, that seems to draw much from George Battaille’s “Story of the Eye,” as, for example, regarding the use of eye bulbs during the sex scenes. Apart from that, the film is filled with lengthy, steamy, and occasionally abnormal sex scenes and gore, which is usually turned towards people’s eyes, not to mention phrases like “Raping you was so spectacular” and “Let me lick your eyeball.”’ — Asian Movie Pulse

Trailer

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Tea, Hi. Busy and weird, I get that. Oh, the guys I post at the end of the month are slaves looking for masters, not escorts. Escorts are in mid-month. So, yeah, the late month guys tend to be much harder core and they don’t charge to do it. I’m kind of monomaniacal too, but I guess I figured out a way to sort regulate it or mostly, ha ha. Yes, I slide between vegetarian and vegan. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 15 years old, so it’s sort of lifelong. It’s second nature. I’ve always had weirdly good health, and I assume that’s maybe one of the reasons. As you no doubt know, vegan pastries have become a thing, but actually delicious vegan pastries are much, much less of a thing unfortunately, as you probably know as well. Anything on your weekend’s agenda that you’re especially drooling about? ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Oh, yes, indeed. I meant to say two of his gay films. The others don’t seem to be viewable unless I missed something in my searching. I’m also a real fan of Joao Pedro Rodrigues, but, yeah, I thought ‘Will-o’-the-Wisp’ was very thin and kind of nothing. Curious to hear about the Bonello. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes, his face would have been a nice bonus. Oh, hm, my favorite … maybe ForNecroHeadfuckers for some reason, probably just because long hair is one of my Achilles Heels. Gisele has a ball-jointed doll, or she used to. Life size, and I think she made it herself. It was in one of her early theater pieces before I started working with her. Love definitely know the magic words there. I’m putty in his … hands. Today love has the simple task of making Nuit Blanche, which is happening tonight in Paris, fun for the first time in at least six years, and it looks from the program like it actually could be even without his assistance, so hopefully that’s not asking too much, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Oh, Ben, that so sucks, I’m so sorry, my friend. But I’m very relieved that you’re back in Hub. What a fucking incompetent mess! Jesus! I hope you’re internally overflowing with all the liquids possible now. Football had better be very, very good to this weekend, that’s all I have to say. Love to you, pal. ** Bill, Hi. I do think there are probably masters who prefer narratively meaty slaves over blank slates. I don’t know Richard Burner at all. I’ll check that out. Thanks, man. Any weekend doings of note? ** Nick Toti, Hey, Nick! I’ve been meaning to write to you. Things have just gotten a little heavy-busy with the film organising, but, yeah, Zac and I want to talk with you about your proposal, by Zoom or when in LA, where we’ll be starting in the next couple of weeks. I’ll get in touch. Amazing publishing project! Wow! Let me psass it along in hopes that helps. Everyone, The fine, fine filmmaker and artist Nick Toti has started a project you should know about and which you could help if you’re able to and feel like it. Here he is to explain: ‘My wife and I have started a small press called DieDieBooks. We’ve now officially launched and announced our first five books. Each book is on a different horror movie, written by a different author. The approach to each book is unique and a reflection of its author’s idiosyncratic perspective, i.e., more personal than strictly academic, but still heavily researched. We’re raising money to get the books printed, and we plan to ship them out throughout the next year as they are finalized. If anyone is interested in contributing/pre-ordering copies, here is the link to the campaign.’ Please chip in if you can, everybody, thanks! ** Paul Curran, Ha ha, weird to be called Denny by a non-family member, but since it’s you, and you’re family in some odd, inexplicable way, gosh, and ‘great’ back to you, Pauly. 15, wow. That’s crazy. From everything you’ve shared, he does seem to be rockin’ the teen years. Thanks, Paul! An ace weekend to ya! ** h now j, Hi! I swear by optimism, and I’ve needed it very sorely in recent times, and, hey, there’s still a smile on my face. I think I’ll just miss you in LA. Zac and I are planning to be there starting in the next couple of weeks. The flight fees are murder right now, wow, but we need to go. I think I’ll be back in Paris before the 10th. If not, I’ll let you know. I hope the conference presentation is an exciting thing for you. The weather is all fall-like and blissful here right now, and maybe you’re similarly ensconced, I hope? ** Okay. This weekend you have the opportunity to explore the films of Hisayasu Satô, and it’s a treat, let me tell you. Have at that, and I’ll see you come Monday.