Still Shots From Shinya Tsukamoto's Bullet Ballet

Like most people I originally heard of Shinya Tsukamoto thanks to his compelling but very, very strange Tetsuo: The Iron Man - an experimental film about a Japanese salary man slowly transforming into some sort of organic / metallic hybrid organism. It's beautiful to look at but quite disturbing and as a result I wrote Tsukamoto off as basically a talented freak show for quite some time. The film that changed my mind about the man was Bullet Ballet. Shot in gorgeous, high contrast black and white the film tells the story of a man driven to the brink of despair and obsession when his girlfriend commits suicide by shooting herself.

Still the most linear and straight forward film Tsukamoto has shot from one of his own scripts - he's got a couple fairly conventional director for hire jobs under his belt as well - Bullet Ballet has also strangely been the most difficult Tsukamoto film to find. That'll be changing in Januray with the release of Artsmagic's DVD release of what I consider an overlooked classic. I was sent a batch of about fifty still shots from the film, from which I've culled my favorites and posted them here. Check 'em out.