I went into Burst City not knowing what it was. I hadn't seen footage or read much about it, and I hadn't seen any of Sogo Ishii's other films, to get a sense of the director. But from a glance at some of the director's filmography, posters and screenshots I may have seen out in the ether, I could tell there was a punk aesthetic in some of his films, that I personally found immensely intriguing, and there's a few of his films that I know by name and by poster art if nothing else and have long desired to see. I guess the reason I went this long without watching any of his films, was because I couldn't find any of them in any kind of half-decent quality.
Burst City it turns out, is some kind of insane 1980s Japanese punk rock concept album music video. Like "Tommy", but with ridiculous teenage Japanese punk songs with lyrics that make no sense, directed by way of a young Shin'ya Tsukamoto. What skeleton of a plot there is, you might sometimes sense occasionally, like an underdeveloped V-cinema Takashi Miike dystopian Mad Max sci-fi script, bobbing just below the surface, drowning under the enormity of the film's aesthetic. Basically, the story of the film, or the "concept" in the sense of the concept album music video, boils down to being about youth rebelling against "the man". But when Burst City is at its best is when it blocks out all pretence of a plot and with seeming effortlessness, becomes pure aesthetic perfection.
The first scene of Burst City, the first song on the album, which has no lyrics and sets the mood for the album to come, would be, from a directorial perspective, a masterfully brilliant opening to any film with a genuine narrative script that might be able to accommodate such an opening. Many of the other scenes in Burst City, too, feel like they could make really heart-pumping moments in a more conventional film. But the fact is that they're all together in this one nonsensical film, which may make the whole thing feel somewhat hollow in the end - like there's no substance here - OR it could be seen as freeing the film up from slavish adherence to a narrative that would diminish its aesthetic credibility.
The best comparison for Burst City would be another 80s cult Japanese musical film that was curated out of obscurity recently, "The Legend of the Stardust Brothers" released on blu-ray by Third Window Films. Another film that's more a full album music video than a narrative feature film, Legend of the Stardust Brothers, like Burst City, is also an extremely campy strange cultural artifact - or time capsule - of a film. I think the main difference is, where Stardust Brothers' camp is just funny, Burst City's camp, while undoubtedly funny, is, to be honest, kind of pretty cool at the same time. Kind of satisfying. How liberating it would be to be a ridiculous Japanese punk in the 80s. I'm kind of really really endeared to this aesthetic.
The Arrow blu-ray release, I have no doubt, presents this film looking true to how it was intended, and shown in theatres. Given the limitations of the source material, the blu-ray could frankly have been an upscaled DVD a lot of the time, and I probably wouldn't notice the difference, but I am confident nonetheless that this represents an enormous upgrade over any previous home release this film may have had. This is a hell of a gritty film all shot handheld at night in high-ISO high-noise super-grainy 16mm film, and watching it in any kind of digitally over-compressed, bad transfer, or compromised way, would murky and confuse the aesthetic and greatly diminish the experience, so I think it's fantastic that Arrow is offering this restored version.
The allure of discovering Sogo Ishii's punk rock aesthetic on blu-ray persuaded me to blind-buy the Arrow blu-ray when it was announced, but I wasn't in a hurry to watch it, as I had no particular expectation for it. As it turns out, this is the surprise blu-ray release of the year, and the best film I've newly discovered in some time. I hope some of Ishii's other films like Crazy Thunder Road and Electric Dragon 80,000V get similar releases soon.
Roger Ebert once said of the 1995 film Fallen Angels by Wong Kar-Wai "It will appeal to the kinds of people you see in the Japanese animation section of the video store, with their sleeves cut off so you can see their tattoos. And to those who subscribe to more than three film magazines. And to members of garage bands. And to art students." Well, none of those examples describes me exactly, but maybe I would fit right in with the types of people Ebert was talking about, because Fallen Angels is one of my most beloved movies. I wonder how he'd describe the hypothetical target audience for this film...
