Seijun Suzuki (1923–2017) is one of the key directors of post-war Japanese cinema and his dynamic, spectacularly composed and propulsive work has gained an increasing reputation and cult following outside of Japan from the early 1990s onwards. Suzuki arrived at Nikkatsu studios in 1954. After a brief period apprenticed to other filmmakers like So Yamamura, he directed his first film in 1956, before going on to complete another 40 over the next 11 years. In the last few years of his tenure at Nikkatsu, Suzuki pushed the boundaries of what was permissible within the generic forms – yakuza films, singing cowboys and boxers, off-kilter literary adaptations, youth dramas, corporate shenanigans – and often shoestring budgets he worked with, before being sacked after making Branded to Kill (1967), the film that studio bosses thought “incomprehensible” and many now think his masterpiece. Suzuki’s best films are wonders of impurity, presenting seemingly disparate tones, styles, sensibilities, worlds and traditions side by side. As Philip Brophy has suggested: “Suzuki’s films mix sex, violence, humour, pathos, critique and irony in a non-totalistic way…. You have to shift gears with the seemingly amoral narratives as they spin, lurch, and turn along a foreign road.” Brophy also argues that “to best understand Suzuki and what he represents, one needs to understand the explosive culture of postwar Japan”. Suzuki’s films vacillate between the genre cinema and iconography of Japan and the West, between tradition and modernity, and between the worlds of pre-war imperialism and post-war US Occupation and capitalism. Although Suzuki would go on to have a subsequent 40-year career in independent art cinema, his lasting reputation largely lies with the extraordinary body of work he completed at Nikkatsu. This imported season brings together a rich potpourri of Suzuki’s cinema during the ten years from 1958 – marked by his first ’Scope film, Underworld Beauty – to Branded to Kill. It highlights several less widely seen but central works within the yakuza genre – such as Our Blood Will Not Forgive (1964) – as well as the first film in his celebrated “flesh trilogy”, Gate of Flesh (1964).
7:00pm BRANDED TO KILL
Seijun Suzuki (1967) 92 mins – M
With its singular visual language and largely incomprehensible plot, Suzuki’s absurdist yakuza film is one of the key works of the Japanese New Wave. Led by a hitman (Jo Shishido) with a rice sniffing fetish who pursues a phantom-like villain and a death-obsessed femme fatale, this wild opus surrealistically satirises genre conventions inherent in the yakuza movie and film noir. Though critically panned upon its release, leading Suzuki to be fired by his studio (Nikkatsu), it has gone on to be regarded as one of the defining works in the filmmaker’s oeuvre.
8:50pm UNDERWORLD BEAUTY
Seijun Suzuki (1958) 87 mins – Unclassified 15+
Michitaro Mizushima plays a principled ex-con committed to using some hidden diamonds to make redress to his crippled partner as well as his partner’s titular sister (Mari Shiraki). Suzuki’s first anamorphic film boasts a visual style – strikingly lensed by cinematographer Toshitaro Nakao – which transcends its B-movie budget, while the familiar noir tropes and milieu are enlivened by the director’s typically subversive humour and jazzily impure style. This watershed film also marks Suzuki’s first collaboration with the prolific composer Naozumi Yamamoto (Gate of Flesh and Branded to Kill, amongst others).
7:00pm GATE OF FLESH
Seijun Suzuki (1964) 90 mins – Unclassified 15+
The first in what is often called Suzuki’s “flesh trilogy” (followed by Story of a Prostitute), this visually and thematically striking drama expands the director’s concerns to take in the legacy of the US Occupation and the unfettered post-war reconstruction and corporatisation of Japan. Based on the celebrated novel by Taijiro Tamura, its focus on the fate of various sex workers in the ruins of bombed-out Tokyo is an allegory for the antagonistic, cutthroat world of modern Japan. A landmark in the representation of sexuality and exploitation, it features Jo Shishido, Yumiko Nogawa and Kayo Matsuo.
8:45pm SMASHING THE O-LINE
Seijun Suzuki (1960) 83 mins – Unclassified 15+
Hiroyuki Nagata plays the reporter from hell, an amoral journalist who’ll stop at nothing to get a scoop on the drug-smuggling and human-trafficking activities taking place on the docks on the East China Sea. Suzuki sets a frenetic pace, using a familiar B-noir template as a jumping off point for a propulsive dance of cinematic style. Its dynamic camera movement, rich, velvety shadows, jolting jump cuts and complex jazz riffs underscore the air of unpredictability and spontaneity of a film which reputedly went from script first draft to final cut in just 16 days.
7:00pm OUR BLOOD WILL NOT FORGIVE
Seijun Suzuki (1964) 97 mins – Unclassified 15+
Released at the point of the Japanese “pop” auteur’s stylistic breakthrough in the mid-1960s, Suzuki’s bold film depicts two brothers, played by popular Nikkatsu stars Hideki Takahashi and Akira Kobayashi, who unite to avenge their father’s death at the hands of the yakuza. Though the film has never received the same amount of recognition as Suzuki’s other works from this period, and hasn’t been widely screened in later years, it is a striking work that sports the director’s singular use of bold colours, expressive rear projection, dynamic soundtrack and absurdist shootouts.
8:50pm THE SLEEPING BEAST WITHIN
Seijun Suzuki (1960) 86 mins – Unclassified 15+
Drawing inspiration from Hitchcock and the nouvelle vague, Suzuki delves into the gritty reality of life in post-war Japan in this murder mystery that sees a newspaper reporter enter the heart of the Japanese underworld as he searches for his girlfriend’s missing father. Equally paranoid and thrilling, this key early work in the director’s career is a fascinating amalgamation of the Japanese and American influences that Suzuki would draw on and refine throughout his filmography. With Kazuko Yoshiyuki and regular Kurosawa actor, Ko Nishimura.