Self Revolutionary Cinematic Struggle (London International Fantastic Film Festival 2024)

Gakuryu Ishii’s second movie of the year is half a dozen things at once, with so much going on that it has taken me a week—after its premiere at the inaugural London International Fantastic Film Festival —to begin processing everything it offers. This menagerie exemplifies the ethos I yearn for in cinema: to defy categorisation. With so much uniformity and circular self-referentialism in the industry, I gravitate toward movies and creators that are truly unique—works that scratch that part of the brain that appreciates finding something genuinely new. However, in the case of Self Revolutionary Cinematic Struggle, that originality is both a blessing and curse.

The two-and-a-half-hour creative odyssey begins with Ishii playing himself in his day job as a lecturer at the Kobe Institute of Technology. He suffers a mental break and pulls a gun on his students as part of his “self-revolutionary movie struggle work” before climbing out of a window and disappearing. His assistants, Takeda and Tanimoto, are left bewildered by the “work text for inner consciousness revolution aimed at expanding the imagination and recognition of the individual and strengthening the will” that Ishii leaves behind. Feeling obligated as teachers, they attempt to turn this eccentric manifesto into a practical study for their students. None of the roles are performed by actors; instead, the cast comprises Ishii’s students and peers from the Kobe Institute of Technology—and therein lies the point of the production, so credit where its due, despite the entirely non-professional cast, they all do a great job.

What follows is a quagmire of imagination and consciousness that continually shifts between fiction and documentary, incorporating musical numbers, large-scale fight scenes, interpretive dance, visual phantasmagoria (celebrating this visual medium), conspiracies, and paranoid delusions. And that’s before Takeda’s hunt for Ishii, which is just as bizarre. This subplot sees Self Revolutionary Cinematic Struggle function as conceptual ideation for the director’s other 2024 film, The Box Man, which follows a group of people erotically obsessed with a homeless man who lives with a cardboard box over his head.

The best way to describe this project is “formally liberated,” and whether it brazenly laughs in the face of the barriers dividing fiction and documentary or not is beside the point—what matters are the two core ideologies. The first examines the act of filmmaking through a lens of mania, both as reductio ad absurdum and as an accurate depiction of the countless spinning plates required to sustain creative work. The second is a fictionalised account of someone losing their mind and vanishing from the world entirely. The only interactions Ishii’s students and colleagues have with him come through philosophical concepts (like the panopticon) or the faint traces he leaves behind—often in the woods. This second strand leads the students to research what a “box man” is after piecing together an abandoned hard-drive, culminating in one of them encountering this oddity in the real world, in a scene is far more unsettling than anything in Ishii’s movie dedicated to this absurd, near mythic figure.

This may well be up there with Ishii’s least accessible works, and given how hard and fast some of his previous projects go, that’s saying a lot, and the reason why many may have difficulties is its origins. Self Revolutionary Cinematic Struggle is a film school movie—not a final project or even a semester project: it’s simply a movie he made with his students, and that makes it the most wholesome thing he’s ever done, and there’s a circular joy to that. Those unfamiliar with his career might not know that (then Sogo Ishii) burst onto the scene with 1980’s Crazy Thunder Road, made while still in university. While this is far more formally adventurous and fluid, Ishii has allowed his students to play on a canvas that will be seen in far-flung corners of the world—something that none of them are ever guaranteed to experience again, not many lecturers have the stature or the wherewithal to offer such a magnaminous gift.

And that’s where this is best appreciated: by those with a studious knowledge of filmmaking and an interest in creating and producing their own work. While a very different genre and type of movie, it reminds me of Justin McConnell’s 2020 documentary, Clapboard Jungle, in that both are hugely beneficial resources for budding filmmakers—albeit one is abstract and evasive, and the other anecdotal.

That is the one avenue through which this can be appreciated: by digging in and finding meaning. For those who might miss the contextual clues, this is a difficult watch—more so than his punk rock and cyberpunk years, more so than the dreaminess of his ’90s work, and more difficult than anything else he is producing now. As the title suggests, this is profoundly indulgent. To make matters more troublesome, it feels every second of its 165-minute runtime—a fact exacerbated by its lack of a focal character, plot jumping between multiple points, and its overall evasiveness. All of which recalls an inherent playfulness that’s reminiscent of the odder ends of the Japanese New Wave. So unless you’re a devoted fan of the director or have some connection to the environment in which this faux-documentary unfolds, this is a hard sell.

You will not have seen a movie like Gakuryu Ishii’s Self Revolutionary Cinematic Struggle. There, that one line is the review, and it can be read as both positive and negative. But as prickly a movie as it is, and as much as it gave me a headache thinking about it, I’m glad I watched it. It gave me (a filmmaker taking my first steps) more food for thought that the countless tutorials, dry textbooks, and YouTuber filmmaker masterclasses could ever dream of. For all its chaos, this is less a film and more a challenge to experience, and for all its flaws, it is about the truest example of an original movie in 2024. It enscapsulates the the director’s intent in this phase of his career beyond directing films, to inspire people to get out there and make something, making its love of cinema whilst explaining his insistence on this being screened in cinemas and cinemas alone.

So get out there, make something, and find your own revolutionary cinematic struggle.

Rob’s Archive – Self Revolutionary Cinematic Struggle