Sion Sono
dir. Sion Sono
Japan 1995/2012, 161’
Subtitles: Polish
Screenings
07.10.2023, 19:00
Cinema Muranów
In 1995, Sion Sono, along with 2,000 others from the Tokyo Gagaga performative collective, recorded over 150 hours of film on Hi8 video tape, in urban spaces, during the group’s performances, with no licences and no final script. Sono had run out of money to complete the project, and was only able to take it to the cutting room over a decade later.
It is a vision of Tokyo in the later 1990s, violence-ridden and plagued by a series of attacks on foreigners carried out by Japanese gangs with colourful names such as Kamikadze. Their targets are any immigrants – white, black, or other Asian. In Kōenji, a district with a large Chinese minority, the foreigners organize themselves into gangs to take revenge for the violence, and they are emulated by similar criminal groups in other districts.
This is an energetic, eccentric story about crime, violence, and love, spiked with Shaekspearean tropes filtered through LGBT motifs. The anarchistic collective production method produced an exceptional film that remains fresh and provocative to this day.
Sion Sono
“Nobody even really noticed me until I turned 47. I was an unknown. It’s always been the same: if a young artist doesn’t make something that outrages old people, there’s no point in it, regardless of whether it’s music or cinema - it has to be criticized by older people.”
In Bad Film, Sono returns to his youthful experiments and looks at this vast body of technically flawed archival material that is nonetheless full of immense potential. His skill at turning archival recordings into a film that is still exciting and unexpected years on, now that it is finally finished, remains a trade secret peculiar to his intuition.
The Hi8 format was characteristic for semi-professional video cameras in the 1990s, and its strong contrasts and full image could record a surprising amount of detail. The “guerilla” methods of filming and improvisation produced a body of varied and visually rather incohesive material. Sono nonetheless succeeded in bringing order to the chaos. Bad Film captures the spirit of the experimental and independent Japanese cinema of that decade, but certainly does not come across as a bad film from the audience’s perspective.
Production team
director: Sion Sono
screenplay: Sion Sono
camera: Tokio Gagaga
editor: Sion Sono
cast: Ishikawa Yûya, Itô Takeshi, Mori Kôta, Nishimura Yoshihiro, Sion Sono
language: Japanese
colour/ BW: colour
