#Psychedelic Violence Crime of Visual Shock | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

kyotakumrau · 4 years ago

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The World Unknown to Matsuko aired April 6th.

Music that ended up evolving A LOT in the age of social media Special: "The World of Visual-kei bands"

(I'll be just doing the main points of the program)

They start with introducing Fujitani Chiaki (藤谷千明) who's been following v-kei world as a fan and a column writer for 25 years now ('a former Self Defense Force member who came to love over 100 bands in 25 years').

The slogan on the screen that accompanies this is 'The great pick up of ultimate bands starting from legends to evolving styles (kei)'.

Chiaki's life changed after she saw LUNA SEA's "ROSIER" in junior high. When she was 18 Kuroyume announced they're stopping activities and shocked she decided to enter Jieitai (but it was also because there were very few employment chances in her hometown).

A message Chiaki wants to convey the most in the program: "I'm fed up with realistic times, let's experience the extraordinary more".

Matsuko commented that she also thought that the entertainment in Japan is very plain/reserved, that's why she thought about visual kei, she brought up Sawada Kenji (ジュリー). They talked about using make up talking about Kpop as well, that v-kei is so different.

Next came teaser "tremendously popular in the 90s" - "the word 'Visual Kei' became established overseas" (as background here they showed dir's footage and some foreign fans wearing vkei style).

Chiaki: nowadays Japanese people have an image of Visual-kei as 'old', 'scary', 'behind the times' and they both talk about tylhe extraordinary being important.

Next part "after 22 years the time has come when Visual-kei is necessary!" They talk about the chronology board prepared by Chiaki, she also explained that the genre was born in 89 with X and the term visual came from X's PSYCHEDELIC VIOLENCE CRIME OF VISUAL SHOCK.

1994 faced restructuring and unemployment crisis, they showed LUNA SEA's TRUE BLUE and commented how popular it got. 'how did Visual-kei fare in such difficult times?'

Matsuko brought up SHAZNA - everyone was shocked then how cute the vocalist was.

Then they talked about 1999 and Nostradamus and end of century, Chiaki sees 1999 as a peak of visual-kei. They talked about GLAY's legendary show at Makuhari with 200,000 people (they also show their best album sales, about 4,870,000 (the top 3rd in Japan)) and how much media attention it got.

Another legendary show that was held that year was LUNA SEA's 10th anniversary with a stage that costed hundred millions of yen. That stage got destroyed just 3 days before the concert due to a typhoon but band decided to go on with plan and held the concert as planned.

(haha I can totally see Chiaki's sparkling when she talks about LUNA SEA😆)

"Totally necessary for these times! Introduction of the legendary bands immersed in the extraordinary":

🌙MALICE MIZER: 'immersed in extraordinary with super extravagant costumes! ultimate visuals with extreme beauty'

Matsuko commented that performance (from merveilles~��焉と帰趨~l'espace) looks like Takarazuka. Chiaki said that for the sake of worldview they don't play instruments on stage and that Sho Kiryuuin from Golden Bomber was very influenced by them.

Matsuko said that fans of course want to see the artist perform, but also are happy to see them dance, that visual-kei is infinite.

Matsuko also compared Mana to Marie Antoinette.

🌹Chiaki then introduced Versailles as a band that still pursues such worldview. They are dressed as French aristocrats, are very popular abroad especially in France.

💀DIR EN GREY: 'extraordinary performance going to the very end'

Matsuko knows dir, Chiaki explained for the audience about their major debut with 3 singles produced by YOSHIKI, that they are popular overseas as well as in Japan. They express 'human pain' and 'the darkness of the heart', the peak of extraordinary. Chiaki talked about the situation with M Stage program when the tv got complains from parents after their kids cried seeing dir on tv, Mstage was on tv just before Crayon Shin-chan and many ended up seeing one of dir's songs (I love how someone burst out laughing in the studio here😂). Matsuko asked what kind of performance was it:

"The following footage contains material not suitable for all audiences"🤣🤣🤣

and of course it's 残-ZAN-

Chiaki: The shock received in your own living room...

Matsuko: certainly, suddenly seeing this kind of deathmetal

Matsuko: something that Tamori (Kazuyoshi Morita, tv celebrity/presenter/comedian) could suddenly introduce

the commentary: 'and even in recent performances' (they proceed to show dir's live footage from DSS in Nippon Budokan)

Chiaki comments that as dir's lyrics are about the pain and extraordinary, and how cathartic can be a very intense show, and she really loves how 'we love the extraordinary in order to deal with the ordinary life' (yes😭❤️)

Matsuko: ... really? But they have songs so deathmetal like. Ok, I guess I'll check them out.

