Re-release of six films by Yasuzo Masumura: a lascivious golden cinema

There are eel-like filmmakers whose work slips through your fingers, resistant to any assignment, disturbing and seductive, and which, although brought back to light with its resurrections, seems to forever retain the opacity of the new. Thus Yasuzo Masumura: after The Red Angel and Tattoo two years ago , a new salvo of six films is being released in theaters on Wednesday, August 27 – in addition to the two aforementioned, Passion, Seisaku's Wife, Doctor Hanaoka's Wife and The Blind Beast. And once again, we are gripped by astonishment, so much so that the universe imbued with perversity and morbid eroticism that exudes from its troubled images remains without equal.

If he was a link between the classical age of the great masters (Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse) and the Japanese New Wave, he remains above all a filmmaker on the margins – despite having worked all his life within a single studio, Daiei , where he easily made three to four films a year. Marginal, he is so first of all by his career p