CONTOURS: Blind Beast (1969) / preceded by Filmstudie (1928)

Paradise Theatre, Oct. 21 2024

Yasuzō Masumura’s exploitation film Blind Beast is a violent immersion into the world of a fetishtic artist. Thrust into the spotlight by the notoriety of an erotic photoshoot, model Aki (Mako Midori) becomes the fixation of the erratic, blind sculptor, Michio (Eiji Funakoshi). Believing only Aki can bring him to complete his new vision of sculpting, Michio kidnaps her. Cast into the terrain of his desire—a studio populated with towering figures of the stolen likenesses of other women—Aki struggles to make sense of her entrapment. 

Grasping for power, Aki exploits the stunted adolesence of her captor, but her efforts are complicated by Michio’s domineering mother (Noriko Sengoku). Careening between perverse tableaux of domesticity and the extremes of artistic expression, the mounting insularity of the film’s world grows increasingly unbound by social mores. In the brutality of the muse’s desperate efforts to cling to selfhood, Blind Beast gapes at the tyranny of the artist who obliterates anything outside the confines of his expression.

Text by Iman Bundu.