#A Woman Called Sada Abe

[byneddiedingo]

Hitomi Kuroki in Sada (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1998)

Cast: Hitomi Kuroki, surutarô Kataoka, Norihei Miki, Kippei Shîna, Toshie Negishi, Bengal, Renji Ishibashi, Kyûsaku Shimada. Screenplay: Yuko Nishizawa. Cinematography: Noritaka Sakamoto. Production design: Kôichi Takeuchi. Film editing: Nobuhiko Obayashi. Music: Sotaro Manabu.

Having seen House (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977) and In the Realm of the Senses (Nagisa Oshima, 1976), I had to see what the director of the former -- a brightly colored, over-the-top horror film, set to a bubble-gum pop soundtrack, about a gaggle of Japanese schoolgirls who find themselves in a haunted house and proceed to die in various colorful and inventive ways -- would do with the latter -- a sexually explicit account, with full nudity and unsimulated copulation, of the crime of Sada Abe, who in 1936 killed her lover, Kichizo Ishido, carved their names on his body, and cut off his genitals, carrying them around with her until she was arrested. The story of Sada has been the subject of numerous books and at least five movies in Japan, after her trial -- which resulted in five years in prison -- set off a nationwide sensation, turning her into a kind of folk hero. The result is a curiously show-offy film that Obayashi fills with all manner of tricks: switches from color to black-and-white, characters breaking the fourth wall, eccentric cuts and startling shifts of tone, and deliberate violations of cinematic convention. In one scene, Sada (Hitomi Kuroki) and her lover, whose name has been changed to Tatsuzo (Tsurutaro Kataoka) in the film, are walking along the street together. The camera follows Tatsuzo from right to left as he speaks, then cuts to Sada as she replies. Film convention calls for a shot followed by a reverse shot, in which we see first Tatsuzo and then Sada from different angles. Instead, Obayashi cuts to Sada, filmed from the same angle and still traveling from right to left, as if she has somehow physically replaced Tatsuzo. This and similar impossible cuts and angles in the film are probably meant to suggest Sada's identification with her lover. Tone shifts mark the film from the beginning: It opens with 14-year-old Sada's rape by a teenage boy, a harrowing scene that is nevertheless somehow played as if it were comic, just as later Sada's work as a prostitute shifts into comic mode with speeded-up action and cuts to a voyeur watching from his hiding place, and a fight with Tatsuzo's wife becomes almost slapstick. Obayashi seems determined to avoid anything that smacks of melodrama or sentimentality. but not always successfully. The screenplay, by Yuko Nishizawa, tries to add depth to Sada's story by inventing a young medical student, Okada (Kippei Shina), who tends to her after her rape. He becomes a symbol of Sada's loss of anything but physical love when he is forced to part from her: He gives her his scalpel and has her mime cutting out his heart and taking it with her -- an obvious foreshadowing of her actual use of the scalpel on Tatsuzo. Sada spends much of the film hoping to be reunited with Okada, only to find that he has leprosy and has been sent to an island on the Inland Sea for quarantine. The film ends with a shot of an elderly woman looking out across the sea to the island. In contrast to Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses, Obayashi's film avoids nudity, but this only serves to add another layer of distance between the viewer and Sada. Kuroki, a beautiful young actress, does what she can with the role, but the constant camera tricks and the limitations imposed by the script never let us get more than a superficial glimpse of what drove Sada Abe to act as she did.

[mudwerks]

(via Poster for A Woman Called Sada Abe (Jitsuroku Abe Sada) (1975, Japan) - Wrong Side of the Art)

[nickged]

A Woman Called Sada Abe, 1975

[keeptheemptinessaway]

実録阿部定, Noboru Tanaka (1975)

Cinematography: Masaru Mori | Japan

[yoramkelmer]

“A Woman Called Abe Sada”, by Noboru Tanaka, 1975

[panuru]

Jitsuroku Abe Sada (Noboru Tanaka, 1975)

[peter-ash]

(También conocida como: Una mujer llamada Sada Abe)

[genkinahito]

The First Wave and the Reboot of Nikkatsu's Roman Porno Films at Nippon Connection Film Festival 2017

Nikkatsu's Roman Porno Films at Nippon Connection Film Festival 2017 @NipponFilmfest

