Unless you’re a fan of cult Japanese film, chances are you don’t know who Seijun Suzuki is. One way to describe him would be a studio hack director for Nikkatsu who primarily worked in the 60’s. You’d be just as justified in describing his as an auteur working within a genre to find his niche. Or even as a visual maverick whose flare for the garish has left an indelible mark on cinema. Yes you could refer to him as all those things and more, but you’d be pompous. What’s worse is that you’d be doing a disservice to the man and his films. So we’re going to take a more humanist look at one of the best directors Japan has ever produced.
To understand Seijun Suzuki’s place in film you have to understand how the Japanese film industry operated for the better part of the last century. The studios in Japan signed directors, actors, lighting technicians, and everybody else who worked in movies, to contracts obligating them to work only for their company except in rare instances when talent or crew would be ‘loaned out’. This is basically the system that existed in Hollywood before United Artists broke the mold in the 1930’s. Unlike Hollywood however, Japanese studios had a rigidly defined system in which an aspiring director would have to rise through the ranks before being given control over a film. There existed a three tier qualifier for movies. A level films starred the best actors, got the most money, and the biggest marketing push. Top B movies were usually the bottom half of a double feature bill, got less money than A pictures, but still could be avenues for talent. C pictures were the top half of a double feature, were almost always black and white, and were really the testing ground for up and comers within the company. A director would enter the studio as a script assistant for an older mentor-like director. If they showed promise they would move on to be an assistant director and eventually move into directing C pictures, than B pictures. Only the masters like Ozu, Mizoguchi, Shinoda, and Kurosawa directed A level films for the major studios. This is the system that Suzuki entered into when he went to work for Nikkatsu, the nastiest and lowest of studios, in the mid 1950’s a fter leaving the lower paying Shochiku studio. It’s a system that ended up being a perfect fit for him.
Suzuki got the chance to direct his first feature with 1956’s Satan’s Town: a basic action-exploitation picture with truly awful acting. Between 1956 and 1963, when his acknowledged breakthrough film Youth of the Beast was released, he directed 25 films. This may seem like a lot, but for a production line genre director like Suzuki it was par for the course. Most productions were given 25 days for shooting and 3 for editing. With a week prior to shooting to iron out the pre-written script. Each type of film A, B, and C, had a specific budget for its type, not the film itself. The director was expected to turn in a completed film every five weeks, and going over budget was unheard of. In fact refusing scripts was also a taboo. The studio assigned directors to scripts, believing at that time that a director was no more important to a film than a camera operator. A director turned down a script at the peril of losing their job. Suzuki himself only turned down 2 while at Nikkatsu. This all may seem like things weren't geared towards making quality films, and that's basically correct. It did, however, offer amazing opportunities for directors like Suzuki to learn all sorts of techniques, and hone their craft over a relatively short period of time. Within one year of producing films you could be considered a veteran.
He never moved above the B level status, something he has never felt bad about. For Suzuki, who never thought of himself as an auteur, that is where he thrived. Eventually though, making whatever film comes down the pipeline can get extremely boring. For a person like Suzuki, who has an extremely short tolerance level it had to be maddening. This is why he began to experiment with films. If he couldn't change the script he would change lighting cues, add unrelenting music, strange scenery, out of place extras, or extreme time changes within a scene. He would do anything and everything to make the films he was creating interesting to him. 1963's Kanto Wanderer is a perfect example of his desire to imbue a typical yakuza film with some interesting flare. The film plays like any number of its genre kin up until the last 15 minutes when suddenly, it takes a turn into the surreal. As our hero yakuza exacts his revenge a wall falls to reveal a brilliant red background, as if his rage has just exploded on screen. It's as if Suzuki knew the audience would be flagging under the weight of this mediocre film by the time the climax rolled around. It's his way of saying, "okay pay attention now." It works like gangbusters, and you can't help but watch that sequence 2 or 3 more times afterwards to be sure you saw what you think you saw.
