Cinema Fou: Surrealist Horror 187 ing may come from o­ utside or inside. Kristeva argues that when such boundaries are crossed, a collapse of meaning occurs that produces the feeling of revulsion, which is the tell-tale sign that one is in the presence of abjection. In Gozu, such boundary crossing is both transgressive and resonant. Encounters with Monstrous Hybridity Not long after an amusing but failed attempt by Masa to compel a spirit to enter her brother Kazu’s body in order to divine the location of the missing Ozaki, Minami learns that someone resembling Ozaki stayed at the inn the previous night. After recognizing Ozaki’s scent in the room, Minami insists upon staying in the same room in case he returns. In the middle of the night, blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, Minami has a vision that he is visited by the monstrous, ox-headed Gozu, who lasciviously licks Minami’s face with its oversized tongue while drooling a semen-like saliva (Fig. 4.14). Although the eponymous creature of the film appears only once, it is unforgettable. Shots of the monster licking Minami are cross-cut with images of Kazu incestuously suckling the breast of his sister Masa.82 Fig. 4.14 Minami encounters the eponymous ox-headed creature in Gozu (2003) 188 S. T. Brown A more literal translation of the film’s full title, Gokudō kyōfu daigekijō: Gozu, which means “Grand Theater of Yakuza Horror: Ox Head,” underscores the importance of this strange creature, which demands further unpacking. The word “Gozu” is a dual allusion to both Buddhist and Shintoist religious mythologies. On the one hand, Gozu alludes to “Gozu Rasetsu,” a Buddhist demon with a human body and the head of an ox charged with keeping order in one of the many levels of Buddhist hell—a sort of prison guard of hell—in the service of Bishamonten, protector of Buddhism and defender of the nation. In scroll paintings, Gozu frequently appears alongside his companion, the horse-headed guardian of hell known as “Mezu Rasetsu.” Together the Gozu-Mezu team of Buddhist guardians feed on the flesh of the damned, extracting their intestines and removing their tongues as punishment. On the other hand, Gozu also refers to the Shinto deity “Gozu Tennō,” an ox-headed god of epidemic disease and plague that is the syncretic product of Shinto-­ Buddhist intermixing, who has been honored and appeased in annual purification rituals performed at the Yasaka (Gion) Shrine in Kyoto since the year 869 to prevent the spread of plague and pestilence. Such religious tropes reinforce the impression that the strange inn where Minami encounters Gozu is the “gateway to the netherworld,” as Mes puts it.83 However, equally significant are the film’s various allusions to the bull-­ headed figure of the Minotaur and other hybrid monsters in surrealist iconography. It may have been merely a coincidence that Gozu was released close to the seventieth anniversary of the publication of the first issue of the acclaimed surrealist magazine titled Minotaure, but it is no accident that Miike’s cinematic visualization of the ox-headed Gozu, along with the crouching pose of the creature that graces some of the movie’s marketing posters, are strikingly similar to the symbol of the bull-­ headed Minotaur that became synonymous with the surrealist journal of the same name and whose image frequently graced its cover. No less an artist than Pablo Picasso was responsible for the design of the Minotaur that graced the cover of issue no. 1 that was published in 1933.84 Surrealists of every generation have expressed a fascination with hybrid creatures and constructed monstrosities, especially those zoological-botanical ­fantasies that blatantly subvert scientific taxonomies. Moreover, as Cinema Fou: Surrealist Horror 189 Elza Adamowicz suggests in her study Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse, the surrealist “collage-monster as a literal agglomeration of parts” not only overturns hierarchies and transgresses taboos, but in its “joyous collision of limbs” and celebration of hybridity also unleashes the eroticism of jouissance.85 Such artistic citations and their psychosexual connotations clearly identify Miike’s Gozu as an unabashedly surrealist film and in so doing effectively resonates with the entire tradition of surrealist filmmaking and art. As Tony Rayns remarks, “it’s all about seeing through the veil of the everyday to the perversity beneath.”86 The ox-headed Gozu hands to Minami a letter signed by Ozaki that says he will wait for him at the yakuza dump. The next day, Minami heads to the yakuza disposal site—a “recycling plant for dead yakuza, which produces buckets of entrails and neatly starched ‘suits’ of tattooed skin”87—whose boss repeatedly poses the same question to Minami: “Who da ya want disposed of?” When Minami demands to know what they have done with the body of Ozaki, he is shown racks of steam-pressed yakuza bodies, including one that is identified as Ozaki’s and bears his signature tattoo of a jealous female demon on the back (Fig. 4.15). Fig. 4.15 Racks of steam-pressed yakuza bodies, including Ozaki’s (on the far right), are shown to Minami at the yakuza dump in Gozu (2003) 190 S. T. Brown Gender Ambiguity However, things become even more surreal when Minami prepares to depart the yakuza dump only to discover a woman he has never met before sitting in the back seat of his convertible, who claims to be the female version of Ozaki. Initially, Minami finds this beyond belief, but the female Ozaki (Yoshino Kimika) knows personal secrets about Minami that only Ozaki would know, such as the details of his circumcision (after which Ozaki had told Minami that his penis “looks just like Frankenstein’s”) or the fact that he is still a virgin. He drives her back to Tokyo where she allows herself to be seduced by boss Azamawari himself, who has a sexual predilection for long-handled ladles stuck up his rear end. In a fit of jealousy, Minami interrupts them in flagrante delicto and violently confronts his boss, who ends up perishing by ladle in the skirmish. Minami and the female Ozaki—whom Minami continues to address as “aniki” (elder brother)—run off together to spend the night in a hotel where they have sex for the first time (and Minami loses his virginity). As they make love, Minami’s penis gets stuck inside of the female Ozaki. To his shock and horror, Minami discovers that his penis is firmly grasped by a hand inside of the woman’s uterus, which belongs to the male Ozaki. After much struggle, Minami attains release and the head of the male Ozaki pokes his head out of the female Ozaki’s vagina. At that point, Ozaki’s adult male self emerges from her body, his rebirth complete with his signature tattoo of a jealous female demon on his back (Fig. 4.16). Throughout the birth scene, Minami repeatedly addresses the reborn Ozaki as “aniki” (elder brother). At the very moment that Ozaki’s body is released from the birth canal of the female Ozaki, a loud, cartoon-like popping sound can be heard, and Ozaki slides across the room towards Minami, who is cowering in the corner. Gozu features a number of distinctive sound design choices throughout, including bowed and scraped string sounds and low-frequency drones that reinforce an overarching sense of dread, but perhaps the most memorable is the “popping” sound heard at the precise moment when the male Ozaki is released from the birth canal of the female Ozaki, which provides a comical sonic exclamation point that helps release all the tension (sexual and otherwise) that has built up over the course of the entire film. Cinema Fou: Surrealist Horror 191 Fig. 4.16 Ozaki’s rebirth in Gozu (2003) By far the most puzzling and complex questions raised by the film have to do with its sexual politics, especially the film’s surreal engagement with gender confusion, transgressive sexuality, and grotesque rebirth. In particular, the monstrous birthing scene in which the female Ozaki gives birth to the adult male Ozaki has been the focus of a great deal of critical attention. Miike was certainly not the first director to visualize a monstrous birth involving a baby with an adult’s head. Danish enfant terrible Lars von Trier caused quite a bit of controversy in episode four (titled “De levende døde” or “The Living Dead”) of his supernatural hospital drama The Kingdom (Riget, 1994), which aired on Danish television in 1994, by showing the grotesque birth of a character named “Little Brother” (played by German actor Udo Kier), the alleged son of a murderer (also played by Udo Kier) and a nurse at the hospital. Although the birth of Little Brother in The Kingdom probably inspired Miike’s visualization of Ozaki’s birth in Gozu, there are enough distinctions to suggest that Ozaki’s birth is not simply derivative. First, although Lars von Trier’s grotesque Little Brother is born with a mature adult head, the rest of his body is not mature at birth. Second, the birth of Little Brother does not blur gender boundaries or flirt with intersexual imagery in the manner of Gozu. Third, Lars von 192 S. T. Brown Trier’s hospital drama does not engage the problem of homosociality to the same extent that Gozu does. To get a handle on what Miike (and his screenplay writer Satō Sakichi) are visualizing with Ozaki’s surreal rebirth, we need to take a step back and contextualize the gender confusion and intersexual imagery of Gozu in terms of the long history of surrealist art that pushes the envelope of gender and sexual identity. Surrealism’s founder André Breton once famously remarked, “I wish I could change my sex the way I change my shirt,”88 and his fellow surrealists could not have agreed more. Surrealists of every stripe have long been interested in border crossings and boundary transgressions of one sort or another, and this applies no less to the blurring of gender boundaries than it does to the exploration of alternative sexualities. As Penelope Rosemont notes in her introduction to Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, In matters of gender and sex, as in everything else, the first surrealist generation—men and women—were rebels and revolutionaries…. [T]he early surrealists’ questioning and challenging of gender stereotypes went much deeper than even the most radical of their contemporaries were willing to go (Breton 1937). At a time when Marxist and anarchist