October 2–8, 2023
Cinema Muranów, Warsaw
Going into our first meeting with Sion Sono, we are expecting some kind of bizarre circus character – a kind of Mad Hatter and defiant amanojaku in one, capable of plunging everything around him into chaos without warning. The impression that emerges, however, is one of a diminutive, reserved, somewhat retiring, timid man. Like the Wizard of Oz, Sono has retreated behind the ramparts of his own art in such a way as to prevent anyone from discovering that he is, in fact, very ordinary.
New art from Japan
The Sion Sono Retrospective at the InlanDimensions International Arts Festival 2023 – the first such extensive, multidimensional presentation of his film oeuvre in Poland – is also a pendant to the review of films by Shūji Terayama at the 2019 Nowe Horyzonty International Film Festival. This retrospective offers audiences a change to savour a new art that we can confidently call “post-Terayama”.
“If I had seen Shūji Terayama’s film Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets! earlier, I would probably have had more courage to lay my hand on my girlfriend’s knee in the dark of the cinema that time and tell her I loved her. Then again, perhaps my life would have turned out differently and I might never have become a film director. As it was, Terayama came into my life later, but his films, the stage performances of Tenjō Sajiki, and the famous essay Iede no o-susume certainly had a huge influence on all my work,” Sono confesses.
Sono went into film almost by accident, when he decided to take his avant-garde poetry into the public space, onto city walls and into public toilets, recording himself writing texts and reciting them on Super 8 film. This cheap, technically far from perfect medium nonetheless possessed a tempting raw quality; it was also popular among underground artists because it offered them independence, thereby contributing to the democratization of film. From this point it was just a step to the retrospective short I Am Sion Sono (1985), a stream-of-consciousness piece by the 22-year-old. Super 8 was to become one of many recording media that he used over his five decades of work.
This will be the first ever opportunity in Poland to see two of his early full-length films from the 1990s. While they are polar opposites in terms of their colours, atmosphere, and themes, they are equally captivating in the sensual, grainy quality of the film. The defining quality of The Room (1992), which is composed of just 61 static shots, is the refinement of its monochromatic frames and down-to-the-wire minimalism. It is a deconstruction of a gangster movie, in which a mysterious man seeks a room to let, but finds fault with every one he views. His protracted odyssey around Tokyo with the young female letting agent is also a curious kind of portrait of the Japanese capital in the early ’90s. I Am Keiko (1997), by contrast, is a journey into the colourful but lonely inner world of its eponymous heroine, who, like the author in I Am Sion Sono, is almost 22, and is trying to describe her life as she lives it from one day to the next. This is one of the purest celebrations of the quotidian in Japanese cinema, deriving its attraction from the charismatic personality of Suzuki Keiko.
In the element of street performance
That was also the decade that produced A Bad Film. This was a film project of impressive proportions, shot in 1995 without a script by Sono and his group of performers Tokyo Gagaga, on Hi8 video tape, but only given final form in 2012. We need to look at this work from two angles: both as a brilliant cut of a huge volume of archival material, and in terms of the work it contains, which walks the line between performance in the public space and spontaneous acting in the presence of the camera. Something that will help us here is the half-hour documentary Tokyo Gagaga, which is barely known outside Japan and comprises not only recordings of work by the legendary group but also comments and words by Sono himself about a past reality of street performances on a huge scale.
Tokyo Gagaga references the famous happening by Terayama, Nokku (Knock, 1975), which has gone down in history as one of the most original street performances of the period. It was made up of a series of smaller plays set in Tokyo’s Suginami district (the Kōenji and Asagaya quarters) and together lasting nearly thirty hours, until uniformed services intervened. Spectators participating in the performance were given a map in place of a normal ticket. This showed the various sections, that were playing out in several places at once. One of the most controversial parts of the play was titled Hyūman bokushingu (Human Boxing), and involved volunteers being packed into large, coffin-like boxes and shipped out to various districts of Tokyo to disorient them. In the section Minna ga atsumatta (Everyone to the Collection Point), 50 randomly selected people were sent information about the loss of an object, requesting that they report to a particular place to collect it. They did not know what they had to do in the situation, because the actors did not come to meet them, observing the proceedings from a distance instead. Confused, they started to talk amongst themselves, effectively becoming the observed actors. Plucked out of their hardworking daily lives, they could finally find a little time to forge contact with others. The improvisation of actors in another part of the performance, being played out in a Tokyo bathhouse, ended in scandal. They recited various lines, performed gymnastic exercises, and poured water over random people. Irate and not willing to be a part of these theatrical experiments, those people called the police, thereby preventing Terayama’s fictional world from becoming reality.
Sion Sono’s interest in another aspect of film which, though ancillary, is nonetheless a significant element of the preproduction process – the casting – has also taken on theatrical dimensions. We want to offer Polish audiences a closer look at this Japanese director as a filmmaker who has on many occasions employed auto-thematism and a postmodernist observation on the margins of his works. In the sensitivity with which he examines the lives of up-and-coming actors, and his deconstruction of the casting process in Red Post on Escher Street (2020) and Maybe We’ll Make It? (2020), Sono reveals himself to be an empathetic artist prepared to work not only with experienced actors and actresses but also with young adepts and amateurs.
