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Ishii Sogo (born 1957) is a film director from Japan known for his
striking visuals and sometimes outlandish subject matter.
Ishii was born in Fukuoka Prefecture and attended the Nihon University
College of Art. There, with the aid of friends, he directed an 8mm short
named Panic (in) High School (ここ大パニック) (also known as The Solitude Of One
Man Divided By 88,000 and Charge! Hooligans of Hakata). The film, about a
student rebellion when a school's administration refuses to acknowledge
complicity for a student's suicide, garnered him attention outside of school
and was released theatrically.
For his graduation project, he filmed Crazy Thunder Road (狂い咲きサンダーロードー)
(1980), again directed with friends of his who were in biker gangs. This
film was a fusion of Mad Max and the Japanese speed tribe aesthetic, and
enthralled film studio Toho such that they struck 35mm prints of the 16mm
film and released it theatrically. It was widely considered controversial,
and the Japanese film board Eirin condemned it for presenting violence
sympathetically.
In 1982, he directed Burst City (爆裂都市), a stylish action film about a
wild gang of quasi-mutant bikers who ride into a town staging protests
against the construction of a nearby nuclear plant. He became a favorite
among rebel and punk cineastes in Japan, who previously had no cinematic
visionaries of their own.
In 1984, Ishii directed his most widely-acclaimed movie to that point,
The Crazy Family (逆噴射家族), the title of which literally translates to The
Back-Firing Family (or more crudely, "the fucked-up family"). A savage
satire of Japanese family life, it depicted an average household (mother,
father, son, daughter, and later grandfather) moving into a new Tokyo home,
only to have their perfect life collapse due to pressures from within and
without. The daughter obsesses over her singing career; the wife goes
table-dances for the guests; the son stabs himself to stay awake during his
exam-cram sessions; the father digs a giant hole in the living room floor,
finds termites, buys ant poison and tries to kill everyone en masse. The
film garnered the Grand Prix at the Saruso Film Festival.
For the next ten years Ishii made few films, other than various shorts
and the Einstuerzende Neubauten concert film Halber Mensch. In 1994 he
returned with his first feature-length film in ten years, Angel Dust
(エンジェルダスト), about a female psychological profiler trying to find a serial
killer who murders every day at five P.M. on the Yamanote subway line.
In 1995 Ishii made August in the Water (水の中の八月), which dealt with a
teenage girl gaining supernatural powers after a mishap and using same to
better understand her purpose in life. In a similarly mystical vein was
1997's Labyrinth of Dreams (夢の銀河), wherein a bus conductor discovers that
her driver may in fact be a serial murderer.
In 2000 Ishii made Gojoe (五条霊戦記), a samurai epic that combined both his
original hyperkinetic filmmaking approach (violence, wild editing and camera
movements) with his newer, more stately concerns (man's place in the
universe). A spectacularly-photographed, revisionist retelling of the
legends of Musashibo Benkei and Yoshitsune, it recast the two as mortal
enemies destined to clash on the bridge named Gojoe. The swordplay,
choreographed by a member of the Chinese opera, brought to mind ballet fused
with conventional chanbara fighting styles. Opinions over the film were
divided in Japan: some lambasted it for being a trashing of conventional
myth, while others praised it for being an imaginative re-envisioning and
retelling of a well-worn story.
Ishii also directed Electric Dragon 80.000 V in the same year. This was
definitely a throwback to his more original filmmaking style -- a
low-budget, black-and-white 50 minute short about two superheroes, "Dragon
Eye Morrison" and "Electric Buddha", who clash in nighttime Tokyo.
Interestingly, the film starred two actors that also appeared in Gojoe,
Asano Tadanobu and Nasage Masatoshi.
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