organizations either downplayed sexuality or ignored it entirely, surrealists carried out a long series of open group discussions on sexual activity—excerpts of which appeared in their journal. As these discussions confirm, tolerance of so-­called sexual deviance was much higher in the surrealist milieu than elsewhere. In the lives and work of several early surrealists—including Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Claude Cahun—gender ambiguity was a large factor. Several surrealists engaged in homosexual relations (Rene Crevel, Georges Malkine, and Claude Cahun openly, Louis Aragon more discreetly, and others, in France and elsewhere, in later years). Because of its pronounced sexual openness, the Surrealist Group as a whole was for many years—well into the 1940s—widely accused of being homosexual.89 Among the most famous examples of such surrealist border crossing is Man Ray’s series of photographs of the transgendered Marcel Duchamp adopting the feminine persona “Rrose Selavy” (a pun on the French phrase “Eros, c’est la vie,” or “Eros, that’s life”). Duchamp’s transgendered portrait has become so iconic that it has often been imitated Cinema Fou: Surrealist Horror 193 by later photographers, ranging from Morimura Yasumasa to Robert Wilson. In the wake of Duchamp’s Rrose Selavy, Gozu certainly does not shy away from using gender ambiguity as a technique to get the audience to think about the performativity of gender, as the scene in the restaurant featuring Gozu screenplay writer Satō Sakichi demonstrates (he is the bald one in the middle in Fig. 4.17). However, Gozu also explores border crossings that push the envelope even more, embracing figurations and desires that verge on the intersexual. In such cases, the early surrealists again paved the way. From René Magritte’s painting The Titanic Days (Les Jours gigantesques, 1928), which shows the struggle of male and female within the same body, to Salvador Dalí’s The Great Masturbator (Visage du Grand Masturbateur, 1929), whose enormous distorted face cast downward is a self-portrait of the artist out of which emerges a nude female figure resembling Dalí’s muse and lover Gala, the early surrealists were utterly fascinated by the intersexual mixing of male and female within the same body. Indeed, as art critic Brian Sewell confirms in the documentary Dirty Dalí: A Private View (dir. Guy Evans, 2007a), although Dalí was attracted to both men and women Fig. 4.17 Gender ambiguity in Gozu (2003) 194 S. T. Brown (and was known to have had affairs with both), his “physical ideal was the hermaphrodite.”90 Hans Bellmer (1902–1975) was another early surrealist interested in gender instability and intersexual mixing, as suggested by photos from Bellmer’s The Doll (La Poupée, 1935–1938) series that intermix male and female limbs at the waist. Bellmer was quite explicit in his view that masculine and feminine images are “interchangeable,” arguing in his essay “A Brief Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious, or The Anatomy of the Image” that the sexes tend “towards their amalgam, the hermaphrodite.”91 As is frequently the case with Bellmer, such images are both grotesque and erotic. Bellmer’s engagement with intersexual mixing is even more pronounced in his drawings, such as The Crimes of Love (Les Crimes de l’amour, 1961), which “fuse male and female forms to create ambiguous, fluid organisms.”92 Peeling away the flesh of his female self in an untitled work from 1947–48, Bellmer reveals his own face. Bellmer’s greatest desire seems to have been for his male self to make love to his female self, thereby giving new meaning to the term “auto-eroticism.” Although such examples explore intersexual imagery as a space for auto-eroticism, Bellmer was also interested in situating intersexual desire in the context of quasi-birth imagery, such as in Bellmer’s Study for “Transfer of the Senses” (Etude pour “Transfert des Sens,” 1949), which flirts with self-­ birthing imagery in a way that uncannily anticipates Miike’s visualization of Ozaki’s self-birth in Gozu. Homosociality and Amour Fou Taking into consideration the history of surrealism’s engagement with such border crossing, how does Gozu make use of such imagery to explore questions of gender and sexuality in the context of the homosocial sphere of the yakuza underworld? As the film’s full Japanese title suggests, Gozu is a self-described “yakuza horror film.” What makes it a horror film, in part, is Gozu’s engagement with the horror of homophobia in the ­homosocial context of the yakuza social space. Here I am using the term “homosocial” as defined by scholars in the field of gender Cinema Fou: Surrealist Horror 195 studies, especially the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and David William Foster. According to Sedgwick and Foster, “homosociality is not homosexuality”: Indeed, the two are mutually exclusive. Homosociality is understood to refer to the way in which patriarchal society forges bonds between men for the orderly transference and maintenance of masculinist power: these bonds not only allow for men to transmit power from one to another (along any number of social axes of