Gozu, Takashi Miike

Gozu
Takashi Miike


A gorefest in Miike's traditional style, with a final reel of weirdness that exceeds itself.... (Audition was no rehearsal itself). Is there something about the physicality and the body obsessions that marks Japanese freak shows? As if the sovereignty of identity in that culture were tested physically. A history in self control perhaps? A special relationship between individual and community that minimizes the former? A misrecognition of corporeality, a culture that disciplines bodies (eating culture, toilet culture, warrior culture) and seeks self mastery through physical self-control? Because their freak films are so often about destroying bodies, cutting bodies, mutilating, transforming, undoing, and otherwise violating bodies that they carry their own particular style.....

Take a british freak film (e.g Peter Greenaway) and you have a narrative that could have been written by a politician. There, individuals are broken, divided, violated by the coldness of social isoluation, the intensity of self-doubt that racks a failed adult, the crushing pressure of gang membership (many British films are ensemble films because it is in the ensemble that the British proclivity for etiquette and civility is brought into play, and is thus up for play). Recent British films in which individuals are indeed the focus (Morvern Callar comes to mind, but there are many about children, mostly boys, growing up) thematize the struggles of self and society by capturing the isolation of any individual not in conformity with his or her situation and context. A woman wanders off to Spain (Morvern Callar), a boy becomes a dancer (Billy Elliot), a man considers the emptiness of his life (Nil by Mouth), a genius proselytizes to a world gone deaf (Naked).... individuals trying to find real contact where society only supports appropriate contact.

Is there something here? Are there "cultural" or national idioms that in this day and age--when film is our primary art, and w/ the slow disappearance of reading, our primary entertainment--that can tell us about the struggles of individuals in capitalized societies around the world?

Whole
by Melody Gilbert
http://www.whole-documentary.com/main.html


The subjects remove part of a limb, mostly a leg, and mostly the left leg. They then feel more complete, more whole.

This documentary was fascinating for its subject matter. These people belong to a type of disorder not yet listed or recognized, and yet there may be thousands world-wide who suffer from it. For those among the audience interested in body manipulations, voluntary amputation really gets you thinking. Is the point to remove a foreign body? To get rid of something so that it can't be seen any longer? To take care of a mental preoccupation and obsession (could these people be sublimating or displacing a deeper desire for gender change? It didn't seem so). Is it for some the fascination with a prosthesis, the artificial attachment being the obsession, a physical extension more desirable than a real leg? Is there a left/right brain connection that causes most of these people to prefer the left over the right? And why is their obsession so particular: this leg only, and up to here only....

You'll come away with sympathy for these people. There's nothing abnormal about them at all. They desire to get rid of something in the way that you desire to get rid of a few pounds. Only that somewhere inside, that something which is their own has become an object, an "it," a foreign body. As if the leg to be removed were already an artificial leg. J.G. Ballard, are you listening?