A profoundly Freudian absurdist from an earlier era, Seijun Suzuki often seems like a man out of time. As a director of "B" pictures at Nikkatsu in the 50s and 60s, Suzuki was a genuine misanthrope. Other directors scrambled to make their pictures fall into place on an assembly line, but Suzuki's movies bristled with a streak of stubborn independence, and it is interesting to compare Suzuki's pictures with those of his contemporaries at Nikkatsu. Putting his films side-by-side with those of his fellow directors, you can see Suzuki's superior command of mood and tone, a handling of actors (or un-actorly pop-singers, as was often the case of his lead performers) unusually sophisticated, light and clever, and a knowing treatment of subtext far beyond most of the company directors of the day. These are not qualities Suzuki is usually praised for, and it is worth noting his comparable advance over his peers, and also that his critical worth in Japan has long been more significant than in other countries. Often Suzuki's commitment to a firm point-of-view, consistent from his years at Nikkatsu through the rocky decades of his independent productions, seems invisible to the western critic at large. It is possible that the cultural significance of Suzuki's wry-even angry-absurdism goes unnoticed by many; but in a Japanese context, Suzuki comments quite directly on the grotesque aspects of his own society. In the process he pulls away the curtain on a course dog-eat-dog world directly at odds with the communal harmony of "export-friendly" films by Ozu, Naruse, and so on.
Much is made of the ragtag, "anything goes" theatricality of Suzuki pictures; there is jokiness, and quick sensory alarm that accompanies many scenes in his ouvre. I can always recall the sudden moment at the end of TATTOOED LIFE, in which gangster Tetsu realizes his brother is dead, and the walls of the building topple around him, or the scene in BRANDED TO KILL in which Hanada lowers himself onto the girl in the butterfly house, and comes up only with a handful of butterflies. Often characters are lit with a theatrical spotlight, or the color of the lighting behind them changes as their moods change. But what is so often avoided in mention of such instances is how all of these techniques serve to isolate protagonists and separate them from the film world around them. Is there another director in the cinema whose films end so often with only a single figure, alone in a landscape (sometimes, as in KANTO WANDERER and others, even the landscape is missing and the figure is totally alone)? Theatrical technique, so common throughout Suzuki's filmography serves not to take us out of the story (even in MIRAGE THEATER, where the protagonists are left debating whether or not their story was worthy of being made into a movie at all, the characters never "break the fourth wall" or make explicit reference to the movie the audience is watching) but rather to remove the protagonist, the absurdist hero, from a society, or just the dross of a plot. The absurdist hero is always abandoned to themselves at the end of a Suzuki story-the only exceptions are characters whose values Suzuki seems to respect, who sometimes get a happy ending. The lovers in THE FLOWER AND THE ANGRY WAVES, who have hid their marriage and their passion from everyone, are finally allowed to escape by the generally rigid, by-the-book police inspector. Miyamoto and the "beauty" seemed to have emerged from hell at the end of UNDERWORLD BEAUTY (at the climax he is shoveling coal from a steaming furnace so that the two of them can escape a building under siege)-and there is the suggestion that these two, neither of whom live by any traditional code of conduct but by their own, wholly private codes that Suzuki seems to enjoy, might be on their way to some sort of productive romance. But by and large, we end a Suzuki movie with a lone hero, abandoned or excised from the ebb and flow of society.
The image I find most instructive here is one Suzuki has described on repeated occasions; Suzuki himself, shipwrecked during the Pacific War (it happened twice), floating in the water as his ship went under. Suzuki once described himself floating in the wake of the listing ship, watching the people and objects still on the boat being pitched into the ocean and suddenly being overcome with "the giggles." The absurdist who laughs at the folly of war is truly committed to his viewpoint, and both the commitment and the humor are common to Suzuki's narratives. His heroes are heroes only in that the world around them seems insane, and they are separated from their surroundings by a different viewpoint. Goro Hanada achieves "Number Two Killer" status in BRANDED TO KILL, and begins to believe that the rumored "Number One Killer" doesn't really exist. Katsuta stands up for the honor of his gang and goes to prison in KANTO WANDERER-the ultimate isolation from the world around him. The gangster hero of TOKYO DRIFTER gradually comes to realize that he is gangster no more, and only a drifter. In Suzuki movies it always seems necessary to see the ending, and weigh it against the bulk of the narrative, before anything becomes clear. The victories and defeats of his heroes are always private, always interior.
It's hard not to plunge into a well writing these things...and I am teetering on the brink. So a few more disorganized thoughts, directed at the viewer who has never seen a Suzuki movie:
1) His films move as quickly as the quickest passages in Godard, and like a Godard picture there is a constant feeling of de-centering as the action rapidly and nearly nonsensically changes location before the scene has ended. Also like Godard, Suzuki will pause within certain scenes of repose, and the film will langor with the characters.
2) The savagery of a Suzuki narrative is more intense in the Nikkatsu pictures, and even for a director assigned to helm nearly 40 pictures-the majority action pictures-is was surprising that when he was free of Nikkatsu, the very thing missing from his independent movies was action. That said, the independent pictures throb with the same repressed eroticism and deep longing that gave implicit energy to his Nikkatsu pictures. Suzuki's production crew was the direct source for many of the later directors Nikkatsu employed to direct their erotic, counterculture "Pink Films" of the 70s-Chusei Sone, Yukihiro Sawada, and Yasuharu Hasebe were all regular support for Suzuki who would later direct the films of Nikkatsu's 70s erotic movement. Masaru Konuma, one of the most successful of Nikkatsu's "Pinku Eiga" directors, cut his teeth as an assistant on one of Suzuki's most formative pictures, AKUTARO (aka BAD BOY). Suzuki's films are never quite as explicit as those of his proteges, even as he moved into the Pinku era (most of that time saw Suzuki black-balled within his industry) as an independent, but the buried erotic content is key to explaining a film like ZIGEUNERWEISEN or STORY OF SORROW AND SADNESS.
3) A film programmer once told me he likened Suzuki's abrupt and highly imagistic style to that of a painter rather than a filmmaker-I think this comment was a reference to the lack of conventional cinematic movement in Suzuki films, and that the explanation was that Suzuki composed tableau imbued with poetic meaning as in a film by Paradjanov or Angelopoulos. However, Suzuki's films are rife with sudden movements and pent-up bursts of action. I think it is more to the point that Suzuki invests his images with moments that are cinematic and moments that are poetic, and in the vacillation between the two extremes (on the one side definitive movement, on the other carefully arranged static images) there is a remarkable and unique effect at play in Suzuki's work. This effect one Suzuki has perfected over a huge range of films, many of which have unprecedented subject matter very uniquely served by Suzuki's peculiar personal style.
4) I hope to expand one day on the concept of a "submerged narrative" I see operating in most of Suzuki's works (even dating before AKUTARO, which he views as an creative watershed). The concept roughly refers to a buried or repressed set of character information or story context Suzuki keeps hidden from the viewer throughout a picture. The submerged narrative informs the actions of the protagonist in a Suzuki film and, if properly identified, reveals the purpose behind many of the more surrealistic theatrical effects Suzuki employs in his narrative. The trick is in identifying this buried but necessary context. As in Mary Poppins, you find the fun, and snap! etc. etc.
SEVERAL EXCEPTIONAL FILMS
1] KANTO WANDERER
2] ZIGEUNERWEISEN
3) THE FLOWER AND THE ANGRY WAVES
4) DETECTIVE BUREAU 23: GO TO HELL, BASTARDS! and YOUTH OF THE BEAST
5) STORY OF A PROSTITUTE
