Join the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures for a film series featuring cyberpunk films like The Matrix, Ex Machina, Blade Runner and more! These films accompany the museum’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide exhibition Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema. Cyberpunk, a subgenre of science fiction, first appeared in the early 1980s and uniquely captured the anxieties of that decade. Featuring near-future scenarios set in worlds that resemble our own, cyberpunk stories juxtapose technological advances with social upheaval, ecological crisis, and urban decay.
Dubbed “a cyberpunk Eraserhead” in Michael J. Weldon’s 1983 book The Psychotronic Video Guide, this defining Japanese cyberpunk film melds Cronenbergian body horror and Lynchian surrealism for a manic, man-versus-machine Tilt-a-Whirl. In a tech-age update to Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, an office worker wakes up to find he’s becoming a machine, a reality that sends him on a tear of ultraviolence. Unavailable theatrically for over thirty years, this new digital restoration showcases the no-holds-barred cinematography of filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto and star Kei Fujiwara; it’s an in-your-face excess of underground ethics and DIY spirit.
DIRECTED/WRITTEN BY: Shinya Tsukamoto. WITH: Tomorowo Taguchi, Kei Fujiwara, Nobu Kanaoka, Shinya Tsukamoto. 1989. 67 min. Japan. B&W, Color. Japanese. Not rated. DCP.
