Goddo supiido yuu! Burakku emparaa (1976) User Reviews

One of the best documentaries I've ever seen. Fans of documentaries or Japanese culture will love it

[bruceleerobot · 8/10 · 9 September 2012]

This movie really deserves far more credit than it gets. It's a highly interesting, raw and phenomenally executed look into the playful early years of Bosozoku culture, a massive and nearly forgotten Japanese youth phenomenon of the 70's and 80's. This film puts you right in the middle of it's joyful and mostly harmless beginnings. The debut of the award winning director Mitsuo Yanagimachi, it was filmed in black and white to save money but this does not take away from the style and cinematic value of this film. There is so much to love about this movie: The artsy and humorous still photographs that were inserted, the excellent Japanese 70's rock n' roll soundtrack, the highly personal glimpse into the public and gang lives of the youthful and adorable members, and the genius I mean GENIUS cinematography. They must have had dozens and dozens of cameramen following these guys around day and night and it definitely shows.

The film focuses on a single motorcycle gang called the Black Emperors and it's members, many of whom are no older than 17. The first half of the film focuses on Decko, one of the leaders who is struggling with his parents after being arrested for vandalizing a taxi and is in danger of having his license suspended. The rest of the film focuses on the other younger members and their personal lives inside and outside of the Black Emperors as they ride through Tokyo at night drinking, vandalizing bridges, dancing in the streets and trying to look cool. It seems like the general goal of these gangs was to have as good of a time as possible while looking as cool as possible and having the most members on bikes. They constantly brag to each other about how homeless and badass they are, but we see after the cameras follow them home that they outside the gang most of them are normal Japanese kids living with their parents so there's also this make believe aspect at play in the gangs. There really is a lot to this film. It's artistic, stylish, dark, raw, happy, and even violent. A lot of people complain about the incomplete nature of the English subtitles and incoherent story. I don't think these people realize that what they are watching is 100% real. No scripting, no acting. The subtitles are dense where necessary and scarce when not but most of the important parts are fully subtitled so that the viewer can understand what is happening. The only thing I would change about this film is the period it was filmed. The early 80's was the peak of the Bosozoku movement and was much more gritty, violent and AKIRA-like, sometimes serving as a training ground for low level Yakuza members. This is the beginnings of Bosozoku culture when the gangs were more like social clubs than street thugs but this is also a highly interesting world to see in this film. If you like documentaries, do yourself a favor and watch this film. I could talk about it for days.

An underrated film about teenage sub-culture, youth and defiance

[ThreeSadTigers · 3 June 2008]

Mitsuo Yanagimachi's Godspeed You! Black Emperor (1976) is these days more famous for having inspired the name of the celebrated Canadian post-rock band than for actually being seen by audiences as a great film in its own right. However, if you are at all interested in Japanese cinema and, by extension, Japanese culture, then it is really the kind of film that is worth tracking down. Though, admittedly, most current available versions of the film feature quite poor-subtitling, the themes of the film and the relationships between the various characters are all fairly easy to understand regardless of such limitations; with the film really being more about the mood and the atmosphere created by the filmmakers, as opposed to any notion of complicated plotting. If you can get behind this approach and appreciate the film for its exciting sense of energy, urgency, confusion and defiance - all central to the lives and interactions of these various characters - then you'll be able to enjoy the film as a purely visceral experience.

In terms of style, Godspeed You! Black Emperor is typical of the low-budget, street-level productions of the Japanese New Wave of the late 60's and early 70's; shot in high-contrast black and white with obvious cinéma-vérité like influences and a cast of young stars that seem suitably intense and charmingly inexperienced. The approach to the film adds to that rough rock n' roll, proto-punk-type appeal of the production, with the film standing as something of a Japanese precursor to Quadrophenia (1979); depicting the workings of a genuine sub-culture - in this instance, the bōsōzoku biker gangs that came to prominence in the 1950's and evolved throughout the subsequent two decades - and the evocative creation of a grey and hopeless world of flat blocks, suburbs and backstreets where this rambling youth drama plays out. It is also sensitively rendered in regards to the characters - illustrating their hopes, dreams and ambitions - not to mention their various interweaving relationships and the sense that the escape and freedom presented by the thrill of riding a motorcycle through the late night streets of Shinjuku is really as life-affirming as anything else imaginable.

