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Nowadays, Seijun Suzuki is recognized as one of Japan's leading
arthouse directors, as well as one of the most stylish and original
directors ever, but his biography is at least as one-of-a-kind as many of
his best movies, as this now acknowledged cinematic artist started as an
assembly line director making pop music films, and while being handed one
low budget film after the next for the lower half of a double bill, he
gradually developed a distinct style all of his own until, still in the
context of assembly line filmmaking, his films transcended the cheap genre
fodder they were supposed to be and more and more became little works of
art in their own right - until Suzuki got fired by his long-time employer Nikkatsu
for making what would soon be considered his signature movie and a key
Japanese genre movie as such, Koroshi
no Rakuin/Branded
to Kill (1967), and he had to spend the next 10 years in artistic
exile. Upon finally returning to the big screen though, Suzuki's films got
weirder and weirder - but with a twinkle in the eye and the intention to
entertain no matter what ...
Early Life, Early Career
For a man whose films (especially the later ones) are quite as unique
as Seijun Suzuki's, his early years are almost disappointingly ordinary:
He was born Seitaro Suzuki in 1923 in Tokyo, Japan to a family busy in the
textile trade. In 1941, young Seitaro had finished the Tokyo Trade School
and applied to the Asian Development Institute, with the aim of
going to Indochina, but failed the entrance exam. After a year of private
studies he entered a college in Hirosaki. By that time, Japan had already
entered World War II though, and in 1943, Suzuki was recruited for
military service. During the war, Suzuki was shipwrecked twice,
and even though he said he didn't desert the army merely out of fear of
being shot, he eventually left the army in 1946 a second
lieutnant. According to his own words, he was able to see the war (well,
some of it) in a humourous light. After the war, Suzuki
continued his studies in Hirosaki, then in 1948, he wanted to enroll in
the prestigious Tokyo University, but he failed the entrance exam. Rather
by chance, he instead joined the film department of the newly founded
Kamakura academy. After having finished his film studies, he took and
passed the entrance exam of the even then traditional production company
Shochiku and
became an assistant director. He got his first assignment with director
Minoru Shibuya, and initially worked with a wide variety of directors
before being assigned exclusively to Tsuruo Iwama.
Nikkatsu, Part 1
Nikkatsu
is considered one of Japan's oldest production houses and was founded back
in 1912, but almost destroyed due to failed wartime film politics - so
much so that Nikkatsu
seized producing movies during the war and only picked up production again
in 1954 (!). This also had long-term positive effects on the studio
though as it led to a rejuvenation of its stable of directors, and while
at other studios it took years for hopeful assistant directors to move up
the ladder and into the director's chair, Nikkatsu
was able to offer this kind of promotion to aspiring young filmmakers in
a mere two years, and thus many talented wannabe directors left their jobs
at other studios to take advantage of Nikkatsu's
system, Seijun Suzuki among them.
Of course,
the fact that Nikkatsu
hired young and promsing directors did not mean they would give them carte
blanche to do whatever they wanted or let the relatively inexperienced
young men have a shot at their A pictures right away, no, these newcomers were
relegated to second features to properly learn the craft and to try and
make a name of themselves before they could get their hands on bigger
projects. Thus, Seijun Suzuki's first film for Nikkatsu,
pretty much his try-out film, was not an arthouse extravaganza like the
ones he made later in his life, but Minato no Kanpei: Shori o Wagate
ni/Victory is Mine (1956), a kayo eiga, meaning a film
based on a pre-exisiting pop tune. In all honesty, the film, a
light-weight love story with a bit of gangster action thrown in, might
have been entertaining but it wasn't great or unique in any way - but it
was exactly what the bosses at Nikkatsu
expected from Suzuki, a light-weight, unpretentious B-movie to run next to
a more prestigious, higher-budget film on a double bill, and thus on the
(relative) strength of Victory is Mine, Suzuki got a long-term
contract with Nikkatsu. None
of Suzuki's early films - the earliest of which he still made under his
real name Seitaro - was too ambitious, just your typical genre fare made
on a budget. That doesn't mean they were bad films though within what they
were, they were actually pretty enjoyable and entertaining, just nothing
exceptional (yet). Of special interest might be Akuma no Machi/Satan's
Town (1956), basically because it was his first yakuza movie, a genre
he would return to time and again over the years, a genre he would take
apart and redefine.
