Sion Sono
dir. Sion Sono
Japan 1991, 93’
Subtitles: Polish
Screenings
08.10.2023, 19:00
Cinema Muranów
1989, Toyokawa. A class is listening to a teacher delivering a lecture in a monotone. The narrator, Shiro, begins: “My favourite artist never used his brakes. He was 44. A daredevil who rode into a tree and died. Tomorrow I turn 22, but I’m still gonna be here for the next three years, doing all the same things over and over again.”
Shiro and Keita were inseparable in high school. When they were 18, they were in a film club and made films together: Shiro acted in them and Keita was the director. They worked on a piece called “First base”, a poetic, entertaining story about a group of friends who played baseball, but they never finished it.
We meet them at a time when they are getting up every night to deliver papers together. Shiro dreams of returning to “First base” and reworking the screenplay, but Keita is sceptical and would rather focus on getting into university. She tries to convince Shiro to do the same.
There is a lot of autobiographical material in Bicycle Sighs. It is set in Sono’s home town, and the energetic, mischievous Shiro, whom he plays himself, may be seen as his alter ego. It is structured as a “film within a film” – intertwined with the vicissitudes of the two friends are scenes from “First base”, shot in a nostalgic sepia.
Sion Sono
After a series of experimental, mostly short films shot on Super 8 mm, such as Love Songs, I Am Sion Sono, and Love, in 1991 Sono made his feature-length debut Bicycle Sighs as part of the PIA Film Festival’s 4th edition of its grant programme.
The programme was launched in 1984 as a way of supporting young independent filmmakers shooting their own films on Super 8. It offered them the opportunity to work on their first project on 16-mm film. Why was that so important? The 8-mm film format was largely restricted to the film underground; the material was cheap but technically flawed, and the resulting issues – significant problems with focus in wide-angle shots, frequent colour imbalance, and poor exposure – were more readily accepted by audiences on the alternative circuit. 16-mm film, associated with television productions, documentaries, and independent films, had far better technical parameters, and could thus be used to reach far larger audiences interested in artistic films. The programme organisers also saw to it that the young adepts had the chance to try out professional production methods.
Bicycle Sighs was the most popular of the films made in the early years of the PIA festival grant programme, a favourite with Japanese audiences, and Sono was invited to the festivals in Berlin and Vancouver. This boost, and his first experiences with foreign screenings, led Sono to his early ’90s masterpieces, the nocturne The Room and I Am Keiko, the ecstatic apotheosis of the quotidian.
In Bicycle Sighs, as in Sono’s earliest works, he himself stands on both sides of the camera, as director and as main character – here with the added twist that his character, Shiro, is more taken up with completing his film shot on Super 8 than with his university entrance examinations.
Years on, Sono returned to the watershed experience of the PIA Film Festival in Forest of Love (2019), a Netflix production. In it, we see the main character arrive in Tokyo and start busking. He is approached by a pair of energetic boys who want to make a film with him and submit it for the PIA, a festival which they see as their way into the film world.
Production team
director: Sion Sono
screenplay: Sion Sono, Hisashi Saito
photography: Hiroyuki Kitazawa
editing: Hajime Ishihara
music: Bobo Rabujiro
cast: Sion Sono, Masahiro Sugiyama, Hiroko Yamamoto, Hiromi Kawanishi
producer: Takashi Nishimura, Yutaka Suzuki
distributor: PIA Co., Anchors Production
language: Japanese
colour/B-W: colour
