[Our thanks to Michael Panduro for the following review.]
Philosophy of a Knife does indeed live up to it’s promise of being one of the most disturbing films ever made. This one ranks up right along masterful, thought-provoking mindfucks like Pasolini’s Salo and T. F. Mou’s similar Men Behind The Sun. And like it’s predecessors it definitely can’t be accused of pulling back any punches. Stylistically the films couldn’t be further apart but the subject matter is the same as Mou engaged in his Men Behind The Sun / Black Sun series, namely the blackest boil on Japanese history: The horrifying experiments of Unit 731 during the 1930s and 40s.
A remote facility, officially known as a lumber-mill, Unit 731 was in fact a Japanese research facility experimenting in biological warfare and carrying out it’s vast array of tests on human subjects. Prisoners of war, locals suspected of counter-activity – even infants and pregnant women were among the more than ten thousand people (states Wikipedia), of mainly Chinese and Russian decent, subjected to various experiments under the command of General Shiro Ishii.
Part documentary, part dramatization and part fiction, Philosophy of a Knife mixes stock war-footage with interview snippets of the last known eye-witness, former doctor and interpreter Anatoly Protasov, and dramatic re-enactments of the atrocities that took place. Russian director Andrey Iskanov deploys a stylized black and white photography that makes for seamless transitions between stock and recorded footage, his flawless sense of silent cinema aesthetics making the non-stop scenes of pain and suffering feel surprisingly realistic, despite the fact that they are presented in black and white and with postrecorded sound.
That this all really happened makes it all the more revolting and it underlines the fact that Iskanov isn’t just out to score in the lucrative torture-porn-industry that some say is modern horror. No, the Russian director has a very real, very confrontational agenda. For one, like Mou, he is out to tell us that atrocities like these should never be forgotten and secondly he uses documentary-style voice-over to explain how many of the scientists involved were indeed never trialled or punished – some were even recruited by the US in exchange for their research results.
You need to go underneath these obvious points and explicit accusations, though, to find the true passion of director Iskanov. What really seems to fascinate the maker of this – hold on – four hour epic, is the human condition. There’s a morbid fascination running through every scene right along with the wish to disgust – a desire to examine what makes people do atrocious deeds in times of war and idealism and a sincere interest in why we find stories like these so disgustingly fascinating.
The film is basically a chronological rundown of the facts, from the establishing of the base to the trials of the prosecuted, but there is a human angle to the story. There’s a Japanese officer who finds sympathy for one of the Russian prisoners, there’s a nurse who writes guilty letters to her diary and there are comments from Protasov on the more humane things that happened at the camp, even putting a human face on the otherwise monstrously cynical General Ishii. Iskanov uses the massive running time both to disgust and to force reflection on the part of the viewer. His unfolding of the morbid, the macabre, the sickening is revolting at first, then it turns disgusting and at some point, without thinking about it, you find that you’ve been desensitised just a little bit to the gruesome detail on screen – and that’s bloody scary!
Sure it could have been shorter, but that would have undermined the entire point of the picture. When a prisoner has her teeth removed without anaesthetic, we don’t get the privilege of cutting away after glimpsing a teeth or two, we get to see every single tooth be pulled out in excruciating close-ups. When a helpless victim is burned under an x-ray, we see him burn for several minutes and when we are subjected to the most horrifying abortion in movie history, we stay in it for minutes that feel like hours. This isn’t a story with a curve of drama or a plot to move along, this is a confrontational piece of art-cinema, a film that uses it’s colossal running time to leave you unsettled with your own mental state. If you make it through and you don’t feel emotionally sacked and physically exhausted, then we really do need to take a look at the desensitising effects of horror-films. For this is by no means a horror-flick in any traditional sense, but it is indeed a horrifying film that should leave you gasping and almost ashamed.
Many will be hopelessly lost by the exhausting runtime, the ultra-artsy cinematography - both mimicking silent cinema in aesthetics and referencing post-modernist filmmakers like Shinya Tsukamoto in rabid energy – the sometimes visible, budgetary constraints and the brutality of the subject matter. Others will wallow in the same morbid fascination that I bet sparked Iskanov’s interest in the first place. Definitely not for everyone, but guaranteed to be a film you won’t forget.
Review by Michael Panduro