All during his time at Nikkatsu,
Suzuki put out three to four films per year, mostly of the action-, yakuza and crime
drama variety, more often than not a combination of some sort of these genres even. For
the film Ankokugai no
Bijo/Underworld
Beauty (1958), he for the first time used his assumed name Seijun
Suzuki, under which he would eventually become famous. The film, an
entertaining film noir, was also one of his best films from the 1950's,
not because it was the first shot in CinemaScope, but because it already
showed traces of the playfulness Seijun Suzuki's films later became famous
for. Sure, the film was positively tame compared to later efforts, but
some macabre and absurd details that most certainly transcended simple B-movie
filmmaking were already firmly in place.
Even more playful than
Underworld
Beauty is Kutabare
Gurentai/Fighting
Delinquents (1960), a film about yakuza and juvenile delinquents -
both hot topics in the movies back then - only on the surface. Actually
it's more of an unconventional mix of crime drama and comedy, gangster
flick and musical, a film that's aware of the cheesiness of its own plot,
which gives the director free reign to veer off into different directions
whenever the audience least expects him to. Additional to that, Fighting
Delinquents is the first movie Suzuki has made in colour,
something he instantly shows a sure hand with, drenching but not drowning
his story in lush primary colours reminiscent of comicbooks (though
ironically, Japanese comics were and still are usually published in black
and white).
For many, Yaju
no Seishun/Youth
of the Beast (1963) is the first film in which Suzuki fully
realized his vision, as in this film it became more obvious than ever
before how little he thought of his actual plot, and instead liked to
concentrate on the visual aspects of the story and on the setpieces his
narrative set-up had to offer - which turned the rather average story of
an ex-cop hero on a mission playing two yakuza clans against one another
in a feast of visual excesses and unusual sequences of all kinds ... yet
to call Youth
of the Beast a milestone in Suzuki's filmography hardly does his
earlier films justice, in which he slowly and within the confinements of
B-movie filmmaking (both on a budgetary and a narrative level) worked
towards his own kind of narrative freedom. Suzuki himself
always preferred Akutaro/The Bastard (1963), the film he
made immediately afterwards, to Youth
of the Beast - mainly though because it was the first film on
which he collaborated with production designer and art director Takeo
Kimura, a man who instinctively understood Suzuki's visual requirements,
helped in putting even his wilder and more excessive ideas to the screen,
and would remain Suzi's partner in crime pretty much for the rest of his
career ...
Nikkatsu, Part 2
To understand Seijun Suzuki's career, it's important to remember that
he was hired by Nikkatsu
not as a star director, a visionary, a cinematic artist, but merely as a
craftsman to turn out second features for the studios double bills, mostly
of the crime, gangster and action variety, as mentioned above, and during
all of his time at Nikkatsu,
that didn't change (at least not on paper) - Suzuki was under contract to
film three to four films a year, based on scripts handed to him by his
bosses which he could only theoretically decline to do (declining too many
scripts could mean being fired, so it was an option only chosen very
rarely - about 3 times in Suzuki's 10+ years at Nikkatsu).
On top of that, Suzuki had no say in casting, so theoretically at least,
filmmaking for Suzuki really did resemble an assembly line job. However,
according to his own accounts, Suzuki quickly tired of being a mere
craftsman, so he did what he could do with the material given to him, like
changing the scripts round a bit, adding personal touches, making up
extravagant setpieces, and of course veering off into a different
direction on a visual level. At first, films by Suzuki semed a
bit quirky but somehow cool in comparison to B pictures by other
directors, but the longer he stayed at Nikkatsu,
the more playful and extravagant his films became, and once he was joined
by Takeo Kimura, he had found a congenial partner who was able to put his
concepts into actual sets, which made Suzuki's films look more and more
detached from both genre and reality/realism, and they seemed to exist in a world all of
their own - while never really betraying their genre roots.
