Dark, ominous and intensely powerful, The Stalin For Never captures the boundless energy and soul of the band's live performances, spearheaded by the charismatic yet enigmatic Endo.
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Their 1984 farewell tour spawned a final live album plus a concert video, once again directed by Ishii: The Stalin For Never. Despite their popularity, the band would decide to call it quits two years later. They had become the country's leading punk exponents, the Japanese equivalent of the Sex Pistols, and their appearance in Burst City led to Ishii directing the video for their next single, entitled Stop Jap. The Stalin's involvement was particularly significant.
For the shooting, bands and musicians from the country's three punk capitols united in the countryside outside Tokyo: The Roosters and The Rockers represented Kyushu, Machizo Machida of the band Inu hailed from Kansai, while Michiro Endo's The Stalin served as the Tokyo delegates. Burst City (Bakuretsu Toshi, 1982) would become the apotheosis of Ishii's punk cinema, combining the deranged bikers motif of his previous feature with a cast consisting of famous faces from Japan's punk scene, many of whom took leading roles in addition to performing in the film. He followed it up with the 30-minute fiction film Shuffle, based on the manga Run by Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo, before embarking on his most ambitious project yet.
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Employing his trusted 16 mm format, the 10-minute Anarchy '80 Isshin (1981) brought Ishii back to his punk roots, but rather than coming full circle it kickstarted a new wave of creativity. (In a Sight and Sound survey among leading international filmmakers, Takeshi Kitano named Crazy Thunder Road one of his ten favourite films of the 20th century.)Īmong those people was the Tokyo-based punk band Anarchy, who asked the young director to shoot a promotional video. Fresh out of university, Sogo Ishii had arrived and people sat up to take notice of this uncompromising new talent. Shot on 16 mm, the film had raw energy to spare, achieved largely through the director's lightning-fast use of camera and editing, and made such a big impression that major studio Toei bought it, blew it up to 35 mm and released it in theatres.
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For his graduation piece two years later he upped the ante a bit further and delivered his second feature, the manic biker movie Crazy Thunder Road (Kuruizaki Sanda Rodo, 1980). He would make his first full-length film a mere year after first picking up a movie camera: Panic High School (Koko Dai Panikku, 1978), a feature-length remake of his first short. This was all the more true for an aspiring Japanese filmmaker, since the traditional way to becoming a director was to get a job as an assistant and climb your way up the ranks. Even the simple fact that Ishii made these films, that he became a film director by simply grabbing any equipment available and shooting, was an act of punk-spirited rebellion, echoing the counter-professionalist do-it-yourself attitude of the movement. His early shorts, shot on 8 mm and 16 mm equipment borrowed from the university, inevitably carried Ishii's affinity with the punk scene on their sleeves, featuring the struggles of misfits and underdogs against established society. Ishii himself dabbled in music as a singer and guitarist, but soon found his true vocation after moving to Tokyo in 1977 to study at Nihon University.There, 19-year old Sogo Ishii (then still known by his real name of Toshihiro Ishii) turned to film. The first Kyushu band to rear their spiked heads were Son House, a mid-70s outfit whose gritty pre-punk rock would become a major influence on those that followed: The Roosters, fronted by the enigmatic Shinya Ohe, Takanori Jinnai's leather-clad The Rockers and the recently reformed ARB headed by Ryo Ishibashi (now one of Japan's most versatile actors, known to many for his role as the victimized widower in Takashi MiikeTakashi Miike's Audition).
When he was in his teens, he found himself in the middle of the punk rock revolution when northern Kyushu became one of the country's most fertile breeding grounds for new bands.Īlong with the Kansai area (Osaka, Kyoto, Nagoya) and inevitably Tokyo, Kyushu spawned the musicians and bands that would go on to dominate the punk scene in the late 1970s and early 80s. The man who is often referred to as Japan's punk filmmaker grew up in Hakata on the island of Kyushu. Sogo Ishii was born in the right place at the right time.
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