Chiaki: I just heard from the staff that dir's vocalist, Kyo, is a fan of this program and is watching every week.

Matsuko: who's here connected with the band?? (asking the studio people)

Staff (from behind camera): when getting permission [to show dir's footage] I was told that.

Matsuko: so in a sense I'm deathmetal too. Ok, I think that's it.

Next the program moves on to "a mystery hot pot eaten in the dark of performance incorporating all trends and fashion"

Matsuko: is 'Yaminabe performance' a band's name? Ah, ok, no, we're changing the topic!

Chiaki explains that it's difficult to explain what visual-kei bands are like now because there are so many elements.

They show the Raid (manga style) and Kiryuu (Japanese horror) as examples of the 2nd generation of evolving visual style, and what elements entered visual-kei: rap, dance, underground idols, Japanese kimono, ???

Matsuko: is the bottom right visual-kei??

Chiaki: has common elements (くくり)

●they show NOCTURNAL BLOODLUST and talk about their image and Hiro, the vocalist. the ??? gets changed into 'muscles', they comment on change in the expectation that musicians are very skinny.

Matsuko comments she personally likes the look of the 'underground idols', like what are they actually doing there?

●They show 0.1gの誤算 performance and Chaki explained anything can happen there. They also showed their recent show where fans prerecorded their shouts and member calling on their phones to play them when loud response is not allowed due to covid.

●Alice9 represents 'dance' element.

●CHOKE represents 'rap'

●Mogamigawa Tsukasa for 'kimono', the drummer in THE MICRO HEAD 4N'S who's singing enka.

The 2nd half of the program introduced humanbeatbox topic (very cool to watch but no report from that part😅)

#dir en grey #luna sea #x-japan #malice mizer #gackt #glay #shazna #golden bomber #Versailles #the raid.#己龍 #アリス九號 #nocturnal bloodlust #0.1gの誤算 #choke #the micro head 4n's #translation

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kurumeki · 3 years ago

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When did “X Japan invented term visual kei!” start?

I think it’s interesting it’s actually possible to pinpoint the moment from which foreign fans of visual kei started spreading the myth as to which X Japan was responsible for creating the term visual kei, and what’s even more interesting - that this was done by Yoshiki himself. How did it happen?

In 2007 there was an event called J-Rock Revolution Festival, it took place in Los Angeles in USA. It featured quite a lot of visual kei artists, I believe it was the biggest event like that outside of Japan when these type of bands were featured. This event was created and promoted by - yes, you guessed it right - Yoshiki.

First, to give you an idea how big it was, in early 2000s visual kei was just becoming popular abroad thanks to neo visual kei bands being formed. Also the wider use of internet and access to it, sites like MySpace, helped to spread the interest. I have to say that Yoshiki gathered quite an impressive line-up for this two day event: Merry, MUCC, alice nine, Vidoll, Duel Jewel, Girugamesh, Kagrra, Miyavi, D'espairsRay.

While these bands might have had fans abroad, Yoshiki at that time wasn’t that big of a name as one would thought he was. He was pretty much inactive musically since X Japan disbanded in late 90s and the myth of X Japan as the ultimate precursor of visual kei wasn’t fully alive yet, except of course the legendary guitarist of the band that passed away. Because Yoshiki remained inactive for almost a decade, him being the man behind the festival in Los Angeles wasn’t bringing enough attention.

This is where “PSYCHEDELIC VIOLENCE CRIME OF VISUAL SHOCK” comes into play, as this slogan of X was used to promote X Japan, and Yoshiki himself at the same time, as the origins of the term visual kei (which is not the case). This information was sold to foreign fans and it was used to justify and promote the 2007 J-Rock Revolution Festival, because it served the purpose of beliving Yoshiki single handedly a) created visual kei in first place b) made visual kei popular abroad by creating the event. This theory is used in non-Japanese sources since then, that X slogan originated the term.

It’s worth mentioning that Yoshiki used this event to announce that Miyavi will be joining S.K.I.N. as the fourth member, next to Gackt and SUGIZO. As we know, the band was not successful and it was active for a very short time. It did count as a music “activity” for Yoshiki, but at the time of the event, it has not begun yet with S.K.I.N.

I don’t want to belittle the success of the event itself, since it did contribute to visual kei being more popular, especially in North America, I just wanted to bring attention to the fact that it effectively contributed to misinformation about history of visual kei by the means of person behind the event.

