- Tetsuo
- aka Tetsuo: the Iron Man, 鉄男
- Directed by Shinya Tsukamoto, 塚本晋也
- 1989
- 67 minutes
- IMDb
- Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
Tetsuo was Shinya Tsukamoto's ticket to world-wide cult fame. The movie is canonized as a part of Japanese movies 101 in the west and countless pages has been written about it, even though the movie is impossible to explain.
It is about the melding of flesh and metal and a battle or love scene between two or maybe three rivaling or maybe loving characters in different stages of flesh/machine transmutations. The story is impossible to follow. The camerawork should be impossible to follow as well, Tsukamoto is constantly shifting between extreme closeups, stop-motion scenes, angles and focus, think a music video director's commercial debut cranked up to the max and you get the idea. It is constantly pounding the viewer with new information, throbbing back and forth with a logic of its own but miraculously you always understand exactly what's going on. Camera wise that is. The music is a pounding noise mat composed by Chu Ishikawa and the obvious sound effects are quite fitting for the movie.
Tetsuo is the best cyberpunk movie ever made.
It is also beautiful:
Tetsuo Trailer
The movie is easy to find if you haven't seen it yet, you can order a subtitled DVD from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
By the way, I blame the lack of updates on Stockholm Pride
3 comments:
Just saw it last week, it was somewhat disturbing but really interesting. It's curious how the film uses stop-motion to give speed to the action. Still, I don't think it's the best cyberpunk movie ever.
everybody knows tetsou
@Antonyo: Yeah using stop-motion to speed things up is a wierd technique, usually the opposite is achieved. And maybe I overexaggerated but it is definitely the best Japanese cyberpunk movie. Made 1989. In black-and-white.
@Anonymous: now they do.