I wanted to open this selection for the Cruel Machine programme with an early short film by George Miller, the director of the Mad Max trilogy. His short is called Violence in the Cinema (Part One); it comprises a spoof lecture on screen violence, during which the lecturer is repeatedly attacked and maimed in ever gorier and more extreme simulations of violent acts. I always thought that this little film was an effective demonstration of the way that audience disbelief can be alternately suspended and brought into play by knowing use of the medium. But it seems that this is one back page which Dr Miller no longer wants to have turned, and so we have to do without it. I will bring something on video (probably from Japan) as a replacement curtain-raiser.
The other two films in the selection, both by chance made in 1994, are short narratives about sado-masochism. Eric Khoo’s film, in which a young man obsessed with pain seizes, tortures and kills another man, is an oblique metaphor for Singapore’s distinctive blend of authoritarianism and nannying social engineering – in short, a political allegory. Saito Yukie’s film is more personal: a ‘diary’ of the relationship between a masochistic girl and her sadistic boyfriend, which happens to be acted by Saito herself and her real-life boyfriend Obitani. Whether the film should be read as a ‘confession’, a psycho-drama, a documentary or a wish-fulfilment projection is open to debate.
Programme:
Eric Khoo: Pain (Singapore 1994, B&W, 16 mm, 31 min)
Saito Yukie: Ikikure domo machi akazu/Gradually Set, Far from Sunrise (Japan 1994, B&W, 16 mm, 24 min)
