the underground film ⑨ Guinea Pigs is a series of short films taken by Satoru Ogura and Hideshi Hino, two Japanese producers of "The Words Are Not Amazing" from 1985 to 199. There are six films in this series, namely Devil's Experiment,1985), Flower Of Flesh And Blood, 1985) and The Undead (He Never Dies, 1986), Mermaid In A Manhole, Androids Of The Notre Dame,1988) and Devil Women Doctor,199), with film lengths ranging from 43 minutes to 65 minutes. Since its release, this series of films have caused an uproar in Japan and Europe and the United States, so that they are banned from being shown in all countries and can only be sold in the audio-visual market in the form of Home Video or DVD, thus falling into the reputation of "underground movies". In fact, it is a far cry from the underground movies which are generally independent, experimental and not profitable, because since this series of films were put on the market, its sales in Japan even exceeded the Hollywood blockbusters introduced in the same period. For example, Flowers of Flesh and Mermaid in the Cellar became one of the TOP TEN sales of audio-visual chain stores within two months of their release in Japan, and the achievements of Flowers of Flesh even surpassed Spielberg's sci-fi romantic masterpiece E.T., which was introduced in the same period. At the same time, in the Western European and North American markets, this series has been all-powerful in the audio-visual market since it was introduced in the early 199s, and the FBI in the United States has been involved because of its high realism. Of course, the result of the investigation is still "fake". Although most consumers of different skin colors are extremely disgusted and resentful of this peak "Snuff Pic." or "Gore—hound Films", it is strange that the crazy people they hate are also crazy about buying, which can create such a large-scale abnormal consumer psychology among fans. The series of underground movies of "Guinea Pig" can be said to have created a myth. For the discussion of this series of films, let's start with the title of "Guinea Pig", which seems to be quite different from the content of the film.
The international Chinese version of Encyclopedia Britannica defines Guinea Pig as: "A domesticated rodent guinea pig, which is native to South America. Domesticated before the Inca era, it was introduced to Europe shortly after the discovery of America, and soon became a favorite ornamental animal and valuable experimental animal. " Attending, it can be seen that the guinea pig is just a domesticated animal for people to enjoy and experiment, but it is strange that although the theme of the series of films is "experiment", there is no real guinea pig in the film, and the "guinea pig" we see is a living and bloody human body. The first episode of this series, Devil's Experiment, tells the story of three masked young men who carried out various atrocities on a woman in order to examine the "limit of pain that human mind and body can bear", including punching, kicking, acupuncture, noise interference, dirty object attack and the most cruel gouging. Later, the tortured and tragic woman was dumped in the wilderness by them. The second episode "Bloody Flowers" is also a story about kidnapping a woman and cruel torture. A perverted man dressed in an ancient Japanese samurai costume and smeared with makeup dismembered a woman like a work of art after anesthesia. After that, he actually disclosed all the "works of art" in his collection to the camera: a large number of dead heads and limbs that had already rotted and were covered with plants and parasites. Although the third episode changed the "soup" and didn't make a fuss about kidnapping and torturing others, it still didn't change the "medicine" and showed the same bloody "self-harm". An ordinary clerk, who was quite frustrated in his career, even used various instruments to self-harm in order to find excitement. As a result, after discovering that he was "immortal", he was ecstatic and immediately called his colleagues and gave a disgusting caesarean section performance in front of them. Although the film ends in a joke-like scene, it still can't dilute its strong bloody smell. The fourth and fifth works of the Guinea Pig series, The Mermaid in the Cellar and The Madonna Robot, can be regarded as two more thoughtful works in this series, but they are still full of blood. The former "Mermaid in the Cellar" seems to be inspired by the "daughter of the sea" in Andersen's fairy tale, but the Japanese "alienated" this beautiful fairy tale. In the film, an autistic middle-aged painter who lost his wife went to the holy place in his heart-a dirty sewer to find some creative inspiration, only to accidentally find the "mermaid" in his childhood fantasy, but this mermaid has been immersed in industrial wastewater for a long time because of being stranded, and her body has begun to rot. Out of pity, the painter moved the mermaid to the big bathtub at home and took good care of it, but the mermaid was terminally ill and her body was getting worse every day. The disappointed painter had no choice but to record the whole process of her decay and death with pictures according to the meaning of the mermaid. In the end, the mermaid died in extreme decay, and the painter broke down and dismembered the mermaid himself. Afterwards, he was arrested by the police who refused to believe this "adult fairy tale" for murdering his wife. The reason why the film has certain ideological content lies in the fact that the director deliberately contrasts and switches a colorful painting about "Mermaid" with an oil painting that records the decay of mermaid when the painter was young, so as to emphasize the alienation and corrosion of industrial civilization on the ecological environment and people's new soul. The tragic death of mermaid symbolizes the death of pure beauty of human beings in industrial society. The latter, Robot of Notre Dame, makes a "cruel" discussion on the contradiction between science and human nature by telling the story of a dwarf scientist who used organs obtained from living experiments to save his terminally ill sister, but was rejected by his sister. Due to the bad influence of the series of films "Guinea Pig" on Japanese society, especially the inducement to teenagers, the public began to accuse it of being "over-expressive" to cruelty. Under this pressure, the last film of the series "Devil Doctor" had to change its "moderate route" and combine a series of bloody but humorous novelty stories into chapters to complete the closing of the mountain of the series "Guinea Pig".