Are You in Touch with Yourself?
In his film Suicide Club (2001), this startling question is posed by some young people to the disoriented detective Kuroda (the splendid Ryō Ishibashi), who is leading the investigation into the mass suicide of 54 teenage girls in the Tokyo metro. We are extremely pleased to be able to show this gripping feature-length crime thriller, which catapulted Sono out of the niche underground and art cinema scene and onto the world stage. Suicide Club represented the then popular Asia Extremegenre, hard-core films featuring copious amounts of violence, horror, and exaggeration. This label drew largely on notions of Japan and other East and South-East Asian countries as exotic, and rode the wave of new horror and brutal action movies. Sono, never one to play by the rules, however, produced a quirky hybrid that also incorporated the power of poetry, pop music, and local horror traditions.
In his later thriller Noriko’s Dinner Table (2005), Sono develops further the world he had sketched out in Suicide Club. The eponymous Noriko is a withdrawn teenager who runs away from her home in the provinces to seek her fortune in the capital. There, she hooks up with a mysterious girl she meets on the internet, and so begins her forbidding journey to self-discovery and nightmare. The director depicts the worst terrors concealed in ostensibly banal aspects of everyday life, whose pitfalls prove far more perilous than ghosts and monsters. In all this, Noriko is a fairly typical character in Sion Sono’s pleiade.
The Japanese Teenage Girl
Similar characters are featured in films such as Utsushimi (2000), Ekusute (2007), and The Forest of Love (2019), which was made for Netflix. Sono, like many other contemporary Japanese filmmakers, often draws on the iconographic pop-culture figure of the teenage girl in school uniform, who in these screenplays becomes mired in ever new troubles. He explores how social alienation and the related dangers of new digital media, toxic auto-destructive traits, suicidal fantasies, and conflicts with family and peers impact her and her life.
Naturally, Sono also brings these Japanese girls up against boys. The most epic of these confrontations takes place in his most popular film, Love Exposure (2008), a wild, unpredictable coming-of-age love story that is larger and more grotesque than life. In this statement about freedom taken to the extreme, he makes ironic use of Christian iconography, once a standard move among many Japanese artists criticizing religion. We warmly invite you to embark with us on this rather physical experience – it lasts a formidable 237 minutes – full of extreme emotions, laughter, cries, and incredulity at the improbable plot twists.
Undermining Pornography
Sono has worked in a range of forms and tested the limits and potential of various genres, and has also made two erotic pink films. In 1998 he released Penis-Man, a silent gay movie about an enigmatic policeman who carries out massacres and embarks on a journey around Japan. This nihilistic picture conveys the spirit of the gangster movies of that decade, in particular the poetry and brutality of the crime pictures of Takeshi Kitano. In Seigi no tatsujin: Nyotai tsubo saguri (2000), in turn, Sono juxtaposes ceramics-making with erotic life, drawing on the analogy popular in contemporary culture between the sexual act and the creative process.
Both pictures are examples of the way in which pink film permits directors freedom in their construction of the world they depict as long as they include the mandatory number of sex scenes in relation to the film length. One extreme extension of this idea is Antiporno (2016), probably the most feminist film in the history of the pink genre. Here, Sono builds a highly artificial, theatrical universum in which he exerts his freedom to imagine a female, lesbian fantasy whose weight crushes the world within which it is created, bringing its inner workings, primitivism, and naivety crashing down. In Antiporno we again see Sono as a director who ostentatiously contests the pink genre and lays bare the mechanisms of Japanese productions, including the exploitation of actresses, the bizarre quality of most erotic films, and the misogyny of the film world. This remarkable film is fascinating inasmuch as it was commissioned by Nikkatsu to celebrate the anniversary of the Roman Porno series, yet it is unerotic and provocative in the extreme, a clarion criticism of the whole genre.
While he does not shy away from commissions, including directorship of screenplays written by others, Sono consistently chooses an original approach, based on his own ideas, using surprising, often eccentric solutions. His work is firmly rooted in contemporary Japanese and world culture, and spiked with references to elevated cultural media, including tropes and conventions from theatre, but also from popular genre cinema and pop iconography. While exploiting the possibilities of the film industry and producing satisfying entertainment, Sion Sono is constantly sprouting unexpected original projects. The titles we have brought together at this retrospective reveal him to be a versatile director of many faces.
Selected filmography
1985 I Am Sion Sono!
1992 The Room
1997 I Am Keiko
1998 Kaze
2001 Suicide Club
2005 Noriko’s Dinner Table
2005 Hazard
2007 Exte
2008 Love Exposure
2010 Cold Fish
2011 Himizu
1995/2012 A Bad Film
2013 Why Don’t You Play in Hell?
2014 Tokyo Tribe
2015 Love & Peace
2016 Antiporno
2020 Red Post on Escher Street