Sources:

https://fuyu-showgun.net/2018/09/vrock-kakkowarui02/

https://www.jame-world.com/en/news/38743-jrock-revolution-in-los-angeles.html

https://jrockrevolution.com/about-jrock-revolution-festival-1-2/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_(Japanese_band)

#history of visual kei

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distanceandvector · 5 years ago

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#Music #X #X JAPAN #Visual Kei #Metal #Japanese Metal #PSYCHEDELIC VIOLENCE CRIME OF VISUAL SHOCK

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sadiechannerfmp · 3 years ago

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Origin of term:

These bands were initially described as Okeshou Kei (makeup style), however founding editor of SHOXX magazine believed it sounded too cheap and urged people to use "visual-shock kei" which eventually shortened to visual kei or vkei.

"Psychedelic violence crime of visual shock", X Japan's early slogan, is where the term visual shock is believed to be derived from.

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kunstmull · 3 years ago

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In Case I Am Wondering Where The New Obsession Came From...

The Guardian music pages had an interview with a currently super-hot K-pop producer, and in it, he mentioned he was inspired by his childhood love for Visual Kei.

Now, Visual Kei was something I was vaguely aware of, kind of an extreme androgynous Japanese take on glam? So I clicked the link in the piece and found some quotes from and photos of a Visual Kei band called Versailles.

Visual kei, a mix of glam rock, metal and punk, has been popular in Japan since the late 80s. Its rallying call is "psychedelic violence crime of visual shock", created by the band X Japan, has been adhered to by many other ostentatiously attired acts. Visual kei bands admit that a good deal of time goes into pre-performance preening; a guitar is merely a last-minute accessory to ornate brocade jackets, frilly sleeves and, most importantly, fountains of hair carefully cascading over heavily made up faces.

Wow, I thought - that sounds great! And dialled up my first song on Spotify. 30 seconds later, I was knee-deep in a HARPSICHORD SOLO and lost forever. I mean these guys literally look like they have stepped out of the pages of this blog. Gold paisley wallpaper and all.

I have no idea if this is going to be a week-long flirtation, or the start of the next thing that's going to take over my life for the next few years -

BTW if anyone sees me attempting to learn Japanese, please stage an intervention

- but right now, wow I am super enjoying this?

#visual kei #kamijo #versailles #by which I mean the Japanese band not Baroque Architecture and boy are my followed Tumblr tags confused by that #sorry I've been quiet on Tumblr lately #I've been WFH and not in the office so I haven't had the bandwidth to keep my queue fed

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marinfernum · 11 months ago

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Psychedelic Violence, Crime Of Visual Shock - Prologue

Mai 1998

Ashley avait toujours été extrême sur ce qu’elle ressentait. Ça lui avait parfois apporté des moments de bonheur intense, mais le plus souvent elle se retrouvait anéanti par la douleur et le chagrin. Comme aujourd’hui, où une véritable descente aux enfers commençait pour elle. Se noyant dans un raz-de-marée de souffrance et de peine. Physiquement, elle ne sentait plus rien, ni la sensation de la chaise froide sur laquelle elle était assise, ni les larmes qui coulaient sur ses joues continuellement depuis des jours entiers. Des sillons rouges s’étaient créés sur ses joues pâles, presque translucides, brûlées par le sel de ses pleurs. Ses yeux verts, rougis étaient cernés sévèrement par une absence totale de sommeil. À l’état léthargique, la jeune femme n’avait pas touché son assiette. Elle n’avait même pas remarqué qu’on l’avait posée sur la table devant elle, d’ailleurs. Elle n’avait pas amorcé le moindre mouvement, depuis qu’on l’avait assise ici. Si bien que ce plat avait refroidit, sans même avoir été regardé. En réalité, il y avait déjà plusieurs jours qu’elle n’avait pas mangé, son visage était creusé, son corps amaigri, ses bras squelettiques.

« Chérie ? »

Une main lui frôla à peine le bras, pour tenter de la faire réagir, mais elle ne sembla pas la sentir. Cette voix qui l’appelait, l’avait pourtant sortie de sa torpeur, ainsi elle ressenti à nouveau ce grand froid intérieur, qui la glaçait jusqu’aux os. Une légère grimace de dégout se dessina sur son visage pourtant d’une grande beauté. Elle se tourna vers l’appelant et le scruta un long moment avec mépris et horreur pendant plusieurs secondes, comme si elle ne parvenait pas à le reconnaître.