why are the live people replaced by the role of "guinea pig" in the series of "guinea pig"? This involves what daniel bell called the break between roles and people in capitalist society. In the book Contradictions of Capitalist Culture, Bell divided capitalist society into three opposing fields: economic and technological field, political field and cultural field. He pointed out that in the field of economy and technology, all industrialized societies are driven by economic impulse and put individuals in a bureaucratic cooperation system. Under this system, people's behavior is regulated by their roles. As a result, individuals are treated as "things" rather than people and become tools for enterprises or institutions to maximize profits. In a word, the individual has disappeared in his function. On the contrary, the cultural field is characterized by self-expression and self-satisfaction. "It is anti-institutional, independent, and measured by personal interests." In this case, one of the contradictions in capitalist society is that "the tendency of democratization of culture will urge everyone to realize their own' potential', so it will also cause the' self' to collide with the' role requirements' required by the technological-economic order". From this, we can understand why people are "materialized" as "guinea pigs". The post-industrial society's "role requirement" for people has turned people into mindless "objects" or playthings, and this extra repression based on instinctive repression has a profound contradiction with the extremely free self-expression advertised by modern capitalist culture. Therefore, the break between the two fields provides a group of extreme "artists" with a creative idea that can express themselves and inevitably carry the virus of capitalist materialization. In this way, it is reasonable to "materialize" people into thoughtless human playthings-guinea pigs.
In fact, in the same period (late 198s and early 199s), the Japanese were not the only ones engaged in such evil "film experiments" as objectifying people. In 1987 and 1991, Jrg Buttgereit, a German, also made a forbidden film series-Confused Romance, which was not inferior to the Japanese. The reason why this "romance" is confusing is that it is neither a romance between men and women, nor a romance between men and women, but a romance between women and male corpses! This film is as close as Guinea Pigs in terms of bloodiness and abnormal index, but unlike Guinea Pigs' fanatical worship of sensory stimulation, the director may have inherited the rigorous rational tradition of the Germans and still has serious artistic pursuits in this "forbidden film". For this reason, Butgoreg specially added a line of famous sayings from western philosophers at the beginning of each episode. The first episode is: "Do people have to eat other creatures to survive?" The second episode is: "I want to dominate everything!" Judging from the contents of the two films in this series, it seems that these two sentences are the themes of the two films. The first episode, completed in 1987, mainly shows a young man and woman's fascination with corpses. The climax of the film is particularly shocking, and it turns out to be a three-person "sex game" between a man and a woman with special hobbies and a highly decomposed corpse. In order to make this disgusting "spectacle" unprecedented in the history of human film look beautiful, the director ingeniously added a layer of filter in front of the camera lens, so that this originally not "romantic" scene was shaped as colorful as a dream. Based on this scene, in my opinion, Brinell can raise a banner of "dirty aesthetics" on "film aesthetics". However, the beautification of "Oedipus" seems to be a little far from the finishing touch. In fact, this is just the director's way of blinding. The part that clearly "points the topic" in the film is a long shot that records the whole process of the butcher slaughtering a rabbit for more than one minute (in the second episode, it was changed to dissecting a live seal). These documentary scenes are put together with expressive scenes, and according to the logical law of "positive-negative-combination" put forward by Hegel, we can draw a conclusion that human beings are a heinous beast that destroys all living things (including human beings themselves), in other words, they have to eat "other" creatures to survive. After the reunification of Germany and Germany, Butgoreg did not make his desperate heart "hot" because of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. He intensified his efforts to launch a sequel to the film "Trapped". This time, a woman with "necrophilia" hooked up with an actor who voiced porn, and they had a "human" relationship. It's a pity that the woman who can't change her true colors, in the second half of the film, is bestial, cuts off her new boyfriend's head at the moment of extreme excitement, and puts her preserved old boyfriend's rotting head on her new boyfriend's bloody body, and then continues to enjoy the happiness of being a human being. While continuing the basic spirit of the last episode, this episode seems to add a little fear of "extreme feminists" because "I want to dominate everything!"