Art Video: Cold Documentary SM from a Concrete Storeroom

In 1982 Yoshio Kawamura founded Art Video (アートビデオ), the first Japanese adult-video company built to make hardcore SM and nothing else. The story told about the camera is that he bought a home video camera to film his children growing up, then used it on the debut tape, Chikashitsu no Inma (地下室の淫魔, Incubus of the Basement). The first crew was five people. The ones named in that account are a female model, the actor Toru Kuroda, the rope master Chimuo Nureki, and Kawamura himself on the camera under the name Kazuya Mine. Sales were cash by mail. A small ad in a few SM magazines, a registered letter with the money inside, a bare tape with no outer jacket. Orders kept coming. In 1983 the company was registered as Kawamura, Ltd. In 1985 it joined the Japan Video Ethics Association (Videorin), and the tapes went into adult shops and rental stores. In 1997 the corporation was renamed AVA Co., Ltd. The name on the box stayed Art Video.

Basements, almost no music, long takes

CineMagic, founded in 1983, took the other road: SM fiction adapted for the screen, with a polished jacket. Art Video stayed raw. A hard underground record, varnish left off. Together the two are the old SM-video houses. Art Video shoots basements, bare concrete storerooms, and dark cells, not the bright living-room set of ordinary AV. Music is barely there. The track is the room: a whip crack, hot wax hitting skin, the flat smack of flesh, winch gears turning, and the sound a gagged performer makes. The through-line is a will coming apart, and the shame under that. The training runs long and is shot close, from the first struggle to the point where the performer is physically and mentally under the other person’s control. Suspension (吊り) and the rope pulling in until the skin flushes are often left as one take of several minutes. The cut does not step in to shorten it. Genitals are mosaicked. The people on camera are adults, and the scene is acted.

Mine, Kuroda, Nawa, Dirty Kudo

When Kawamura shot straight hardcore records he used the name Kazuya Mine. When the tape was a plotted SM drama he used another name, Ryou Takamura (高村良), so the story films would not be mixed up with the documentary ones. Toru Kuroda started as the house sadist in front of the camera, then moved behind it as MURUZOU (夢流ZOU). The work is mean, with a streak of absurd humor. Nawa Tooru (名和透) worked the rope itself: the pattern of the ties, the line of the body, the visual pressure of rope against skin. Dirty Kudo went for extreme humiliation and enema scenes, then left and carried that line to Big Morkal.

Koi Iijima carried a lot of the late-1980s and early-1990s tapes. She looked strikingly like the star Ai Iijima, and she played bound wives and widows. In the 2000s Izumi Amami (天海いずみ) was the SM lead people pointed at. She could take a long realistic session, and that endurance made her the benchmark for this kind of masochist performance. Tsubasa Okuna came over from the major studio S1 and appeared in Art Video’s 2008 AV Grand Prix entry, Jōnetsu M Inbaku Chōkyō (情熱M淫縛調教, Passionate M Bondage Training). Rinako Hirasawa, Sara Aoki, and Saki Otsuka are the other names attached to the label’s furthest taboo scenes.

Those shoots are what the long series are made of. Ryōki no Ori (猟奇の檻, Cage of the Bizarre) ran past 50 volumes. Bizarre Orgasm passed 70. Chikarō no Tōsakuma (地下牢の倒錯魔, Perverted Devil in the Dungeon) sits with them.

The mania shelf, then a catalog with no new tapes

Art Video is the label that made “mania” — the extreme-fetish category — a retail shelf other companies could follow. Attackers and Dogma, later, went into edge material on ground this studio had already shown would sell.

In 2004 the company opened its own pay site, Kinbaku no Hanazono — Art SM Online (緊縛の花園, Garden of Kinbaku). In 2010 it joined the Black Label network inside the Mousouzoku group. In April 2017 Yoshio Kawamura, founder and the director at the center of the label, died. From May that year Art Video stopped making new films and turned to DVD reissues of the old tapes and digital releases of the same catalog. The official site closed on 30 June 2017. The classics are still up on FANZA and still move under Mousouzoku: the same pictures, first issued on analog tape, now sold again as discs and files.