« Tu devrais manger un peu. Juste une bouchée, s’il te plaît. »

Elle regarda l’assiette se trouvant sous son nez, et remarqua enfin sa présence. Elle secoua négativement la tête, presque imperceptiblement, vidée de toutes ses forces. L’homme s’assit à côté d’elle en soupirant, le visage tiré et la tristesse gravé sur ses traits. Il la fixa longuement, et renonça. Elle n’avalerait rien, pas d’elle-même en tout cas. Il faudrait probablement lui mettre la nourriture de force, et la bâillonner. Mais à ce stade, il n’était pas garanti qu’elle ne se laisserai pas mourir étouffée.

« On devrait peut-être rentrer, non ? »

Elle secoua une nouvelle fois la tête à la négative, et lui fit un vague signe de la main pour l’intimer de la laisser tranquille. Mais il n’en fit rien.

« Bois au moins de l’eau. »

Encore une secousse négative. Elle resta les yeux dans le vide, le regard éteint, absent. Il la fixa de longues minutes dans un silence chargé. Il eut l’impression qu’à plusieurs reprises, pendant de lentes et interminables secondes, elle s’arrêtait de respirer, comme si elle n’y arrivait plus. Mais toujours, sa poitrine finissait par se gonfler à nouveau d’oxygène, reprenant le court de sa vie, pour elle. Soudainement, elle attrapa un verre de saké se trouvant devant elle, et s’apprêta à le boire. Mais il tenta de s’en saisir. Grave erreur. Dans un geste violent, elle dégagea son bras, et le verre se renversa sur eux deux, et alla se briser sur le sol, comme elle n’avait plus assez de force pour le tenir. Dans la pièce, l’ensemble des personnes présentes, alertées par le bruit, et toutes vêtues du noir de deuil se tournèrent vers eux. Mais elle s’en foutait, trop préoccupée par la douleur qui l’écrasait. Toujours le regard dans le vide et réputée pour être déterminée, Ashley se saisit d’un autre verre de Sake posé sur la table, probablement celui de quelqu’un d’autre. Il tenta à nouveau de s’en saisir, et la scène se répéta.

« De l’eau, chérie, s’il te plaît.

- Fous-moi la paix, grogna-t-elle entre ses dents, ses yeux pleins de larme, sans le regarder.

- Dans ton état, l’alcool c’est…

- Mais par pitié, laisse-moi, supplia-t-elle avec colère. Sugizo, laisse-moi.

- Je ne peux pas. Pas dans ton état, souffla-t-il attristé que les premiers mots qu’elle avait pour lui depuis longtemps soient ceux-là.

- L’homme que j’aimais plus que tout au monde est mort ! Cracha-t-elle comme un venin. Alors boire ton eau, j’en ai rien à foutre. »

Il était blessé. Bien sûr qu’il était blessé. Ils étaient ensemble depuis longtemps maintenant. Et elle venait de lui sortir les mots qu’il appréhendait le plus d’entendre depuis le début de leur relation, sans scrupule, sans sommation. Elle ne criait même pas, elle se contentait de lui parler sur ce ton grave, tremblant de rage, et de peine qui aurait brisé le cœur de n’importe qui. Cette journée était aussi difficile pour lui aussi, pourtant, il se contenta d’avaler et d’accuser le coup, mettant ça sur le compte du chagrin.

« Ashley, tu…

- J’aurais préféré que ce soit toi, dans ce cercueil. »

Elle posa enfin ses yeux sur lui, brutal, meurtrier. Elle était effrayante. Sugizo, soupira et regarda autour de lui. Les gens les fixaient. Il ne voulait pas créer de scandale, mais il ne pouvait pas la laisser comme ça. Elle ne se laisserait pourtant pas faire et il le savait. Il n’était juste pas de taille à lutter contre elle.

« Tu ne te sens pas assez humilié comme ça ? »

Il continua de maintenir son regard, tant bien que mal. Ce regard de haine qu’elle avait pour lui aujourd’hui, et qui brisé son cœur déjà meurtri.

Et puis Heath arriva, presque précipitamment, se faufilant entre les gens, les bousculant quasiment, et vint se placer entre elle et Sugizo pour faire barrage à la furie qui était en elle et qui pourrait exploser à tout instant. Il attrapa la jeune femme par les épaules et la fit se lever. Elle s’appuya contre lui, n’ayant même plus assez de robustesse pour tenir sur ses jambes.