class, caste, race, religion, profession, and the like), but also they allow for the process of inclusion of some men in power and exclusion of others from it, and they allow for the vigilant scrutiny of men to determine if they are abiding by the conditions of the patriarchy—that is, if they are worthy exponents of it. It is here, of course, that homophobia comes in, since homophobia works against those men who do not abide by the heteronormative rules of the patriarchy, and it works both to punish and to exclude them, often by violent death. In homosociality, women are tokens of the exchange of power between men: appropriate and adequate heterosexual relations with women are taken as a guarantee of one’s conformance with the patriarchy, and it is frequently through women that patriarchal power is transmitted—for example, from a powerful man to his son-in-law. The bonds between men range over the sociocultural spectrum between what, popularly, we call the buddy system to, in a more formal and professional context, the old-boy network.93 Gozu raises challenging questions concerning the horror of homophobia in the exceedingly homosocial space of the yakuza underworld. But rather than simply recapitulating homophobia in a mindless heterosexist sort of way, Gozu actively explores the problem of homophobia in a ­manner that is quite distinctive when viewed in relation to the ­pronounced homosocial history of the yakuza genre. Perhaps the most difficult question for any viewer of Gozu to answer is whether Miike’s surrealist yakuza horror succeeds in overcoming the homosocial baggage weighing down decades of traditional yakuza cinema. More than simply dramatizing the horror of homophobia, Gozu offers a nontraditional yakuza love story—or, more to the point, given its ­surrealist leanings—a celebration of amour fou in the surrealists’ sense of the term. This is confirmed by the strange incantation—“gean keruke mister amore”— 196 S. T. Brown that innkeeper Masa invites Minami to recite along with her in order to locate Ozaki with the help of her brother as spiritual medium. Later, Minami hears again the strange incantation, but this time emitted from the womb of the female Ozaki while she is sleeping. The first half (“gean keruke”) of the incantation consists of nonsense syllables, but the second half (“mister amore”) is anything but nonsense, since it addresses Minami himself as “Mr. Amore” (Mr. Love). As Tom Mes astutely observes, “sexual desire [is] the driving force behind the story of Gozu.” Having made so many of them, Takashi Miike has had plenty of opportunities to toy around with the codes of the yakuza film and the genre’s homoerotic subtext in particular has been a recurring feature in his films. It rears its head quite overtly in films like Shinjuku Triad Society, Blues Harp, Ichi the Killer, and Agitator. On the surface all the pushing around, yelling, punching, and shooting seem like typical displays of pumped-up machismo, but more often than not Miike dwells just that little bit longer on the fact that these men spend a lot more time with each other than with women. In a Miike film, members of the opposite sex are mere passers-by in a gangster’s life. He goes so far as to show groups of these supposedly virile men living together in the same house, cooking communal meals, and doing the dishes and each other’s laundry. Gozu continues this motif in what is perhaps its most direct expression yet. Stripped of its abundant absurdism, the film tells the simple tale of a man who wants his male companion to admit that he loves him and wants to sleep with him. It requires the illusion of heterosexuality, in the shapely form of actress Kimika Yoshino, to get him there, but once he has owned up to his true feelings this illusion quite literally splits apart to reveal its true face.94 What Gozu offers is nothing less than a nontraditional yakuza love story and coming-out film in the context of a surrealist horror. As film critic Tony Williams reminds us, although it is not hard to detect subtexts involving closeted homosexuality in “classical Hollywood gangster films such as Little Caesar (1931) and later examples such as The Pawnbroker (1965) as well as the traditional yakuza movie,” Gozu brings such issues out of the closet in ways that are quite innovative for the genre.95 After the rebirth of the male Ozaki, the female Ozaki certainly looks worse for wear, but Minami conveys in voiceover that they simply Cinema Fou: Surrealist Horror 197 “put the girl in the tub and she was back to normal.” Gozu ends with a touching shot of three toothbrushes side-by-side followed by the two Ozakis and Minami walking arm-in-arm down the street in a love triangle that calls to mind François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (Jules et Jim, 1962) but with less tragic consequences. The female side of Ozaki effectively serves as the bridge (or intermediary) between Minami and the male Ozaki that allows Minami to bring his love for Ozaki out of the closet, so to speak. Miike may not have succeeded in destroying the traditional yakuza movie as he set out to do, but at the very least it might be said that the homosociality that is one