#jasper sharp

“The intellectual themes of many of Satô's films are, in reality, far closer to those of the horror genre than the erotic film. Like Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel's indelible image of a razor bisecting an eyeball in Un chien Andalou (1929), mirrored by the similar ocular abuse contained within Satô's own filmes Naked Blood and TURTLE VISION, they present visual affront rather than visual pleasure. The camera's fixed, unwavering stare forces us, the viewer, to parkate in the outrages perpetrated onscreen as if our eyes were pinned open like Alex's from A Clockwork Orange, with horror upon horror pumped onto our retinas until we can take no more. [...]  In Satô's world, Tokyo is a cold and loveless place populated by loners and misfits unable to form any meaningful emotional bond unless through violence and other acts of social transgression. They find anonymity in the milling crowds whose members seem oblivious to one another, hide out in desolate undeveloped urban wastelands between the skyscrapers and seek privacy and a place to breathe on rooftops, abandoned portacabins and, more bizarrely, in tents and rubber dinghies floating offshore. [...] If Satô's films represent uncomfortable viewing - which they most certainly do - then this is not solely due to the acts staged in front of the camera, but also the way in which they are presented to the viewer. The reality shown on screen is rarely passed off as being just the subjective experience of his characters. If they get their kicks from atrocities they commit, then we get ours from watching them indulging in their perveted desires. Emotionally, we are kept outside of their world looking in, but never allowed to forget that our role as a spectator is essentially that of a voyeur, as we become stitched into the diegesis through a variety of visual (and sometimes aural) mediatory devices. Scenes are presented through camera viewfinders, CCTV surveillance technology, as grainy 8mm or video footage, still photographs and even as photocopies, complicating identification with the characters and notions of individual perspective. For Satô's protagonists, reality is often only perceived as such when it occurs on camera”

MECHAT REFERRAL CODE

Jasper Sharp (11 CGs/11)