Hachimiri Madness

Hachimiri Madness was the name given to a collection of shorts during the Berlinale Forum program. Shot in what I expect was 8MM film (hachi-miri, get it?) they were classified as “Japanese indies from the Punk years”.

Punk is supposed to be aggressive, non-conformist and with a do-it-yourself approach. Vague and ambiguous, purposefully obtuse and home made as they can be without the writer/directors growing their own film stock in their back yard, I have yet to see a better use of the term to describe a movie.

UNK — Tezka Macoto, 1979

A woman runs around Tokyo buildings. Every time she stops, she looks up. There’s no voice, only a music soundtrack. Eventually she’ll run into a miniature house, pursued by a white styrofoam UFO. Props will be tossed left and right, she will find herself in an overexposed papercraft universe, and… um…

Yeah.

High-School Terror — Tezka Macoto, 1979

Another short that Tezka Macoto shot in the same year as his DIY-Communion UNK, High-School Terror is comparatively straightforward. Two girls sit in a classroom, uncomfortable. Horror stories are shared and implied. The horror is more real than the narrator expects.

The word nightmarish gets thrown around easily for gory movies, usually meant to indicate scenes the viewer would rather not have seen. High-School Terror embodies instead its pure meaning: it captures the essence of being trapped in a bad dream you cannot wake up from, the rules of reality bending to draw you further into it, refusing escape.

The Rain Women — Yaguchi Shinobu, 1990

The Rain Women brush their teeth for too long before going out to decapitate a cow, sacrifice a Lawson to some pan-national moisture god, and getting covered in a pulsating vascular system.

After that it gets weird.

Yaguchi tricks random people into becoming cast members of his improvised non-story, trolls viewers into clapping yet staying on the theater, and tickles individual audience members into chuckling at those who are still falling for his narrative feints.

As a movie it’s a mess, but as a piece of meta-movie making it’s brilliant. He knows what he wants to do, he just doesn’t let us in on the joke right away. It takes a while for us to detune from our reality and join his.

You’ll get there, though. You’ll know you have arrived when you hear yourself cackling.