of the yakuza film’s most defining and tenacious characteristics has been both recapitulated and transgressed by the end of Gozu’s yakuza horror theater. Conclusion This chapter shows a side of Japanese horror that is rarely discussed. Although Face of Another is not, strictly speaking, an example of contemporary Japanese horror, it is included here because it serves as a bridge that connects earlier Japanese surrealist filmmakers to contemporary J-horror directors, who have incorporated experimental surrealist filmmaking techniques and tropes into their films in often underappreciated ways. Despite being strikingly different in tone and style, what Face of Another and Gozu share with one another is an insistence on defying logic with unexpected combinations and disorienting juxtapositions; employing oneiric structures and scenarios that disrupt narrative continuity; and raising existential and sociopolitical questions about the shifting status of identity, body, and life. By confronting us with the strange, absurd, bizarre, and uncanny side of life, such surrealist horror films not only push the envelope of what a horror film can be but also defamiliarize the everyday to the point that the organizational powers of modernity that repress, control, and fragment the bodies of the films’ protagonists are thereby exposed. Here most of all, on the “edge of meaning,” to ­paraphrase Jean-Luc Nancy, the sound-image machines of these two films confront us with “resonant subjects” grappling with the “edgy meaning of extremity.”96 198 S. T. Brown Notes 1. Salvador Dalí quoted in Hans Richter, Dada, Art and Anti-Art, translated by David Britt (New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 194. 2. Félix Guattari, Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977, edited by Sylvère Lotringer (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotexte, 2009), 247. The concept of “cinema fou” (mad cinema), which serves as the main title of this chapter, is borrowed from an interview with Guattari on the role of amour fou in Terence Malick’s Badlands (1973), which was first published in Libération (July 17, 1975) and later reprinted in Félix Guattari, La Révolution moléculaire (Fontenay-sous-Bois: Recherches, 1977). 3. For further discussion of Un chien andalou, including its influence on Japanese horror films such as Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Tetsuo; dir. Tsukamoto Shin’ya, 1989), see my Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 60–64. 4. On conceptions of surrealist cinema and its exemplars both narrowly and broadly defined, see Alison Frank’s discussion in Reframing Reality: The Aesthetics of the Surrealist Object in French and Czech Cinema (Bristol: Intellect, 2013), 1–10. 5. Maurice Blanchot, “Tomorrow at Stake,” in The Infinite Conversation, translated by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 407; Maurice Blanchot, L’entretien infini (Paris Gallimard, 1969), 597. 6. Luis Buñuel, My Last Breath (London: Flamingo, 1985), 107. 7. Quoted in Keith Aspley, Historical Dictionary of Surrealism (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 267. See also André Breton, “The Exquisite Corpse, Its Exaltation (1948),” in André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, translated by Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: MFA Publications, 2002), 288–90. See also Elza Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 78–83, 160–62, 175–78. 8. Breton, “The Exquisite Corpse,” 290. 9. Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh, translated by Abigail Israel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 103–04. 10. Morise quoted in Aspley, 8. From Morise’s essay “Les yeux enchantés” (The Enchanted Eyes), which was included in the opening issue of the surrealist journal La Révolution surréaliste published in December 1924. 11. Michael Richardson, Surrealism and Cinema (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2006), 29. 12. Takemitsu’s score for Face of Another received an award for Best Film Score at the 1967 Mainichi Film Concours. Cinema Fou: Surrealist Horror 199 13. Peter Grilli, “The Spectral Landscape of Teshigahara, Abe, and Takemitsu,” The Criterion Collection, July 9, 2007, https://www.criterion.com/current/ posts/607-the-spectral-landscape-of-teshigahara-abe-and-takemitsu (accessed November 19, 2016). 14. See Felicity Glee’s comparative analysis of surrealist practice in Teshigahara’s Otoshiana (Pitfall, 1962) and Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (The Forgotten Ones, 1950): Felicity Glee, “Surrealist Legacies: The Influence of Luis Buñuel’s ‘Irrationality’ on Hiroshi Teshigahara’s ‘Documentary-­ Fantasy,’” in A Companion to Luis Buñuel, edited by Rob Stone and Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 572–89. 15. John Woo would explore similar ideas in his 1997 action thriller Face/ Off, but Face of Another offers a much more philosophically charged, surrealist engagement with such issues. 16. Examples include Extreme Makeover (2002–2007), Dr. 90210 (2004– 2008), Miami Slice (2004), and I Want a Famous Face (2004–2005). 17. Ghislaine Wood, The Surreal Body: Fetish and Fashion (London: V & A Publications, 2007), 6. 