Tetsuo: The Iron Man

Part of the special series NACHTBLENDE

“Marvel built a multimillion dollar movie franchise about the wrong Iron Man in my humble opinion” Branson Reese on Letterboxd

Man is a machine! While in Shinya Tsukamoto's Japanese underground cult film TETSUO the protagonist increasingly merges with the metal surrounding him, Stan Brakhage's silent and radical experimental documentary THE ACT OF SEEING WITH ONE'S OWN EYES evokes the feeling that man has always been a machine. From the silent images of dead bodies and their sometimes surprisingly colorful interior to a black and white fever dream that also knows how to disturb on an auditory level. A double feature for steel die-hards, or something.

The protagonist in Tsukamoto's film fuses himself with all kinds of metallic things to become the eponymous Tetsuo - The Iron Man. What he doesn't realize is that the disease of metal - rust - can also affect him, and what may surprise everyone else is that he can pass this disease on.