« Viens, Shey-chan, on va nettoyer ta robe, dit-il en l’emmenant avec lui, jetant un regard noir au Luna Sea. »

Elle se laissa faire, titubant, ayant du mal à mettre un pied devant l’autre sans s’appuyer sur son ami aux cheveux noirs. Tant bien que mal, il l’emmena vers les toilettes, quelques dizaines de mètres plus loin. Il poussa la lourde porte, et appuya son amie contre le mur carrelé, la regardant se laissait presque tomber au sol, telle une poupée de chiffon, sans vie. Il attrapa quelques serviettes en papier qu’il humidifia et s’accroupi à côté d’elle pour commencer à essayer vainement de retirer le saké qui s’y était incrusté.

Heath n’était pas sûr de ce qui était pour lui le plus douloureux. La mort de cet homme, qu’il considérait comme un grand-frère, ou bien voir son amie dans cet état de souffrance qui semblait incurable. Il essayait de ne pas la regarder dans les yeux, car s’il la regardait, il savait qu’il allait pleurer. Et il n’était pas encore prêt pour ça, parce qu’il n’était pas sûr qu’il pourrait s’arrêter une fois qu’il aurait commencé. Mais la jeune femme se mit soudainement à trembler, et puis des spasmes, des sanglots la possédèrent tout entière. Son corps paressant si minuscule et amaigri semblait ne plus supporter ces secousses trop intenses pour lui. Heath se mordit la lèvre, tentant de contrôler les larmes qui déjà lui brouillaient la vue.

« Heath… »

Elle s’agrippa, presque désespérément à son poignet, comme si elle craignait de tomber dans son vide intérieur. Il posa ses yeux noirs, embrumés sur elle, se mordant quasiment jusqu’au sang, pour se maîtriser, mais en même temps que le goût cuivré de l’hémoglobine parvint à ses papilles, les larmes coulèrent le long de ses joues.

« Hi-chan… Il faut que tu m’aides… Il faut que tu m’aide, je t’en prie… Je t’en supplie… Je n’y survivrais pas… »

Elle hoquetait presque des paroles qui lui brûlaient la gorge. Mais Heath abattu, baissa la tête, pour essayer de maintenir ses sanglots à l’intérieur, encore un peu. Il ne voulait pas. Il ne pouvait pas réaliser. À bout de force, lui aussi, il laissa sa tête tomber en avant et se poser sur la poitrine de la jeune femme, resserrant ses bras sur lui-même, terrifié par le chagrin qui l’envahissait. Elle posa sa main sur sa tête, glissant ses doigts dans ses cheveux noirs, recoiffant machinalement l’épi qu’il avait toujours. Pleurant ensemble.

Heath savait tout au fond de lui, qu’elle avait raison…

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thirech · 3 years ago

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DADAROMA「溺れる魚」Oboreru Sakana

Visual kei is a genre of rock inspired by punk, glam metal, and gothic rock with a heavy emphasis on the use of shocking and brutal visuals, makeup and eccentric hairstyles with the name deriving from X JAPAN's slogan: "PSYCHEDELIC VIOLENCE CRIME OF VISUAL SHOCK". Oboreru Sakana or “drowning fish” depicts a world that is akin to a fish inside a tank that cannot be cleaned out as “ fallen drop of black ink can’t be scooped out” revealing the contradiction of a fish drowning or that we ourselves are dying in the environment that we built. This is backed by the visuals of flashing tv static in a room of concrete that could be a reference to humanity's fish tank that acts as a place of immense isolation but at the same time is a place that we cannot live without as fish out of a fish tank will drown. The use of inverted and the constant shift of colours from a muted white to bright and colourful to a darker red, purple and black adds to the violence and brutality at the end of the video.

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pocketbeer9-blog · 6 years ago

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Horror Show

NOVEMBER 8, 2018

INTRODUCING HIS 2007 REMAKE of the beloved Herschell Gordon Lewis oddity The Wizard of Gore, director Jeremy Kasten said he admired the original film, made in 1970, but that there was room for improvement. “Herschell wasn’t much of a storyteller,” he said to the packed house at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before playing us his psychedelic makeover. Nor, he might have added, did people come to H. G. Lewis movies to be so entertained. Lewis was a ferocious marketing executive by trade, and his movies had the same blunt effectiveness of a personalized mailer or a cold call. He knew audiences were there to see blood and guts and he delivered in spades. His film Color Me Blood Red (1965) uses the blood of a serial killer’s victims as paint on a canvas. When a shock of that degree is in the offing, the narrative is simply a buttress, no more functionally important to Lewis’s methodology than synch sound or a tripod. There was room for Kasten to turn such a flimsy framework into something with personality without ruffling anyone’s feathers.

