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Catalogue introduction
Since retrospectives on Seijun Suzuki's work as early as one at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1989, a peculiar Westernized mythology has followed his steady rise to cultdom over the ensuing decade. We are told he was fired from the mainstream production company Nikkatsu (key purveyor of 60s' roman porno or 'pink' movies with shades of S&M) because his films were deemed 'incomprehensible'. We are told he crazily mixes humour into his narratives, and that his films are excessively and almost irrationally stylized. And he has been often compared with lauded American mavericks like Robert Aldrich and Sam Fuller.
But to best understand Suzuki and what he represents, one needs to comprehend the explosive culture of postwar Japan. Or, if you are attuned to the sensibilities of Japan's pop culture, then Suzuki's fevered amalgams of hysterical action cinema would be recognizable as ambassadors of that milieu. But in the West we still don't understand pop culture: we think it either has to be parodied by politically-correct comedians or couched in social theory by smarmy journalists and TV presenters - as if pop culture needs to be explicated and rendered intelligible. As if authors, artists and auteurs are the only ones to make statements about anything.
Suzuki's cinema - strictly not 'his', but he is an important figure in its apparition across 40 genre films between 1956 and 1967 - is particularly complex and fascinating because he applied the harsh sardonic perspective of Japanese literary figures from the 20s and 30s who became embroiled in WWII while being opposed to many of its brutal dehumanizing facets. Standard intelligentsia practice for the celebrated likes of Kurosawa, Imamura and Oshima - but Suzuki was making populist, successful genre movies. Imbedded deep in the lurid density of so-called 'B-grade' genre production, his succulent films grew fetid in the dark of public cinemas, away from the glare of internationalist festival spotlights. He stands as one of many unacknowledged figures who contextualizes the existential ephemera between Masaki Kobayashi's A Soldier's Prayer (1961) and Kitano Takashi's Sonatine (1993). Looking at Suzuki's confronting and halting combination of sex and violence in a contemporary climate, his films are less curious models of auteurist valiance and more intense and incisive statements of what genre film making is all about: a heady deliverance of sensation and manipulation.
You may not make much sense out of this small sampling of the genre films of Seijun Suzuki. But it is worth trying to view them not in a tacky 'rebel/loner' light, nor as 'wild and weird' simply because they don't ape the naturalism which has strangleheld the dramatic arts for the past thirty years. Some pointers. Firstly, Suzuki's films mix sex, violence, humour, pathos, critique and anarchy in a non-holistic way. Do not expect resolution, reprisals or reprimands. You have to shift gears with the seemingly amoral narratives as they spin, lurch and turn along a foreign road. Secondly, Suzuki's films are not unified in style, content or even tone. Directing between 3 to 6 films a year across a decade, his films form an off-kilter map of impulses, eruptions, quirks, banners, gestures. Catch them as they are expelled on-the-run, carelessly and gratuitously, but always with maximum impact. Thirdly - and this should be part of any primer on Japanese pop cinema - most everything that seems funny is achingly pathetic, and most everything which makes you shudder is but a flippant and cursory incidental. Please invert your mind before taking in these movies, and chortle at the expense of your own stupidity.
Each year, the imported oddity we call 'Japan' grows. So many images, sounds, events and sensations are welcomed into the West as we seem to be caught in an endless fascination with Japan's fractured reflection of ourselves in both retro and techno guises. This retrospective on Seijun Suzuki irresponsibly adds to that glut. Yet the beauty and value of our indiscriminate consumption can hopefully infect us and addict us to the vast uncovered spread of Japanese pop culture from the last 50 years and beyond. Like the disenchanted 'wanderer' figure who traverses both Suzuki's yakuza films and that Japanese genre in general, we too could flow through its landscape to the twang of an electric koto.
[This programme was officially titled VIOLENCE AND BEAUTY, but its original title - A LUST FOR VIOLENCE is much more apt. Further reading: Paul Willemen & Jim Hickey - "The Films of Seijun Suzuki" in The 1988 Edinburgh Film Festival Catalogue, Edinburgh, 1988; Simon Field & Tony Rayns (ed) - Branded To Thrill, ICA, London, 1994. Special thanks to MIFF festival director Sandra Sdraulig, programme co-ordinator Brett Woodward & Mike Campion.]
Complete contents of this page © Philip Brophy