Jon Moritsugu

Jon Moritsugu
Born	February 15,1965 Honolulu, Hawaii, United States
Occupation	Filmmaker

Jon Moritsugu (born 1965 in Honolulu, Hawaii) is an American cult/underground filmmaker. His movies are satiric, protopunk deconstructions of popular genres and formats with scabrous and pointedly garish results. The New York Times describes them as "funny, anarchic, provocative and exhilarating." Influenced by the nihilism of Jean-Luc Godard and Guy Debord, Moritsugu's films are often defined by their "lo-fi" aesthetic and were initially shot on 16mm film for a gritty, visceral quality. He states that he often "pay(s) less attention to narrative flow and storyline and put(s) more emphasis on sight, sound and spectacle" to create a movie that is "like a live punk/hardcore show." The works themselves are often absurdist comedies that feature actress, co-writer, stylist, and wife, Amy Davis. Perhaps best known for his cult classic, Mod Fuck Explosion, Moritsugu's films have been screened at Sundance, Cannes, Berlin, Toronto, Rotterdam, Venice, New York Underground, Chicago Underground, MoMA, Guggenheim, Whitney and numerous other festivals and museums. In the year 2001 he received the Moving Image award from Creative Capital.

Moritsugu started filmmaking in high school in the early 1980s and then attended Brown University, where he studied semiotics and critical theory. Classmates in his department included director Todd Haynes, producer Christine Vachon and studio head/producer Nina Jacobson. Moritsugu's senior thesis film, Der Elvis, was called by The Village Voice critic J. Hoberman "one of the top 50 films of the eighties." The New York Times described it as "a 23-minute jolt of highly controlled chaos." Upon graduating in 1987, he commenced production on his first feature, My Degeneration, but an industrial accident in which his right arm was pulled into a conveyor belt and nearly severed postponed the project. After a lengthy hospital stay and rehabilitation, he was able to restart the movie, which he looked at as a form of "physical therapy." My Degeneration, about an all-girl rock band playing music for the beef industry, starred his future wife Amy Davis. It played at a number of film festivals including Sundance, where Roger Ebert walked out after 7 minutes. Rolling Stone named it one of the "25 Greatest Punk Rock Movies of All Time" and said: "Underground filmmaker/art terrorist Jon Moritsugu reimagines a rise-and-fall showbiz narrative as a scuzzy, 16mm skullfuck opus set in a lo-fi punk world...This movie feels like punk rock: dirty, angry, righteous, handmade, exhilirating." The movie was self-released theatrically, after which Moritsugu moved to the West Coast in 1990.

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