However,
it would be a mistake to reduce Suzuki's films to their visual qualities,
especially from the mid-1960's onwards he also stered his genre films into
different directions narratively, which usually went hand in hand with the
films' visual extravaganzas - the almost expressionist bombed out city of Nikutai
no Mon/Gate of Flesh (1964)
mirrors not only the time the film
is set in but also its underlying feeling of decay, the intentionally heavy-handed
symbolism of Shunpu
Den/Story of a Prostitute (1965)
gives away what Suzuki actually thought about the movie's cheesy plot, the comicbook style of Hana to
Doto/The
Flowers and the Angry Waves (1965) gives the film an extra dimension its
slightly silly plot almost doesn't deserve, and Suzuki's stylized
pictures in Irezumi
Ichidai/Tattooed Life (1965)
perfectly support the film's
almost abstract story.
Tattooed Life is
a perfect example for Suzuki's evolution as a filmmaker: While he started
out as a mere genre director, he was now adamant to break up genre
conventions, to take his career to the next level - but the reaction of
the Nikkatsu-bosses,
who still saw him as a craftsman, no more, was less encouraging when they
were warning him that he was "going too far" with Tattooed Life. Suzuki
was no longer willing to just follow studio directives, so he followed Tattooed Life with
Kawachi Karumen/Carmen from Kawachi (1966), which on the
surface sounds like a light romance, but incorporates many elements more
reminiscent of experimental filmmaking than anything else. Again, studio
heads were less than pleased ...
As a response, Nikkatsu
decided to slash the budget for Suzuki's next film and give him a script
so full of clichés it seemed to be impossible to result in anything but a
run-of-the-mill yakuza flick. The result was Tokyo
Nagaremono/Tokyo
Drifter (1966), a yakuza film alright, but one that takes apart
the genre as such and reconstructs it as an at times absurd, at times
expressionist but always exhilarating work of art in primary to garish
colours that at times owes as much to film musicals and Westerns as it
does to gangster cinema - and that above all else doesn't take itself at
all seriously - without being a regular spoof. From today's point of view, Tokyo
Drifter is regarded Seijun Suzuki's first masterpiece by many, but
back in the day, the heads at Nikkatsu
were les than amused.
For Suzuki's next film, Nikkatsu
slashed his budget even more, forced him to return to black-and-white
filmmaking, and gave him a ridiculously simplistic script to work with, a
martial arts story as formulaic as can be ... but by that time, Seijun
Suzuki was beyond being tamed, and in his hands, Kenka
Ereji/Fighting
Elegy (1966), the tale of a young man born to fight, became a hilarious
comedy about sexual frustrations and violence as a means of politics - in
short, something that was almost certain to disappoint the studio bosses
but please at least today's cineastes.
Koroshi no Rakuin/Branded to Kill
(1967) was pretty much Suzuki's final straw
concerning his employment with Nikkatsu:
After all, he could have turned the weak script about a contract killer he
was handed into a routine genre movie and everybody at the studio would
have been happy. Instead though, Suzuki turned his script into an absurd
masterpiece, a film that defies categorization and that's far out even by
Suzuki's standards. Problem was of course that Nikkatsu
back then did not want a genuine work of art which Branded to Kill
was but merely a featureless flick to fill the lower half of a
double bill, and since Suzuki seemed to be unable (or unwilling) to
deliver that, Nikkatsu
president Kyusaku Hori decided to fire him - which is even kind of
understandable from his point of view - after 40+ films Suzuki had made
for the studio..
