Radical Japanese films at AGNSW
When you break the traditional language of cinema, the cemented hierarchy of images goes with it. Art by Chloe Callow
February 23, 2021
Sometimes, the only way to repair the machine is to break it. The Art Gallery of NSW is screening two incendiary masterworks of radical cinema as part of the Japan Film Festival: Matsumoto Toshio’s feverish exploration into the LGBT underground of 1960s Tokyo,
Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) and Tsukamoto Shinya’s break-neck industrial fable of flesh being fused with metal,
Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989).
The animosity towards ‘respectable’ style shared by these two films is well-founded. Unfortunately, the vast majority of commercial cinema is born from capitalist mega-conglomerates, creating an endless stream of disposable media. Popular films use a grammar that reduces signifiers of reality to a strict patriarchal and heterosexist hierarchy of images that saturate the visual
A man wakes up one morning to find himself slowly transforming into a living hybrid of meat and scrap metal; he dreams of being sodomised by a woman with a snakelike, strap-on phallus. Clandestine experiments of sensory depravation and mental torture unleash psychic powers in test subjects, prompting them to explode into showers of black pus or tear the flesh off each other s bodies in a sexual frenzy. Meanwhile, a hysterical cyborg sex-slave runs amok through busy streets whilst electrically charged demi-gods battle for supremacy on the rooftops above. This is cyberpunk, Japanese style: a brief filmmaking movement that erupted from the Japanese underground to garner international attention in the late 1980s.