The Hisayasu Sato thread

[Guro Taku]

The Eye's Dream / 眼球の夢 is finally hitting Japanese BD (with ENGLISH SUBTITLES!) on December 6th. This has been a long wait.

[Guro Taku]

And if that wasn't good enough news for you, Sato also has a new film coming out on December 23rd and a first teaser trailer just dropped:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjUYIzyQssg

















The film is about young people doing street interviews, asking passersby if they know who Keita Murayama was and in the process meeting a man who claims to be Keita Murayama. Kind of odd, that, since Murayama was a painter and poet who died in 1919 during the Spanish Flu pandemic at the age of 22. Judging from the teaser and the various images available, things get a little weird after that.

[Guro Taku]

Full trailer for 火だるま槐多よ (2023):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uir6RS61gPw

There's also a mini-retrospective of some of Sato's older films, mostly screened from 16mm prints that I wish I could attend. Especially for watching WAVE (aka LADY OF THE STABLE) and CLOSE DANCE (aka UNIFORM MASTURBATION: VIRGIN'S UNDERPANTIES) uncut and from actual film prints. Neither film has ever been officially released on home video, as far as I know. Notice how the titles are Sato's shooting titles, not the pornified titles slapped on the films for their initial theatrical and (in some cases) home video releases by their distributors.

[HungFist]

Well, damn. I'll be stopping Tokyo a few days BEFORE this starts... when by coincidence there's a Aki Kaurismäki retrospective. Damn the irony!

[Guro Taku]

Actually, I only posted half of what has to amount to Sato Fest at this point:



So in addition to some really rare features (How did I forget to mention that they're showing his 1985 debut film MAD LOVE: LOLITA POACHING under its original working title DISTORTED SENSE OF TOUCH? Rumor has it this film can never again be released because it features unlicensed music by the Sex Pistols.), they even dug out one of Sato's non-pink student films, which will be screened from 8mm! It's kind of disturbing that they're showing GEMME SHELTER from VHS because all other material looks to be lost but I'd still jump at the chance to see it.

There seems to be a real push to get Sato and his work "out there" right now. There's the new film coming out, THE EYE'S DREAM gets a BD with English subtitles, this veritable Sato Film Festival happens, Sato created new twitter/X and instagram accounts and he's currently out on the streets personally promoting his new film.

[Guro Taku]

Fascinatingly, the film was co-produced by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, the directors of the 2012 documentary LEVIATHAN.

I believe they filmed a documentary movie about Sato during the production of Dream of Eyeball.

There is an extra on the BD of THE EYE'S DREAM that sheds a bit of light on what exactly happened there. Basically, Castaing-Taylor and Paravel wanted to film a documentary on Issei Sagawa and they offered to finance/produce a feature film for Sato if he, in return, put them in contact with his cannibal friend. That's how we got THE EYE'S DREAM and Castaing-Taylor and Paravel's 2017 documentary CANIBA. Both the US BD of CANIBA and the Japanese BD of THE EYE'S DREAM curiously include the same extra that spells these things out, a strange short film/making of hybrid titled IN THE SEA OF TREES that mostly sees Sato interview a stroke-addled Sagawa in a suicide forest. It is also mentioned that Castaing-Taylor and Paravel filmed footage with and about Sato during the making of THE EYE'S DREAM for the purpose of what is called "another ethnographic film" but for whatever reason nothing ever came of that so far.

[Guro Taku]

Well, this is unexpected! EIRIN rated Sato's new film "G", as in "General, suitable for all ages". That's a first. I guess that means no sex scenes despite the imagery on the poster? I'd be fine with that. They also give its genre as "performance drama". Interesting.

[Guro Taku]

Sato's new film, officially titled DEAR KAITA ABLAZE in English, is already hitting the festival circuit, currently playing IFFR.

https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2024/films/dear-kaita-ablaze

They write the film up like this:

Murayama Kaita, a Japanese painter, novelist and poet died in 1919 at the age of 22, leaving behind an impressive and time-defying body of work. In his most recent film, Sato Hisayasu offers a surreal, time-crossing, meta-layered essay on the artist, his originality and his legacy.

Dear Kaita Ablaze brings together a young woman Azami obsessed with Murayama's painting, a young man Saku, who can hear unusual frequencies and claims to be Murayama or his spiritual imprint and a quartet of young performers with psychic abilities. They bond over Murayama’s work which they recreate in performative dance while driving to a mysterious cave called Agartha.

Sato Hisayasu (The Eye's Dream, Muscle, The Bedroom), renowned for his pinku and exploration of madness and lust, returns to IFFR. Dear Kaita Ablaze is hyper-dense, obsessive and driven, effortlessly mashing surrealism with sci-fi and mysticism, layering seemingly unrelated events and encounters to bring them together in a monumental climax.

[Guro Taku]

Japanese DEAR KAITA ABLAZE Blu-ray is coming on July 3rd. A lot sooner than I expected but also apparently no English subtitles this time.

[Guro Taku]

I picked up the DEAR KAITA ABLAZE Blu-ray and was very surprised to notice that despite what amazon and other retailers claim, it does come with ENGLISH SUBTITLES! This is a pretty big selling point to completely omit from your marketing. Weird, but I'll take it. As for the film itself, I'll probably write something longer at some point but as for my first impressions:

Dear Kaita Ablaze (火だるま槐多よ) (Japan, 2023) [BD] – 4/5
Hisayasu Sato has made a career out of mixing arthouse sensibilities with at least sometimes extreme exploitation filmmaking. For his latest film, he leaves the latter behind and delivers the first pure arthouse film of his career. Once again collaborating with frequent screenwriter Shiro Yumeno, the film packs its 101 minutes with esoteric weirdness. There are paranormal abilities and shadowy government agencies, a journey to the underground kingdom of Agartha (which is not a mere cave like the IFFR write-up suggests but a legend obsessed over by theosophists and occultists), possession, curses, potentially time-travelling objects, a nuclear bomb explosion, devil tongues (there is a brief interlude where a character starts taking pictures of people's tongues, mirroring what a character in The Eye's Dream did with eyes) and so much more. I don't think for one second I understand half of what the film threw at me but unlike at least some viewers I don't see that as a negative but rather as an incentive for future viewings and rabbit holes to explore. Another thing the film has going for it is that it finally answers my burning question what Sato, who famously claimed to have felt "raped" by the city of Tokyo when he first visited it as a young adult, thinks of that potentiation of alienation that is social media. While rated "G" in Japan and free of Sato's usual exploitation content, a few instances of topless nudity and a brief sex scene (mostly filmed from behind a screen) ensure this would still be an obvious "R" in the US and probably a 15/16 rating in most other places.

[Guro Taku]

Completely unexpected but most assuredly welcome, another previously unavailable Sato film has found its way online as an amazon VOD exclusive. We're talking about 1991's New Wife's Private Parts: Caress / 新妻下半身　わしづかみ, which was re-released by Xces Film in 2008 under the title 新妻奴隷　強制愛撫. Strangely, amazon uses that title and even lists the film as a 2008 production. There's also the Xces logo at the start, so they clearly got that version. Sato's shooting title, by the way, was DOLL. A Kyoko Godai script, so less esoteric and more psychological.