Ishii is often cited as the progenitor of cyberpunk-style filmmaking, exemplified by Shinya Tsukamoto, who attended the same film school in Tokyo and later directed the Ishii-inspired Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989). Many of Ishii’s acolytes (Tsukamoto in particular) adopted his technique of “undercranking,” or filming at less than 24 frames per second to create a choppy, sped-up effect. In a 2005 interview for Midnight Eye, Ishii said that even the collaborative process of filmmaking was often “too slow” for him, and that his frequent use of fast motion comes from a “desire to express ecstasy. … an escape from the clutches of reality into pure time and space.” The opening of Burst City is just that: shot from a camera mounted to a speeding vehicle, flashes of a barren cityscape blur into an abstract collage of neon lights and concrete, with intermittent glimpses of metal, leather, and close-ups of spiked hair.

It’s worth noting that Ishii wasn’t much of a film student; he simply used the school’s equipment to perform his own creative experiments. He taught himself how to direct in the same way that punk musicians fumbled with unfamiliar instruments, using the tools at hand to express their dissatisfaction with the status quo (or whatever). At the time, Japan was just entering into what would later be called the “lost decade” of its film industry, marked by the steep decline of the national studio system. The country was experiencing economic prosperity while the government was advancing conservative social values, creating a breeding ground for bored, pissed-off punks. Ishii was one such misfit, thoroughly embedded in his local music scene, the loosely organized “Mentai Rock” collective based in the Hakata ward of Fukuoka City on Kyushu island.

Hakata was the site of several American naval bases, which led to an influx of American rock music into the area, inspiring the three best-known punk groups from Fukuoka: The Rockers, The Roosters, and The Mods, all of whom appeared in Ishii’s early films. The Mods figured prominently in Crazy Thunder Road, while members of The Rockers and The Roosters combined to make the fictional central band of Burst City, “The Battle Rockers.” Led by the charismatic frontman Takanori Jinnai, The Battle Rockers spend their days squatting in a ramshackle clubhouse and their nights wreaking havoc onstage, challenging opposing bands. Also hailing from Fukuoka was Shintaro Sugiyama, the bass player from The Stalin, a Tokyo-based hardcore punk band. The Stalin appear in Burst City as themselves, appropriately dressed in red, at one point pissing on the audience and tossing a severed pig’s head and intestines at angry riot cops. It’s a beautiful scene that replicates the band’s antics, which attracted national news attention, and included projectile vomiting, self-mutilation, on-stage sex, and other delightfully repulsive behavior. (The Stalin were sufficiently extreme to win the respect of the groundbreaking, punker-than-punk noise act Hijōkaidan, with whom they performed repeatedly around this time.)