Shinya Tsukamoto

The following images are taken from promotional material for the film Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (2009), the third film in the series by Shinya Tsukamoto, who is a personal favourite of mine from since I was a child. I first saw Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1991) in the mid-nineties, when I would have been around ten years old, after my older brother had taped it from television. The plot follows a man who is pursued by mysterious thugs subscribing to a kind of metal fetishism, who seek to draw out a violent transformational physical response from the man, in which weapons, namely guns or cannons, emerge from his body. Through their actions, the man accidentally kills his own young son in an uncontrollable fit of rage, aimed at the men who kidnap him. Throughout the film, he goes to and from a state of physical transformation, somewhat reminiscent perhaps of a cross of Cronenberg's  The Fly and Cameron's The Terminator, becoming entirely lethal and completely out of control. By the films conclusion, he is essentially a tank rolling through Tokyo with no intention in mind other than destruction.

The third film in the series is essentially a more modernised reworking of the story of the second film, with some more of the art-house influences present in the 1989 Tetsuo: The Iron Man. The visual effects are refined and the 'Tetsuo' design is more complex visually, and the film itself has a considerably higher fidelity than the grainy film used in the original two films. However, by transitioning to digital film, there is a quality in the original films that is lost, namely the dirty roughness reminiscent of rust, a theme very significant to the first two films. The Bullet Man is a more chaotic affair than Body Hammer but lacks of the black humour of The Iron Man, resulting in a film that is less certain of itself perhaps than it's predecessors.

Tsukamoto's work is often concerned with transformation or the transformational effect of emotions, often rage, on a person. Tokyo Fist (1995)  is similarly concerned with anger and violence, infused with a great deal of the black humour present in the first Tetsuo film. In A Snake of June (2002), the main themes are voyeurism and malaise, with the main character a woman in an interminable marriage that is completely sexually repressed, who inadvertently inspires a photographer to 'save her' the way she saved him through a sort of Samaritans hotline. He does this by blackmailing her into exploring her sexuality, threatening to send on photographs of her masturbating to her husband if she doesn't comply.

Tsukamoto stars in all of these films, and would typically be considered an auteur as he writes and directs most of his work, occasionally taking direction only projects. This would indicate that these roles that he plays (the antagonist in all three Tetsuo films, the photographer in A Snake of June and the anti-hero in Tokyo Fist) have great significance to him.

 

Man-machine physical transformation (American actor Eric Bossick) in Tetsuo: The Bullet Man

 Shinya Tsukamoto in Tetsuo: The Bullet Man

Promotional artwork for Tetsuo II: Body Hammer

Promotional artwork for Tetsuo: The Bullet Man

Tetsuo II: Body Hammer trailer

A Snake of June trailer