The Nippon Connection Film Festival takes place from May 23 to 28, 2017 and it will be held in Frankfurt am Main. The organisers released details of the 100+ short and feature length films that will be screened and there are many top titles that audiences can see to get a perfect snapshot of the myriad of stories and talents that the Japanese film industry is producing. There are a whole host of…

[dramaserialdotid]

http://ift.tt/eA8V8J via DramaSerialDotTV

[nontonfilmdrama]

A Woman Called Sada Abe http://ift.tt/2AkYrHQ

[hyaenagallery]

Sada Abe part 11 Abe capitalized on her notoriety by sitting for an interview in a popular magazine, and appearing for several years starting in 1947 in a traveling one-act stage production called Shōwa Ichidai Onna (A Woman of the Shōwa Period) under the director of dramatist Nagata Mikihiko. In 1952 she began working at the Hoshikikusui, a working-class pub in Inari-cho, downtown Tokyo. She lived a low-profile life in Tokyo's Shitaya neighborhood for the next 20 years, and her neighborhood restaurant association gave her a "model employee" award. More than once, during the 1960s, film-critic Donald Richie visited the Hoshikikusui. In his collection of profiles, Japanese Portraits, he describes Abe making a dramatic entrance into a boisterous group of drinkers. She would slowly descend a long staircase that led into the middle of the crowd, fixing a haughty gaze on individuals in her audience. The men in the pub would respond by putting their hands over their crotches, and shouting out things like, "Hide the knives!" and "I'm afraid to go and pee!" Abe would slap the banister in anger and stare the crowd into an uncomfortable and complete silence, and only then continue her entrance, chatting and pouring drinks from table to table. Richie comments, "...she had actually choked a man to death and then cut off his member. There was a consequent frisson when Sada Abe slapped your back." In 1969 Abe appeared in the "Sada Abe Incident" section of director Teruo Ishii's dramatized documentary History of Bizarre Crimes by Women in the Meiji Taisho and Showa Eras, and the last known photograph of Abe was taken in August of that year. She disappeared from the public eye in 1970. When the film In the Realm of the Senses was being planned in the mid 1970s, director Nagisa Oshima apparently sought out Abe and, after a long search, found her, her hair shorn, in a Kansai nunnery. She passed away sometime after 1971. #destroytheday

[nickged]

A Woman Called Sada Abe, 1975

[keeptheemptinessaway]

実録阿部定, Noboru Tanaka (1975)

Cinematography: Masaru Mori | Japan

[kansassire]

Jitsuroku Abe Sada aka A Woman Called Sada Abe, 1975, Noboru Tanaka

[tsun-zaku]

田中登監督「実録 阿部定」（日活－1975年）

[hyaenagallery]

Sada Abe part 5 After their two-week encounter ended, Abe became agitated and began drinking excessively. She claimed that with Ishida she had come to know true love for the first time in her life, and the thought of Ishida being back with his wife made her intensely jealous. Just over a week before Ishida's eventual death, Abe began to contemplate his murder. On May 9, 1936, she attended a play in which a geisha attacks her lover with a large knife, after which she decided to threaten Ishida with a knife at their next meeting. On May 11, 1936, Abe pawned some of her clothing and used the money to buy a kitchen knife. She later described meeting Ishida that night, "I pulled the kitchen knife out of my bag and threatened him as had been done in the play I had seen, saying, 'Kichi, you wore that kimono just to please one of your favorite customers. You bastard, I'll kill you for that.' Ishida was startled and drew away a little, but he seemed delighted with it all..." Ishida and Abe returned to Ogu, where they remained until his death. During their love-making this time, Abe put the knife to the base of Ishida's penis, and said she would make sure he would never play around with another woman. Ishida laughed at this. Two nights into this bout of sex, Abe began choking Ishida, and he told her to continue, saying that this increased his pleasure. She had him do it to her as well. On the evening of May 16, 1936, Abe used her obi sash to cut off Ishida's breathing during orgasm, and they both enjoyed it. They repeated this for two more hours. Once Abe stopped the strangulation, Ishida's face became distorted, and would not return to its normal appearance. Ishida took 30 tablets of a sedative called Calmotin to try to soothe his pain. According to Abe, as Ishida started to doze, he told her, "You'll put the cord around my neck and squeeze it again while I'm sleeping, won't you... If you start to strangle me, don't stop, because it is so painful afterward." Abe commented that she wondered if he had wanted her to kill him, but on reflection decided he must have been joking. #destroytheday