Now this is where the
story should have ended, but it didn't because Nikkatsu's
Kyusaku Hori had decided to wage a personal vendetta against Suzuki,
apparently just because he found his latest films
"incomprehensible". This is interesting in the light of the fact
that around the mid-1960's, Suzuki's films were beginning to be noticed by
the student crowd, an audience segment that traditionally pays little attention
to B-movies almost by definition. In 1968, shortly after Suzuki being
officially fired from Nikkatsu,
the student-run Cine Club was trying to launch a Seijun Suzuki
retrospective, and was asking Nikkatsu
for no less than 37 of his movies to screen - but president Kyusaku Hori
personally denied the release of the films and also saw to it that all of
Suzuki's films were pulled from distribution. This caused an uproar among
cineastes nationwide, and eventually, the whole affair was brought to the
attention of the media. Repeated attempts to reason with Nikkatsu
and Kyusaku Hori led to nothing, so ultimately, Seijun Suzuki took the
whole affair to court, suing the studio for breach of contract and
personal damages. All of this led to a lengthy trial that lasted for over
three years and was only eventually settled out of court with Suzuki
receiving at least a fraction of the sum he had been suing the studio for. The
trial seriously tarnished the reputation of Nikkatsu
(which soon afterwards resorted to mainly producing softcore erotica)
while it made a celebrity and cineastes' darling out of Seijun Suzuki.
Problem was though that while Suzuki was popular with cineastes and the
general public alike, he was blacklisted by all major studios, most
probably because they were not willing to accept a director who put his
own artistic aspirations over their business interests and had the
audacity to sue one of them, too. As a result, Seijun Suzuki
did not direct another movie for the big screen until 1977, ten years
after Branded to Kill, which
many regard as his signature film ...
Comeback
The years away from the big screen, Seijun Suzuki kept himelf
busy directing TV-movies, episodes for TV-series and commercials. None of
them big things, but he had to make a living, right? He also published
several collections of his essays, and having become a bit of a
celebrity/counter culture icon, he started acting in other people's films,
starting with a special appearance in Kazuki Omori's Kuraku Naru-made
Matenai!/Don't Wait Until Dark! (1975). (To this day, Seijun
can be seen making cameo appearances in films by other directors, even
though he has long retired from the film business otherwise.)
In 1977 finally, Seijun Suzuki returned to the directing chair of a
theatrical feature wth Hishu
Monogatari/A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness -
but the film quite simply wasn't what anybody had been waiting for for ten
years. Now don't get me wrong, the film isn't essentially bad, as many
sources do suggest, it's just a pointless farce about sports (golf in
particular) and the media with a few dark touches that fails to captivate
the audience in a way his best films - particularly of course Tokyo
Drifter and Branded to Kill
- did.
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Fortunately though, A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness
was not a precursor of films to come on a quality level, already with his
next theatrical feature Seijun Suzuki proved he had found back to old form again: Zigeunerweisen
(1980) is a murder mystery, talking in genre terms, but unlike any murder
mystery you have ever seen, as once again, Suzki takes the basic elements
of the genre apart and reconstructs them in an unusual matter. Add
to this Suzuki's trademark stylized direction and you get a genre-defying
genre experience that has also been labelled a ghost story by many, but
that has to do more with the logic of a nightmare, actually.
Zigeunerweisen
might not be perfect - it shows some weaknesses on a narrative level -,
but it was nevertheless the triumphant return of Japanese cinema's lost
son, it became a success commercially as well as critically, and it
won Suzuki many awards.
In style, Suzuki's next film Kagero-za
(1981) resembles Zigeunerweisen,
but as a whole it's actually the superior film. With Kagero-za,
a dark, even haunting romance, objectively speaking, Suzuki goes even
further in breaking up genre conventions, and this time, he even attacks
the narrative structure of his own plot as such, suspending temporal logic
and letting present, past and future co-exist. Furthermore, death exists
in this story only as a passing condition, souls might be nothing more
than bladder cherries (or the other way round?), theatre doesn't only mimic live but at times also
anticipates it, and several characters might just be manifestations of one
and the same character - but then maybe not. What makes Kagero-za
so amazing though is not that it wages war against both genre and narrative
conventions, but that it makes perfect sense caught in its own,
nightmare-like logic and remains surprisingly accessible for general
audiences throughout.
