Violated Angels

Koji Wakamatsu's 1967 Japanese film departs from the Richard Speck case, in which eight nurses were killed in a Chicago nurses' residence in 1966. Wakamatsu moves the event to Japan and tells it almost entirely in one room, in sixty minutes. The film does not make the killings a source of suspense; it shows the perpetrator's gaze and passivity from a cold distance. The form is extremely radical: largely black and white, switching to colour for the blood; static shots, long silences, almost no dialogue. Wakamatsu's interest is not psychological explanation but the exposure of a particular formation of masculine consciousness. Emerging from within the pink film industry, the work has a direct link to the political cinema of the period in Japan. Who it's for: viewers interested in the Japanese avant-garde, Wakamatsu's work and radical formal experiment. Who it's not for: anyone who does not want to watch a film centred on sexual violence against women and mass murder, or who will find telling it from the perpetrator's viewpoint indefensible.