Junk Films: The Collected Short Shockumentaries of Tsurisaki Kiyotaka

Tsurisaki Kiyotaka is primarily a photographer. An unusual photographer, specialised in recording death. His exhibitions of photographs featuring corpses is internationally successful. He is thought to have photographed more than a thousand. And not washed, prepared bodies lying in state before burial, but decayed bodies or ones torn open that are found on rubbish tips or after a road-traffic accident. In his own country the uncensored gaze of Tsurisaki has got him in legal problems more than once.
It’s exactly ten years ago (1998) since the festival presented the theme programme Cruel Machine. Without doubt, Tsurisaki’s film would have fitted in well. As a film maker, he takes more or less the same approach as he does as a photographer. He travels the world as a war photographer. Only, he’s not interested in the fighting, but in the results after the battle, in the bodies of those who didn’t survive. He also has an eye for disasters, starvation and accidents.
His pictures are surprisingly unsensational. He registers from a distance, like an ordinary bystander at an accident. The film, made up like a photo album from a series of short films, is also about the spectators and about the viewers who dare to watch his film. The film is obviously and consciously in the tradition of the notorious Mondo Cane (1962) by Gualtiero Jacopetti. And it bears comparison with that. (GjZ)

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