Where many films about artists offer up the creative impulse as a substitute for worldly experience, Masumura's fetishistic extravaganza goes beneath experience to the senses themselves. Michio, a blind sculptor, kidnaps a young model, Aki, who has gained notoriety for a series of sadomasochistic photos. In Aki's curvaceous body, Michio believes he has found the perfect torso for his masterpiece of "tactual art," a sculptural form to be caressed not viewed. Aki is held captive in his studio, a cavernous room decorated with huge mockups of female anatomy-lips protrude from one wall, breasts and ears from others. Aki eventually succumbs to her imprisonment as Michio, in his Braille-like tactile probings, transposes her every pore to a mound of clay. But soon the pleasures of the creative act prove limited, so, abandoning art for its own sake, Michio and Aki descend into an erotic frenzy that leads not to the gallery but to oblivion. Based on a story by Edogawa Rampo, Japan's "Edgar Allan Poe."-Steve Seid