Wild Japan Day 7 - The School of the Holy Beast

I'd heard the name of Norifumi Suzuki's notorious 'nunsploitation' film spoken in hushed tones by cult film enthusiasts for a while, but nothing could prepare me for the experience of seeing The School of the Holy Beast on the big screen for the first time. It is quite simply jaw dropping in every respect. For one thing its almost impossible to make a more provocative film about Christianity, although Jasper Sharp's cautionary note regarding Japan's tiny and oft persecuted Christian community gives the film a very different shade then if it had been made in, say, Italy where the subject matter would carry a more relevant and politicised charge. But then I'm not sure that this makes the film necessarily conservative.

The film centres on Maya, a liberated woman of the sixties who joins St Clore's convent in order to discover the fate of her mother. The nun's are all lined up, like a military parade, and as Maya is introduced to them, the camera emphasises the rigidity of the life there by tracking between the lines of grim faces. The film is full of such striking compositions, which along with the sumptuous colour photography demonstrates the director's aesthetic talent, and the film's surprisingly high production values (the sexploitation film in the ailing film industry of the seventies wasn't merely a subgenre, but the bread and butter genre for studios like Toei and Nikkatsu, the latter of which moved its output exclusively to this area).

One of the film's alternative titles is 'The Transgressor', and this applies as much to the film's formal and generic transitions than it does to its protagonists. Beginning as a sex comedy with ample scenes of titilation, most notably the sequence in which Maya sneaks her over-sexed boyfriend and his sidekick into the nunnery to pleasure the frigid mother superior in her sleep, the film lurches into the horror genre, becoming increasingly dark in tone. Revelations are made concerning the death of Maya's mother, tortured to death at the hands of the Mother Superior after she was inpregnated by the priest Father Kukinuma, who bares the scars of Nagasaki on his back in the director's excurision into that most horrific of Japan's recent experiences. History seems to be repeating after another nun is found to be with child and is tried as a witch (she is forced to drink a bucket of salt water, then a crucifix is placed between her legs and the nuns form a circle around her, waiting for her to soil the lord and thus demonstrate her guilt). Such transitions also occur in individual scenes, such as the one in which Maya is punished by being whipped naked with rose stems whilst bound by thorned vines; starting in a fairly disturbing and sordid vein, it becomes increasingly poetic and beautiful with an impressionistic flurry of rose buds and tossed hair.

School of the Holy Beast takes the theme of sexuality in the convent, the subject of Michael Powell's excellent Black Narcissus and takes it to an extreme that is almost unthinkable in its capacity to shock. The truly astonishing thing is that whilst from the title and synopsis little would suggest a film of any depth, the end result is, somehow, utterly beautiful and sophisticated.