18. On the fragmented body in surrealist art and photography, see Wood, 6–17, 32–55; Sidra Stich, Anxious Visions: Surrealist Art (Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1990), 26–37, 42–47, 51–54, 74–79; Madeleine Cottenet-Hage, “The Body Subversive: Corporeal Imagery in Carrington, Prassinos and Mansour,” in Surrealism and Women, edited by Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf E. Kuenzli, and Gloria Gwen Raaberg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 76–95; Hal Foster, “Violation and Veiling in Surrealist Photography: Woman as Fetish, as Shattered Object, as Phallus,” in Surrealism: Desire Unbound, edited by Jennifer Mundy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 203–26. On the fragmented body in surrealist cinema, see Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 483–85; Robert Short, “Un Chien Andalou,” in The Age of Gold: Surrealist Cinema, edited by Robert Short (London: Creation Books, 2003), 72; Phillip Drummond, “Textual Space in Un Chien Andalou,” Screen vol. 18, no. 3 (1977): 55–119; Paul Sandro, “The Space of Desire in An Andalusian Dog,” 1978 Film Studies Annual (1979): 57–63. 19. Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995). 20. Adamowicz (178) summarizing the argument put forward by Xavière Gauthier in her study Surréalisme et sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). 200 S. T. Brown 21. Adamowicz, 181. 22. Wood, 56. 23. James Quandt, “Video Essay,” Tanin no kao, directed by Teshigahara Hiroshi (1966), translated as Face of Another, subtitled DVD (Irvington, N.Y.: The Criterion Collection, 2007). 24. Such imagery resonates with the surrealist fascination with insect imagery. Here I am thinking not only of Buñuel and Dalí’s visualization of ants crawling out of a hole in a man’s hand in Un chien andalou (Dalí practically established swarming ants as a leitmotif for mortality, decomposition, and irrepressible sexual desire) but also the early surrealists’ usage of the praying mantis as a figuration for the voracious sexuality of the femme fatale. In Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna, 1964), which was released two years before Face of Another, Teshigahara and his collaborators Abe and Takemitsu pursued the surrealist implications of such entomological tropes as far as they would take them. The protagonist of Woman in the Dunes is an amateur entomologist named Niki Junpei who in the course of collecting rare bugs comes face-to-face with what it feels like to be treated like a bug himself by the unnamed “sand-woman” (suna no onna) played by Kishida Kyōko, who also plays the nurse at the clinic treating Okuyama in Face of Another. 25. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 167–91. 26. Ibid., 168, 170. 27. Ibid., 168. 28. On Eyes Without a Face, see Raymond Durgnat, Franju (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 78–86; Kate Ince, Georges Franju (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 50–53, 67–75, 139– 42. In Ring 0: Birthday (Ringu 0: Bāsudei, 2000)—a prequel to the Ringu series—Tsuruta Norio pays homage to Eyes Without a Face by having the young Sadako (before she turns into the vengeful ghost of Ringu) play the lead role in a play titled Kamen (Mask) that is supposed to be a stage adaptation of George Franju’s unsettling classic. 29. On the genre of “cínema fantastique,” see Ince, 47–61. As Richard Scheib points out in his review, “The Face of Another joins a number of other films from the late 1950s onwards that deal with surgeons engaged in facial experiments. This mini-genre began with the French arthouse hit Eyes Without a Face (1960) and quickly made its way to the province of B horror movies with the likes of Atom Age Vampire (1960), Circus of Horrors (1960), The Awful Dr. Orloff (1962) and Corruption (1968).” See Richard Scheib, “Review of The Face of Another,” Moria: Science Fiction, Cinema Fou: Surrealist Horror 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 201 Horror and Fantasy Film Review, http://moria.co.nz/sciencefiction/faceof-another-1966-tanin-no-kao.htm (accessed December 3, 2016). Salvador Dalí quoted in Hans Richter, Dada, Art and Anti-Art, 194. Georges Bataille, “Eye,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927– 1939, edited by Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 17. Miki’s ear art may also have been inspired by Méret Oppenheim’s bronze sculpture Giacometti’s Ear (1933). Alexandra Munroe, Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (New York : H. N. Abrams, 1994), 195. Munroe, 198. See also Doryun Chong, “Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde,” in Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde, edited by Doryun Chong (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 58. Munroe, 198. Keiko I. McDonald, “Stylistic Experiment: Teshigahara’s The Face of Another,” in From Book to Screen: Modern Japanese Literature in Films (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2000), 278. