The closest sonic match in all of cinema to the industrial tradition. A Tokyo salaryman mutates progressively into scrap metal; the body-horror is scored by Chu Ishikawa with metal-on-metal percussion and machine rhythm that is, in practice, an industrial record.
Why the Bureau files it. The load-bearing connection is the score. Chu Ishikawa, who founded the Tokyo metal-percussion group Der Eisenrost, built the soundtrack from clanging steel, drill-and-grind texture and pummelling rhythm that belongs to the same family as the percussion tradition the Bureau files under industrial proper. Heard apart from the picture the score is a noise record of its period; heard with it, sound and image describe the same idea, the body overrun by the machine.
Shinya Tsukamoto wrote, directed, produced, shot and edited the film himself, working on 16mm in black-and-white for roughly a hundred thousand dollars and blowing the result up to 35mm. The do-it-yourself scale matters to the reading: this is the cinematic equivalent of the band-owned-studio method the first wave filed as principle, a complete work made outside any commercial apparatus, with the maker holding every role. Tomorowo Taguchi plays the salaryman; Tsukamoto himself is the metal fetishist whose curse begins the transformation.
The metal-and-flesh imagery rhymes directly with the tradition's oldest preoccupation. Where Throbbing Gristle staged the body as a site of damage and the rhythmic-noise tradition made the factory floor audible, Tetsuo makes the fusion literal: drill bits for limbs, cable for sinew, the human form reassembled as machinery. The film descends from no tradition figure and feeds back into none, but it shares the reservoir completely.
This film is filed in the influenced field: cinema that shares the industrial, noise and avant-garde tradition's sensibility without being made by tradition figures. It is adjacent to the tradition, not of it. The canonical Film entries (Decoder, Halber Mensch, Pig) are tradition-internal works made by or with tradition artists; the influenced field collects the cinema that runs alongside the tradition and feeds the same imaginative reservoir.