Philosophy of a Knife

Saw Philosophy of a Knife, a very tasteless documentary about Japan's infamous chemical/biological research unit 731. The actions of unit 731 are horrific and something I know very little about. It was therefore all the more infuriating that this documentary was a sort of Halloween-ization of the events. The film opens with the sound of buzzing flies as credits roll over gynaecological equipment. Already warning signs are apparent. Why gynaecological equipment? Because it looks creepy, that's why. We proceed to a narrator describing Lenin as an "evil genius" and describing communism in virological terms. Okay, so bias is apparent. We then progress to lurid depictions of pregnant women having their foetuses removed. Tits are focused on as growly music plays, the narrator talks, and we hear stock sound effects of women screaming. It is not clear from this muddle of sound what this footage has to do with anything. Clearly, the point of this film is to horrify and repulse, not to educate and not to illuminate. Especially egregious in this regard are various farcical reenactments of atrocities, each trying to out-atrocity the actual event and each invariably involving gallons of fake blood and Halloween-tier makeup.

These reenactments are narrated by some woman with an unplaceable accent reading from a diary. The diary describes various horrors, such as the notorious frost-bite experiments. In the reenactment, we unaccountably see a woman's face being removed by doctors. A vinyl record is shown playing but the sound on the soundtrack is that of a radio knob being twiddled. After her face is removed, a cockroach crawls out of the woman's mouth and hangs out on her flayed nose. This is all very gross I grant you, but what the hell does that have to do with anything? Are we to understand that the frostbite experiments involved face-ectomies? Are we to understand that the prisoners were incubating cockroaches in their mouths? There's a shot of the doctors tossing hunks of meat onto their tray of surgical instruments in a messy, desultory way, as though they were in an infomercial, demonstrating the improper way to harvest fake organs.

The narration provides chilling and awful information about, for example, the vacuum chambers which would make the blood inside of a prisoner's veins, eyes and teeth boil. Their organs, we hear, writhe out of their mouths as though alive. This horrific fact is at once forgotten when we see the ridiculous, hyperbolic reenactment where the prisoner's head just fucking explodes. If you really want to horrify me, dear filmmakers, just let the facts speak for themselves. If you provide me an escape via snide criticism and ironic lampoon, I'll take it. Don't give me that out. I want to know and understand. I don't want to be shown a Marilyn Manson music video. (Typically, the film ends with some heavy-metal song about death playing over the credits. Very brutal. Very brutal, everyone.)

You know this was an actual event involving actual people, right? It seems immensely tacky to me to turn this into a haunted fun-house ride. Imagine if this were about the holocaust. On that note, actually, I kept mentally contrasting this film with the far superior Shoah. In Shoah, we are made to feel the filmmaker's frustration with the deteriorating information of the past. The facts which are of the utmost importance are so frustratingly difficult to find. In Philosophy of a Knife, meanwhile, we not only gloss over the authenticity of our facts but eagerly participate in making up new ones. We can only hope that the filmmakers have not deluded themselves into thinking that they are actually honouring the events with any of this crap, but a dedication to the victims and executioners at the start of the film makes me wonder.

Okay, as for the actual film itself, it's quite hard to watch. The filmmakers go for an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-too style of horror. Baby cries, women screaming, maniacal laughter, synth organs, and actual organs fill up the soundtrack. The action is all foley-ed unto absurdity. Every scalpel slice makes a sound like cloth ripping or like stones grinding. Every scene involving surgery is accompanied by the sound of a sponge being energetically squeezed. The visual effects are gloppy and involve endless gallons of fluid.

The film is not entirely reprehensible. The filmmakers display a sympathy for the Japanese which is noble and bespeaks a mature recognition that even monstrous people are not actually monsters (well, either that or a sleazy sympathy for the devil.) The best parts of the film, for me, were the bits of narration that came from the diary and an interview with a Russian dude who worked as a translator. These actually informed me about actual events and were not silly or ridiculous. But then again, they weren't in very good company either. Maybe they're part of the film's fabrications as well.

This film is tacky and gross. Regarded as horror, it's not so bad. If we treat it like it's riffing on these atrocities instead of documenting them (as it claims,) then the film improves a great deal. If you must see this thing, regard it as the tasteless exploitation that it is. It's quite effectively repulsive and sensational exploitation, but it is exploitation none the less.