Which brings us to Suspiria, Dario Argento’s 1977 horror classic newly remade by Luca Guadagnino. By the time Argento directed his symphony of torment, the film for which he’ll always be remembered, censorship of violent content in European and American film had been functionally defeated. Movies like The Wizard of Gore were no longer necessary as the doors they knocked down with bad taste, sex, and violence stayed broken. Argento’s films flaunted that freedom by painting the screen with blood in a more productive and elegant way than Lewis, though no less flagrantly. Argento was free to craft something uniquely his in viscera and neon gels. It didn’t take him long to outstrip much of his competition and become as well known in the United States as in Italy for his symphonic horror tales.

Argento’s Suspiria begins with a still unnerving double homicide. Not 10 minutes into the film, a phantom muscular arm comes crashing through an apartment window and drags a woman kicking and screaming onto the building’s roof. Once there, she has her chest cut open and her visible, still-beating heart stabbed multiple times by the faceless killer before her body is shoved through a pane of stained glass. The falling shards land on and kill another innocent woman frantically trying to scare up some help down below. The bulk of the film is in this register. Agitated characters are sent through mysterious yonic hallways or unnerving womb-like spaces, and then they’re murdered in abstruse displays of malevolent creativity. Argento’s fascination with, and ingrown fear of, women would yield some of the most unforgettably delightful nonsense of the century (Inferno, The Stendhal Syndrome, The Cat o’ Nine Tails). His women were often killers, and he felt no compunction killing them. He killed his own wife and frequent co-writer, Daria Nicolodi, on screen a marriage-ending three times.

Argento didn’t have time for plot — it handcuffed him to dialogue and linearity, and anyway he liked it when the endings cheated logic. The killer was supposed to be impossible to guess: what more effective way of making his audience feel that they were trapped in an honest-to-god nightmare? Argento’s compositions, his psychedelic color schemes, his jazzy editing, and his snake charmer’s musicality all spoke louder than story. His strongest work might still be the drummer’s odyssey Four Flies on Grey Velvet where a progressive rock session musician chases a killer. The movie alternately snaps taut like a drum and shakes and crackles slowly like a beat cymbal coming to a rest. Music and image dance with one another in his films so much so that if one falls behind, the movie stops working. Suspiria is beloved not because its tale of witches preying on ballerinas in Germany comes to a satisfying conclusion, but because the music swells sweetly and the colors flash and the movie casts a spell that bypasses your rational understanding of the way narrative cinema behaves. You never want the ecstatic dread to end.

Guadagnino probably looked, on paper, like a fine candidate for updating Suspiria — just look at his 2009 jaunty and sensual daydream I Am Love. That film opens with loving shots of stunning and stern architecture in winter, while the dripping, driving woodwinds of John Adams’s “The Chairman Dances” fall like snow on the soundtrack. It’s a perfect marriage of image and sound (even the font selected for the opening credits has a simpatico elegant detachment), a sense of the perfection of things untouchable. The music alternates between a stabbing punctuation and an ethereal, nagging echo — forward and back, close, faraway — the film’s intimate understanding of its subjects is similarly flirtatious. We’re drawn ever nearer to the shape of lovers and buildings and then the camera retreats to show them as part of a broader landscape. The snow and mist in the air further distance us from the buildings. Slowly, we get closer and closer to the film’s subjects, penetrating spaces, moving in on the hands and faces of its characters. Love scenes are impressionistic smatterings of limbs, torsos, and faces, before we finally enter the body itself via a portentous soup recipe. It’s by taste that a son will divine his mother’s betrayal. The film, having gotten as close as it can to its subject (bringing to mind the cliché about the quickest way to a man’s heart), ends on an image of lovers in a cave, the camera far away once more, implicitly observing their love as if it were a perfect object. Call Me By Your Name, Guadagnino’s Oscar-winning 2017 romance, attempts much the same thing, trading sculpture for architecture and John Adams for Sufjan Stevens.

The most curious thing about Guadagnino’s Suspiria is how little resemblance it bears to his other movies in all but its study of impenetrable surfaces. Guadagnino appears to have let the pressure of adapting a classic get to his head and empty his bag of tricks. The film has almost none of the hallmarks of Italian horror, nor of his own past work. Gone is the confident, urbane romanticism of Call Me By Your Name, the reverent tableaux of I Am Love, the lusty paranoia of A Bigger Splash, another remake of an arthouse classic, 1969’s The Swimming Pool. Somehow he grew afraid of the project, not daring to take anything but the framework, the blueprints of its story, for his own.

