Kei Fujiwara helps make bodily horror feel painfully solid, acting in films whose images and props she also helps create. We rate that hands-on work highly, while finding her best-known role in Tetsuo: The Iron Man frustratingly thin.
Fi1m perspective
In Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), flesh and metal begin to look horribly compatible under harsh black-and-white photography. Kei Fujiwara plays the Girlfriend, but she also shares the photography with director Shinya Tsukamoto and worked on the props. The handmade effects stay visible enough for us to imagine their weight against skin. We felt queasy because those surfaces made the prospect of bodily damage so easy to believe. It is inventive, unpleasant work, and her contribution reaches well beyond what she does in front of the lens.
The film gives us less to admire in its writing, and that limits what we can say for Fujiwara’s performance. The Girlfriend has little life beyond sex and physical suffering; even her name tells us how narrowly the character has been drawn. Tsukamoto’s Metal Fetishist is similarly restricted, so the problem is not confined to her role. The physical construction keeps us watching, but the repeated bursts of movement sometimes have to supply the interest that a developing character might have provided.
That combination of acting and making had developed through her work with Tsukamoto’s Kaijyu troupe in the 1980s. She played Future Eve in The Adventure of Denchu-Kozo (1987), which was shot in her flat. After Tetsuo, she returned to theatre and formed her own company, Organ Vital. Organ (1996), her first feature as director, grew from her own stage work, and Ido (2005) followed as her second. She wrote, photographed and acted in both, extending a working method in which performing was one job among several.
Her use of household items for sets and props makes practical ingenuity central to her filmmaking. We value that involvement, while wanting the writing to give the performer as much to work with as the person making the effects. Start with Tetsuo for the physical horror she helps build, with fair warning that its relentless movement can exhaust us.
Biography
Kei Fujiwara is a Japanese actress, cinematographer, screenwriter and film director. Born on 12 March 1957 in Kumamoto, she began her screen career with a role as Kay, a lab technician, in the 1973 American film The Neptune Factor.
She collaborated with director Shinya Tsukamoto on several projects, appearing as Future Eve in The Adventure of Denchu-Kozo (1987) and as the Girlfriend in Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989). For the latter she also worked as one of the cinematographers and contributed to props and costume design.
Fujiwara later directed and starred in Organ (1996) and Ido (2005). She has a background in underground theatre, including work with playwright Jūrō Kara and her own company Organ Vital.