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, translated by Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), 57. Later, when Okuyama meets Dr. Hori at a nightclub to discuss his experiences with the mask, the same waltz is played again but this time it is performed diegetically by a live band with a Japanese singer who sings German lyrics that resonate strongly with the discussion at hand: “I see your face before me,/Yet I no longer recognize you./Where are you? Where are you? The you I knew yesterday./I saw you in the fog/As if through frosted glass./You were so near and yet so far away./You glistened in the moonlight/As if your skin were made of glass./You were good to me and yet you were a stranger.” Rear projection is used to create a number of extraordinarily surreal scenes. In one scene, a door in the middle of the doctor’s office (that seems to lead to nowhere) opens by itself to reveal an extreme close-up of a woman’s long hair floating on the shoreline like seaweed—perhaps an intimation of the suicide that takes place later in the film involving a parallel narrative about an atomic bomb survivor from Nagasaki with disfiguring facial scars. In another example, a woman (probably the doctor’s wife) flies around the city on a bed, dodging buildings. In each case, the surreal interrupts the everyday without forewarning, making us question what it is that we are seeing. The doubling of shots, settings, and snippets of dialogue, in which Okuyama is reinserted into nearly identical scenes, creates a strong sense 202 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. S. T. Brown of cinematic déjà vu that is strongly reminiscent of Buñuel’s use of repetition in The Exterminating Angel (El ángel exterminador, 1962). Also known as X-ray of My Skull. See https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/96.188 (accessed July 31, 2017). On Oppenheim, see Wood, 42–47; Renée Riese Hubert, “From Déjeuner en fourrure to Caroline: Meret Oppenheim’s Chronicle of Surrealism,” in Surrealism and Women, 37–49; and Robert J. Belton, “Androgyny: Interview with Meret Oppenheim,” in Surrealism and Women, 63–75. For a discussion of how the genre of the portrait is parodied in the art of other surrealists, see Adamowicz, 141–55. The fact that Oppenheim’s X-ray self-portrait displays rings on her hand and earrings dangling from her ears probably also references the intersection of X-rays and fashion that accompanied the early introduction of X-ray technology. According to Stanley Reiser, “New York women of fashion had X-rays taken of their hands covered with jewelry, to illustrate that ‘beauty is of the bone and not altogether of the flesh.’ ‘Women Not Afraid,’ read one headline, as single women clasped hands with their beaux for sentimental X-ray photographs, and married women gave bony portraits of their hands to relatives as family souvenirs.” See Stanley Joel Reiser, Medicine and the Reign of Technology (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 61. See also Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 115. Chion, 128. Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 87. Ibid., 29–30. Catherine Waldby, The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Post-Human Medicine (London: Routledge, 2000), 91. Translation mine. Teshigahara remarked in interviews that the doctor was another part of Okuyama. Steven T. Brown, Theatricalities of Power: The Cultural Politics of Noh (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 27–28. See also Komparu Kunio, The Noh Theater: Principles and Perspectives, translated by Jane Corddry (NewYork: Walker/Weatherhill, 1983), 227–28; Nakamura Yasuo, Noh: The Classical Theatre, translated by Don Kenny (NewYork: Walker/Weatherhill, 1971), 214. Komparu, 126. Cinema Fou: Surrealist Horror 203 52. WWWJDIC Japanese Dictionary Server, s.v. “bakeru,” http://nihongo. monash.edu/cgi-bin/wwwjdic?1F (accessed on December 3, 2016). 53. Director Alan Parker would later pay homage to this scene in the movie Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982). 54. Quandt, “Video Essay.” 55. Yoshio Sugimoto, An Introduction to Japanese Society, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 33. 56. Jane M. Bachnik, “Time, Space and Person in Japanese relationships,” in Interpreting Japanese Society: Anthropological Approaches, edited by Joy Hendry (London; New York: Routledge, 1998), 107–08. 57. Takeo Doi, The Anatomy of Self: The Individual Versus Society (Tokyo; New York: Kodansha International, 1986), 25. 58. Doi, 26. 59. As Doi points out, the concepts of omote and ura are strongly correlated with the concepts of soto (outside) and uchi (inside). See Doi, 29; Bachnik, 108. 60. Doi, 33. 61. James Quandt, “The Face of Another: Double Vision,” The Criterion Collection. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/592-the-face-ofanother-double-vision (accessed November 15, 2016). 62. Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another, translated by E. Dale Saunders (New York: Vintage, 2003), 62. For a more detailed comparison of the Face of Another novel and film adaptation, see McDonald, 269–86; Tomoda Yoshiyuki, Sengo zen’ei eiga to bungaku: Abe Kōbō x Teshigahara Hiroshi (Kyoto: Jinbun Shoin, 2012), 215–243. 63. On the significance of the young woman’s keloidal scars and the function of this film-within-a-film, see Tomoda, 215–228. 