One of our two September Volunteers of the Month was Charlotte Brungardt, who chose Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man as her VOTM pick. Read what she had to say about the movie and her time at The Frida below!
How did you find out about The Frida Cinema?
I actually have my Dad to thank for that. He used to go to midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, with the shadowcast and the whole experience, a lot when he was younger. When I was around 14 years old he got the idea, correctly, that I would also probably dig it, so he started looking for theaters near us that had it and The Frida Cinema was the closest one. So we went to one of KAOS’ performances of Rocky Horror years ago and really enjoyed it. That was how I first found out about The Frida, but weirdly enough I didn’t start regularly going until COVID shut everything down. Before that, I would go to Rocky Horror, and then every once in a while there would be a movie my Dad wanted to see. His luck is insane because one of his favorite movies is somehow always playing during his birthday month, so we would go to those. I remember specifically North by Northwest and Monty Python and the Holy Grail were two that we went to see for his birthday.
But it took the pandemic for me to regularly start attending The Frida because obviously, like everyone else at the time, I was all cooped up inside my room slowly going insane and we found out about the drive-in screenings that they were doing. It was such a great thing for me and everyone else who went, from what I’ve heard. There is this weird communal aspect that exists, while still being safely quarantined. The programming, also, was great.
What made you want to volunteer here?
Well, to be honest, the first time I applied to volunteer here I was just looking for volunteer hours to make my college applications look better. This was back in freshman or sophomore year of high school, so I wasn’t even regularly seeing movies there at that point in time. I sent in my application over email and I forgot about it. Then when I remembered, like a month later, I thought, “Hm, it’s weird that they haven’t gotten back to me,” only to look through my inbox and find that they did actually get back to me, but it had been buried under Google Classroom notifications and whatever other nonsense. I was really embarrassed by that for a while, so I just never re-submitted it, until a little over a year ago I realized: I still have free time and actually go to The Frida now, maybe I should volunteer. So I did, but I actually followed through this time.
Tell us a little bit about Tetsuo: The Iron Man.
God where do I even start with that movie, which I mean as a compliment. For me personally, there are two distinct varieties of films I really enjoy and feel fulfilled in some way by. The first is the more typical kind of great movie, where it’s the work of some skilled craftsman of the art form and the technical aspects are firing on all cylinders. Every part of the film feels finely tuned and deeply purposeful, and it’s all working together in tandem to create that classic, immersive cinematic experience. But it’s that second kind that really compels me, because I often find that these films feel like a piece of art that the artist could not get out of their head. The result often feels less like the finely tuned creation and more like the artist is unloading their burden onto you. These films weren’t made to be watched, thought of as good and/or interesting, and then neatly tucked away into your long term memory, they were made to be obsessed over the same way their creators obsessed over them.
My favorite of these films also resist the urge to apologize for their artificiality, an impulse that I think is implicit in the majority of films. The pervasive, standard philosophy when it comes to filmmaking is one that prizes a kind of “ease of use” for the audience. It’s the idea that the directing, the cinematography, the screenplay, the performances, the sound design, the editing, etc. should all create as seamless an experience as possible. It should be invisible, unless calling to attention its own excellence, washing over the viewer and receding into the background of their mind. But Tetsuo is not that at all, I would say that every single sensory aspect of this film is confrontational. Since most filmmakers aim to make a film that makes its audiences forget that it is a film, I always find it incredibly interesting when a film eschews that philosophy but still induces in me that hypnotic feeling that’s typically associated with the first type of great movies.
The one where you feel like you’re waking up from a dream when you walk out of the theater. You stumble out into the sun and you kind of don’t remember who you are and you feel immediately, fundamentally changed as a person. Usually that only lasts for the day, by the next morning the spell has been broken. Tetsuo is not the kind of movie that captured my attention for a day, with that sort of short-term “revelation” feeling, and then became just one in my extensive mental list of movies I really enjoyed. Watching it, to me, felt more like a seed being planted in my brain and it slowly grew, and grew, and spread throughout my nervous system. Weeks and months after I first watched it I would think of a specific scene, or a specific image, or a specific sound and suddenly that was all I could think about. The metaphor is pretty appropriate for the subject matter of the movie, actually.
I have one more thing to say, sorry. To me, a lot of the visual storytelling is very reminiscent of one of my favorite eras in film history, when the silent films were really cooking with gas. The films created during the peak of the silent era do things with their visuals that I think are comparable to even the most visually impressive sound films we have today, even if it’s in light of the context of their creation. There’s a very specific, impressionistic look to the silent films, and that’s because film was a truly visual medium at that point in history, rather than the audiovisual medium it is now. They had to really leverage the visuals to their full potential to tell the story in a competent way and that led to a lot of the incredible innovations in visual effects that you see in films like Metropolis, Sunrise, and Häxan.
There have been plenty of comparisons made between Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Eraserhead. Part of it is undoubtedly because of the cult/midnight movie status both of them have. But I think the reason people see them as very similar, even though the actual content of both are so different, is because they both seem like they borrow from that silent film tradition. Neither film has much dialogue and the visuals they both manage to create with a limited budget and limited technology are incredibly impressive and effective, even if not strictly “convincing” by the standards of modern VFX.
I’m going to stop being all conceptual now and just be honest, Tetsuo is also just a movie with a bunch of stuff I really like. Body horror’s my favorite horror subgenre. It’s got grotesque transformations. It’s got weird, eroticized violence. It’s got industrial music. It’s super grimy and sweaty, I feel like I’m stuck in a dirty boiler room while I watch it and I could get tetanus at any moment, in a good way.
What were your other choices for Volunteer Pick of the Month?
My other two choices were Edward II, the adaptation of the Christopher Marlowe play by Derek Jarman, and Arrebato, an incredibly underrated horror movie from the era in Spanish cinema that gave us Pedro Almodovar and he’s got a super small cameo in it.
What is your favorite Frida memory?
If you could program any movie here, what would you pick?