The action is once again set in Berlin, but Guadagnino has decided that that must mean something, and so the Baader-Meinhof Group are scribbled into the margins and the Holocaust is brought up early and often. The tenuous association between the differing forms of terror speaks to a troubling facileness inherent in the aspirationally socio-political horror — a genre that includes recent works like Hereditary or It Comes at Night, films that presume to be above the mere act of scaring an audience. As if it were easy. Once Guadagnino’s film starts broadcasting the crimes of the Red Army Faction, it also accidentally admits that it won’t be doing anything so pedestrian as scaring you. This does not appear to be a problem at the script level; the obviously talented screenwriter David Kajganich (The Terror, Blood Creek) has never shied away from the mechanics of horror before. Time and again the opportunity to be frightening appears, and the director opts for the high road, as if to say, “This is a film of important ideas and historical violence. It would be beneath us to have a ghoul waiting in a bathroom mirror to shock you.” Well then … what else have you got?

The story remains the height of simplicity, even if it’s quickly crowded with meaningless tangents. A doe-eyed dancer (Dakota Johnson) comes from the American heartland to replace the recently departed lead (Chloë Grace Moretz) at a prestigious international company headquartered in Berlin. She makes friends with another ingenue (Mia Goth), who already presumes something fishy about the heads of school and slowly divines their ill purpose while bodies pile up all around her. The new Suspiria doesn’t build a head of steam the way its inspiration does: Guadagnino cuts out the heart of the original and replaces the still-warm organ with heady allusions as if stuffing a scarecrow. The designs on the academy’s floor, for example, look to take after the furious geometry of Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy. The dancing is deliberately a cross between the styles of Martha Graham and Pina Bausch. Each mistress of the school brings her own artistic baggage. Angela Winkler is meant to remind audiences of her work with Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, chroniclers of Germany’s political upheaval from the 1940s through the 1970s. Ingrid Caven is there as a paean to the work of her frequent director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ditto Renée Soutendijk and Paul Verhoeven. Christine Leboutte and Sylvie Testud are no doubt meant as representatives of the cinema of Chantal Akerman, who celebrated female performers and also worked with Bausch.

The act of suggesting other work, offering up a cornucopia of tributes in place of developing aesthetic identity or a firm purpose, seems to content the director. Why try to recreate the visual and or thematic language of Argento, Akerman, Verhoeven, or Fassbinder when you can play it safe and place yourself in their lineage without working toward a coherent stylistic tradition? He turns his mise-en-scène into a muddy brown smear with uncertain dimensions all the while praising directors and actresses he doesn’t see fit to challenge. Certainly no one could accuse him of plagiarism, but it’s not the best way to prove himself up to the task of meddling with another director’s work. Suspiria casts its arms up in praise and its eyes toward the dirt, feeling unworthy of the artists whose name it moans in worship.

By 1977, Argento had arrived at his abrasive, psychedelic style by dint of discovering the elementary function of cinematic components. Image and sound were like synchronized swimmers concerned with symmetrical dependence and form — not distance, technique, or order. They wrap themselves around the viewer, loudly lulling them into a psychotic state. Guadagnino’s image and sound don’t talk to each other. The edit is furious and vivisects the interiors and dialogue with more malice and purpose than it manages to exert on its own expendable characters. No understanding of the dance school emerges, neither its geography nor its textural aura. No sense of the blank young leads emerges, either in their dancing or their fraught, halting conversations. The music by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke in no way corresponds to the images, which themselves are lackluster, deliberately shying away from the original’s singular chromatic form. (The choice to hire Yorke again smacks of contrarianism — the smart money would have been on Radiohead’s guitarist Jonny Greenwood, an accomplished film composer who would have aced this assignment.) Look at the climactic dance performance to see an identity crisis written in light. The costumes the girls wear, a system of red bonds meant to suggest sinew and muscle, don’t accentuate the choreography, the lighting doesn’t help the costumes, and the baggy white underwear each dancer wears undercuts whatever effect they’d have anyway. It’s a shapeless disaster made worse by frenetic editing, and it’s meant to be a showstopper. It’s almost shocking to see Guadagnino so stranded.

By the time heads start exploding while Yorke softly coos on the soundtrack, it’s beyond clear that this is a sort of art-school prank, a film the director did not know how to make so he gave all his favorite artists a fat paycheck and faked it. Little else can explain the stunt casting of Tilda Swinton as both the coldly rational head of the dance school and her nemesis, an elderly male psychologist on the trail of the coven. Guadagnino has once more cooked I Am Love’s betrayal dinner, feeding us broth spiked with something very meaningful to him, hoping the biographical components of the recipe will awaken in viewers the same love he feels for each ingredient as it grew in the wild. Admiration and a love of art history is commendable in a director suddenly handed financial freedom, but they won’t turn dirt into soup, and they can’t save Suspiria.