Beyond the obvious curiosity value for fans and admirers of the now iconic band, Godspeed You! Black Emperor is a window into a particular time in 20th century Japanese history; with the general attitudes of the characters, their defiance and sense of rebellion all being characteristic of the country before the economic rebirth of the following decades. The depiction of the country's youth and the general behavioural system as documented in the film is easily as fascinating as that depicted in a film such as 'If...' (1968), which presents a similar sense of generational defiance and the need for escape, as well as offering a similar window of experience for those of us that missed that particular time and movement. Not only that, but Godspeed You! Black Emperor can and should be seen as one of the truly great rock n' roll films; with the timely soundtrack combined with the scenes of group banter and those endlessly fascinating shots of the snake-like convey of motorcycles - with headlight glaring out in pristine black and white as they parade through the slumbering city - defining the film as something completely iconic and completely unique.

Godspeed you Black Emperor! Has one of the greatest names in cinema history!

[kaiserspike · 10/10 · 16 July 2001]

Well,its an informative movie about a Japanese moped gang.I don't know if it makes much sense.The black and white production was dodgy at best.The movie shares its name with a Canadian band.I don't know why it appeals to me so much,but it just clicked.

New No Wave

[chaos-rampant · 27 June 2011]

Okay so it was a band that ushered the title into the cultural lexicon, originally though it was a Japanese film about teen bikers. I'm not familiar with the band, instead I come to this in my quest for New Wave images, images that catch cinema unawares. Especially Japanese New Wave, which usually resonates closer to the heart of things.

Yasuzo Masumura brought the stuff to Japan, having probably been exposed to what was going on at the Left Bank while studying in Italy, and Oshima nourished the seed. From there it grew unexpected roots. In Europe it was about a simple rejection of old values, the old Europe of thinking and theater, and thinking in terms of it (a grand stage, subject/object duality, high purpose revealed by conflict).

In Japan the youthful energy tapped deeper though, into ancient soul. The rejection of traditional appearances, the peeling of all manner of charged ritual and rigorous formalism, strangely, perhaps inadvertently brought them to the essence of that old tradition. Asymmetry, deliberately broken balance, abstraction hinted at by imperfect forms, all these were discovered anew, with newfound immediacy.

The rejection here is emblematized by the biker gang, one of many called the Black Emperors. Looking at these teenagers goof around, they are a much tamer version of what the Hell's Angels were earlier, who it should be noted went on to real gang rapes and real murders but whose formation was after all cinematically inspired (The Wild One, with Marlon Brando and Lee Marvin).

But at core we find the same ideal-less nihilism; the same gratuitous appropriation of swastikas, the same tribal ceremony of male aggression (there is mention of the elders who founded the group, venerated as ancestral chiefs), the same massive rides meant to strike terror at the decent folks that Hunter Thompson describes in his book about the Angels. More importantly, the same alienation of jobless, aimless young people (here seen loafing in Shinjuku) with too much time and energy and nothing to create. Harmony Korine would love the sense of itinerant recklessness. Kenneth Anger the chrome fetish and boyish impertinence.

More poignantly yet, it's Western culture that provides the inspiration, the what-to-reject-for. They write Black Emperors in English instead of kanji, as though meant to equally offend good graces as the swastika between the two words in the logo (ironically a Buddhist symbol). They all smoke rigorously, like movie characters out of Godard. As the mother recites her mantras and counts her prayer beads, the son in the next room cranks up loud rock'n'roll beats on his turntable.

In music we find another suitable analogy to this. It's what punk rock was at the time, youthful expression as an abrasive middle finger aimed everywhere. This is an important film in what would eventually become a punk cinema, the No Wave as it were of Sogo Ishii and Tsukamoto, some Miike, that would no longer tap into an ancient soul and would have no burning reason to reject what it did with so much exuberance. I think one because of the other.

Some of these contrasts may be easy; a lesser, catchier documentary would purport to tell a story through them, build up to something.

But here? Here there is time inbetween. A sense of transience, of a now (often mundane, unmediated by cinema) without fear of past or anticipation of future. Or an emptiness of identity, waiting to be filled. Nothing comes out of this venture eventually, except that they venture out to vent again. The long procession of bikes lined up on the road ready to move off at the end, strangely looks like a kanji of headlights painted on a scroll of Zen calligraphy that points the 'middle road'. Something to meditate upon perhaps.