Hisayasu Sato, the King of Pink

Hisayasu Sato

Hisayasu Sato — born in 1959, in Shizuoka City — began his career in the late-70s as a director of “Pink Films” or “eroductions” (erotic productions), these were films made by independent companies which operated within the confines of the soft-core genre — in terms of taste, only a grade above traditional pornography. Sato, as well as his contemporaries, the so-called “Four Devils” or “Four Kings of Pink” (Hisayasu Sato, Yuji Tariji, Takahisa Zeze, and Takeshi Ishii) took the freedom offered directors working within the Pink genre, much like that offered to directors of Roman Porno, to make films which both straddled and blurred the line between art and exploitative smut.

Fig. 1 Hisayasu Sato

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Filmography

One gets the best sense of Sato’s filmographic character by skimming through the titles of his films, which are sentence long descriptions often having nothing to do with the plot they claim to disclose, for example,  “Office Lady Rape Devouring the Giant Tits,” decoding this gibberish is futile, as I can only assume something (taste, among other things) was lost in translation. Some more: “Naked Action: College Girl Rape Edition”; “Pervert Ward: Torturing the White Uniform”; “Lesbian Rape: Sweet Honey Juice”; “Pleasure Masturbation: New Wife Version”;  “Lolita: Vibrator Torture”; “Married Woman Collector”; and the regrettable “Horse, Woman, Dog” and “Neigh Means Yes,” both movies billed as “horse films.” Those whose curiosity for pink cinema was not torpedoed by the syntax of the above titles, will be satisfied to find them greatly inadequate for the films they preface, as they belie much of Sato’s true talent and the quality of his filmography.  

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A Style Of Coarse Technical Quality

If there is an era which epitomizes the mood of Sato’s worlds, it is the 80s; his films feature the now-fetishised VHS look of the so-called “Lo-Fi” aesthetic (in a purely authentic way), meaning that the general technical quality is, by traditional standards, subpar, which, when paired with the on-screen sex and violence with semi-realistic acting and impressively produced gore effects, gives his film the disconcerting look and feel of a snuff film (or at the very least a film made under dubious and or not quite law-abiding circumstances). Adding to this effect is that the general voyeur-ishness of most porn films is here amplified to the tenth power; even if voyeurism is not directly a subject of the plot, it is always present and most times prevalent in motif. Handheld cameras moving with human excitement, following the more bawdy parts of body with particular human interest, are reminders of this feeling: a breach of privacy. Another great contributor to this effect is the environments of Sato’s films, namely the fact that they don’t feel like sets, i.e., they don’t feel fictional. This is likely because they are, in fact, not sets but rather the homes or apartments of cast or crew, dutifully offering their apartment as the filming site of sexual simulations — this sacrificing of one’s own property for the greater good of the movie is common in low budget films. All the kitsch belonging to the real world owner is left as set decoration — Rococo lamps and stuffed Snoopy dolls — reminding the viewer of their own home, similarly kitschy, and of a cozy so uncinematic that one would never assume it to be the location of depraved assault. This is all part of the unsettling quality of Sato’s films; they, though ridiculous, feel real. Yet, despite the rough aesthetic, dispiriting subject matter, and the naturalistic way in which they are depicted, the pleasure to be had when watching a Sato film is far from the usual schadenfreude of snuff-viewing. There is an artistic quality to enjoy (which more than makes up for the lack of technical “quality” so often cited as the director’s, or even the genre’s, primary failing). Sato is clearly a very inventive filmmaker, one who has the film student's mindset of wanting to avoid a conventional shot whenever possible. When it comes to angles, Sato’s absolute plethora of bizarrely contrived camera positions and hiding-spots is creativity on par with that of the porn director, whose ability to contrive new angles when shooting its primary subject — penetration — is incontestable. In a way this makes such films as  “Naked Action: College Girl Rape Edition,” fit subjects for film-scholarly study.

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Click HERE for the article "Nudity, Sex and Violence: The Rise of the Pinku Eiga"