Guadagnino may have seen in the 1977 original the same exciting blueprints Jeremy Kasten saw in The Wizard of Gore. But Suspiria was never supposed to be more than a bloody funhouse, a gorgeous crashing of color and sound, as sweetly, dreamily insistent as anything in Walt Disney’s Fantasia. Guadagnino had a chance to do something unique and new but given blueprints and permission to be his most outré, bold self, it turns out he isn’t much of a storyteller.

Scout Tafoya is a filmmaker and critic from Doylestown, Pennsylvania, currently living in Astoria, New York.

Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/horror-show/

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koholint · 6 years ago

Video

youtube

the channel that uploaded this song has a really good name

“Psychedelic Violence Crime Of Visual Shock - V系”

#songs tag

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thyele · 4 years ago

Text

ビジュアル系ってなんだろう？ 2020年6月27日

某雑誌の考察に触発されまして(笑)。

ヴィジュアル系、V系、V-ROCK、まあ本当は呼び名はどうでも良いんですが、『視覚、聴覚のみならず五感を刺激する音楽』と言う何処かで見たコンセプトがしっくり納得出来まして、尊敬と敬愛を込めて『VISUAL SHOCK』が正式名称だと自分の中では勝手に思っています。

これはXの副題だったpsychedelic violence crime of visual shockから取ったようにも感じていて。今は無き某CD店で表記されていたジャンル分けを見てはあなるほど、としっくり来たと言う経験から来るものでもあります。

コミックソングや歌謡曲に始まり、JPOPやロック、パンク、メタル、アイドル、洋楽など広義でもたくさんのジャンルを聴けるように、楽しめるようになりましたが、その時代時代で集中して聴いていたジャンルがあって、一番長く聴いているのがこのビジュアル系にカテゴライズされているアーティストさん達なんですよね。

多分世間一般に認知していた表層的な言葉を揶揄として捉えてカテゴライズされているアーティストさん達は否定的な見解を述��ていたりすると思うんですが、個人的には様々なものを取り入れながらも進化して行く革新的なジャンルとして受け止めていたように思います。

ビジュアル系と言う言葉が無かった頃は、自分はインディーズ��ーンの言葉を勝手に取って『インディーズが凄い』と当時の友達にのたまっていたので、呼び名は本当にどうでも良いんでしょう(笑)。

じゃあなんでビジュアル系を聴いてるの？って話になりますが、それだけ衝撃を受けたアーティストさん達や楽曲が多くて、未だにその感動を与え続けてくれている存在でもあるからなのです。

もう十年単位ですよ。信じられますか？ずっと感動を与えてくれるなんて。

そしてビジュアル系を探せば凄いアーティストさん達、好みの音楽に出会えると言う確信もあります。

たくさんの人達が関わっていたし、売り方や売上やムーヴメントでもあったので、否定的に捉えられがちですが、個人的にはここまで切り拓いて来たジャンルは自分の中ではやっぱり一番なんですよね。

だから表層的に捉えられて嫌われていたり遺物のように語られがちなんですが、未だに現在進行形で素晴らしい音楽を生み出し続けているんですよ。

どうもアイコンを揚げ足に取って貶めたがる野暮な輩も多いので今更他人の評価はどうでも良いんですけど、自分の中ではビジュアル系から飛び出したアーティストさん達が好きな事が多いですし、本人達が否定的であったとしても、個人的には『VISUAL SHOCK』であり続けて欲しいなと思っております。本当に凄いジャンルなんですから。

当然凄くない人もフォロワーもいらっしゃいますけどね。そう言うアーティストさん達も楽しんでこその生粋のファンなんじゃないかなと思ったりしますね。ムーヴメントに乗っかって飽きちゃった人は他の部分でもそうでしょうし。

愛し続ける事で見る事の出来た光景もたくさんあるのです。

なのでこれからも死ぬまで『VISUAL SHOCK』やその周辺の方々を主に聴いて行くと思います。

ちなみにUKとかゴスとか色々好きなアーティストさん達のルーツを聴いたりもしたんですが、当人方程の感動は得られませんでした。勉強にはなりましたけど。

要素としては面白いんですけどリアルタイムでは無い事も含めて、やっぱりビジュアル系の要素が入っていた方が個人的な好みなんだと思います。

うっすらですけど見た目では無くて、『VISUAL SHOCK』としての音楽性のある種の統一感はいくつかあると思ってますしね。退廃的であるとか、耽美であるとか。

なので自分の中では確立された一ジャンルであると認識していますよ。

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