In 1991, Suzuki made a third film in
style of Zigeunerweisen
and Kagero-za
(1981), Yumeji, and
eventually, the three films became known as Suzuki's Taisho
Trilogy, named after the Taisho period (roughly 1912 to
1926) these three films are set in - though it sounds absurd to name these
films after a certain period, because while they are all period pieces,
that's about the least remarkable thing about them. Back to Yumeji
though, that in theory is based on the life of real-life painter Takehisa
Yumeji - but don't expect anything remotely resembling a biopic here, as
Suzuki doesn't seem to be interested to tell the man's actual story in the
least, instead he spins a yarn of murder and sex, madness and revenge somehow revolving
around some of the painter's erotic pictures, which once again pretty much follows the
logic of a nightmare rather than anything else. The result is a pretty
interesting movie, but to be honest it lacks the greatness and freshness
of Kagero-za.
In the 10 years between Kagero-za
and Yumeji, Suzuki made 2 more films:
- On one hand there's Kapone oi ni Nako/Capone Cries a Lot
(1985), a rather weak and uninspired comedy about a Japanese singer
wanting to make it in the USA.
- On the other hand, there's the animated feature Rupan
Sansei: Babiron no Ogon Densetsu/Lupin
III: The Gold of Babylon (1985, co-directed with Shigetsugu
Yoshida). Now it might be surprising and promising to read Suzuki's
name in the context of an animated series film, but it's all the less
surprising once you know that Suzuki has previously also worked on the
TV-series Lupin
III. And about the promise his invovlement holds: If you
expect madness Seiun Suzuki-style, you will be disappointed, Suzuki
plays according to the rules in this one. But if you expect madness Lupin
III-style (not the worst kind of madness I might want to
add), you'll be greatly entertained ...
In the 1990's, Seijun Suzuki's cinematic output almost came to a
standstill, and why wouldn't it, after all, the man was already in his
late 60's/70's. Besides Yumeji,
he only directed an episode of the omnibus movie Kekkon/Marriage
(1993, other episodes directed by Joji Nagao, Hideo Onchi), and while his
episode was the best at least, it was still a disappointment, as was the
movie as a whole.
In the early 2000's though, news hit the filmworld though that got
cineastes all over the world in a spin: Seijun Suzuki, by that time going
on 80, would remake his msterpiece Branded to Kill.
Now that could have been a good thing, but also a bad thing, because
Suzuki's age might have rendered him toothless.
Thing is, the remake of Branded to Kill
never got made - as such. Basically the script for the film to be veered
off into a different direction, and while it still shared the same basic
premise, the resulting film would no longer qualify as a remake.
All that said, the film in question, Pisutoru
Opera/Pistol Opera
(2001) ably proves that Seijun Suzuki has not gone toothless despite his age, with the
movie he delivers a bizarre, even surreal take on crime
and action cinema shot in glaring primary colours and in front of highly
stylized and artificial sets. In short, this film did not look like any
other genre film, but seemed like a logical continuation of the genre
destruction and reconstruction Suzuki had started in the 1960's.
Suzuki's last film (so far?) is Operetta
Tanuki Goten/Princess
Raccoon (2005), starring then Pan-Asian superstar Zhang Ziyi [Zhang
Ziyi bio - click here], which resembles Pistol Opera
inasmuch as it takes apart genre conventions and is unlike anything you
have ever seen. This time, Seijun Suzuki has set his sights on the fantasy
genre, a genre he previously did not have much experience with, and to
properly put his stamp on that genre he fills his film with corny to bad
special effects, wooden performances by all involved, and even a few
underwhelming song-and-dance numbers. But if you think that all results in
a bad film, you are gravely mistaken, in the hands of Suzuki, all these
shortcomings are intentional and he builds his own absurd to surreal world around them so
the whole film becomes a weird, trip-like experience that's simply to be
seen to be believed.
With Seijun Suzuki being in his late 80's now, it's not very likely
that he will ever direct another movie, and he has already announced his
retirement from directing years ago in an interview - but with both Pistol Opera
and Princess
Raccoon, he has created the perfect swan song for himself, one of
the most creative filmmakers of Japanese and international cinema, and
looking back at his work in B-pictures from the 1950's and 60's, one could
only wish that in a world in which B-movies with A-budgets are called
blockbusters there would be more filmmakers like Seijun Suzuki who dare to
make something different and even risk their own job in the process ...
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