64. Abe, 231. 65. Abe, 230. 66. McDonald, 283. 67. See André Breton, “Second Manifesto of Surrealism” (1930), in Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 180–81. In The Phantom of Liberty (Le Fantôme de la liberté, 1974), Buñuel uses incestuous relations between both aunt and nephew and brother and sister to illustrate the transgressive nature of amour fou. On amour fou in the films of Buñuel, see Peter William Evans, “An Amour still fou: Late Buñuel,” in The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film, edited by Graeme Harper and Rob Stone (London: Wallflower, 2007b), 38–47. 204 S. T. Brown 68. David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987), 46–47. 69. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 21. 70. McDonald, 284. However, I do not agree with McDonald’s interpretation that “the young man’s body is seen (in my view) as a vulture chained to the window”(284). The animal carcass hanging from hooks appears more bovine than avian in my opinion. See also discussion in Tomoda (236–241), who compares the scene to Luis Buñuel’s surrealist comedy L’âge d’or (1930), in which a young woman discovers a cow in her bed. 71. Chris D., Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 198–99. 72. Miike Takashi, “Interview by Film Critic Wade Major,” Gozu, directed by Miike Takashi (2003), subtitled DVD (United States: Cinema Epoch, 2009). 73. Tom Mes, “Review of Gozu,” Midnight Eye, May 21, 2003b, http:// www.midnighteye.com/reviews/gozu/ (accessed December 14, 2015). 74. In his crazed endeavor to take out the yakuza attack dog, Ozaki appears to have been inspired by a strange video (probably a parody of the Ringu video) that appears at the very outset of the film displayed on a television monitor in the restaurant. Ozaki is as mesmerized by the horribly distorted sound-image relations of the short video as he is by the dictum expressed in it, one of the most famous mottos attributed to influential Meiji-period educator William Smith Clark (1826–1886): “Boys, be ambitious [Shōnen yo taishi o idake]!” In the context of Gozu’s nontraditional, transgendered yakuza love story, “Boys, be ambitious!” effectively becomes “Boys, be ambiguous!” 75. This meta-level playfulness is reaffirmed again in a later scene when it is revealed to both Minami and the audience that the character of an American woman, who speaks Japanese very poorly, is actually reading aloud cue cards that are hanging just outside the frame, thereby demystifying the illusion of the cinematic construct even further. 76. Tom Mes, Re-Agitator: A Decade of Writing on Takashi Miike (Surrey, England: FAB Press, 2013), 46. 77. Jorge Bastos da Silva, “A Lusitanian Dish: Swift to Portuguese Taste,” in The Reception of Jonathan Swift in Europe, edited by Hermann Josef Real (London, England: Thoemmes, 2005), 90. 78. André Breton, Anthology of Black Humor, translated by Mark Polizzotti (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997), xix. Cinema Fou: Surrealist Horror 205 79. Kurt Vonnegut, Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, edited by William Rodney Allen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), 56. 80. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 81. Brigid Cherry, Horror (London; New York: Routledge, 2009), 112. 82. Tom Mes has suggested that the incestuous sister and brother, Masa and Kazu, invoke Japanese creation mythology, offering “a degenerate version of Izanagi and Izanami, the brother and sister deities who descended from the heavens to Earth’s primordial ooze and gave birth to the Japanese archipelago and its first emperor (after initially spawning a boneless miscreant named Hiruko, that is).” Mes, Re-Agitator, 50. 83. Mes, Re-Agitator, 50. 84. See Jillian Suarez, “Minotaure: Surrealist Magazine from the 1930s,” Guggenheim.org, September 25, 2014, http://blogs.guggenheim.org/ findings/minotaure-surrealist-magazine-1930s/ (accessed December 23, 2016). 85. Adamowicz, 97. 86. Tony Rayns, “Review of Gozu,” Sight & Sound, vol. 14, no. 9 (September 2004): 64. 87. Rayns, 64. 88. André Breton quoted in Penelope Rosemont, “Introduction: All My Names Know Your Leap: Surrealist Women and Their Challenge,” in Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, edited by Penelope Rosemont (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), xliv. 89. Rosemont, xliv–xlv. 90. Brian Sewell interviewed in Dirty Dalí: A Private View, directed by Guy Evans (2007), DVD (London: Channel 4, 2007a). 91. Hans Bellmer, The Doll, translated by Malcolm Green (London: Atlas Press, 2005), 125. 92. Michael Semff and Anthony Spira, “Introduction,” Hans Bellmer, edited by Michael Semff and Anthony Spira (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2006), 10. 93. David William Foster, Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004), xiv–xv. 94. Mes, Re-Agitator, 50. 95. Tony Williams, “Takashi Miike’s Cinema of Outrage,” Cineaction, no. 64 (2004): 62. 96. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, translated by Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 7.
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