While his flourishes in Kanto Wanderer piqued the interests of some of Nikkatsu's execs it was One Generation of Tattoos, also known as Tattooed Life, that earned Suzuki his first official caution from the studio. Ever wondered where the under the floor shot during Kill Bill's 'house of blue leaves' sequence comes from? You guessed it, Tattooed Life. This scene, shot for only about 20 seconds form under a tatami mat was the climax of an elaborate fight scene that highlighted a thrilling chase through a house with a seemingly endless number of sliding doors. Once again red is used as a symbol for our hero's, White Fox Tetsu, seething rage. This time is appears in the form of window dressings, and lights that lead intot he final showdown.
Under strict orders to 'play it straight', he went on to make 1966's Tokyo Dirfter which can be nothing else than a total '*** you' to his bosses. Using the most dramatic color changes yet, Suzuki crafted a pop art masterpiece. The story concerns the last honorable yakuza battling for survival against the corporate corruption of his own gang as they attempt to wipe him out to make peace with their rivals. With its minimalist plot, and total disregard for narrative flow Tokyo Drifter is what you might have expected from Andy Warhol, had he ever made a James Bond movie. During one sequence we see the seasons change from Spring, to Winter, to Fall, back to Winter, and then Summer. It's unclear if these time shifts are disjointed to reflect the main characters unstable state of mind, are meant to leap over a few years of story, or have any meaning at all other than to liven things up a bit. The final showdown between our hero yakuza and his old boss is set in the most surreal nightclub I have ever seen. Everything contained within it, which isn't much, from the floor, to the walls, the bar and piano is white. As the shoot out begins between the parties, a sculpture is flooded with corresponding colored light to mirror the escalating tensions. It's simply the most beautiful scene I have ever watched in a film. Hero's Chinese landscapes have nothing on this film's interiors.
All of these experiments culminated in the film that finally got him fired from Nikkatsu in 1967: Branded to Kill. The film starts out as many others of the genre did. It concerns a yakuza assassin, called '#3 Killer', who must escort a VIP through a perilous cityscape. While doing so he realizes this is no ordinary assignment when, in a shoot out, the VIP takes deadly aim on their pursuers. Aroused only by the smell of rice, '#3 Killer' begins to get intertwined with a series of foxy go-go girls, to no romantic avail, and one who wants him to show her the ropes a la The Professional. When our man commits the greatest hit man sin by bungling as assignment he must go into hiding from '#1 Killer' who must put him down. This is where the film veers off wildly into Suzuki's most elaborate time shifts and narrative disruptions. '#1 Killer' gets pleasure out of torturing his mark, playing a twisted form of cat and mouse. By the time '#3 Killer' emerges from his seclusion to take on his enemy and the his entire yakuza clan the film has broken down into an extremely cerebral experience heavy on the symbolism.
This turned out to be absolutely more than the studio could take. After repeated warnings, Suzuki had defied them again and they excised him for it. Being that he had a contract with them, he sued Nikkatsu to, as he put it 'protect his dignity'. While the lawsuit didn't really amount to much, he did receive support from film fans and the public at large. Protests of Nikkatsu cost the ailing company so much money that it ended up being the death nail for them, they closed their doors a few years later. It has come to light since, that while Nikkatsu didn't appreciate Suzuki's films, the real reason they fired him was to cut expenses. Why they decided to go about in such a way as they did, we will never know, but Suzuki wasn't the only director to lose his job at that time.
In his 12 twelve years at Nikkatsu, Seijun Suzuki made 42 films. The last 13 of which are some of the most provocative, thrilling, and inspiring genre films ever made. In the 26 years since, he has gone on to make only 6 features. Many of these seem to be merely retreads of themes and ideas he has already visited. While he definitely thrived under the strict rules and regulations of the 1960's Japanese studio system, his years since can definitely not be counted as a failure. He has had quite a successful career as a tv actor in his homeland, and in 1985 he was voted 'Best Dressed Japanese Man' by the Japanese Fashion Society. Only recently have his films found critical acceptance abroad, with many retrospectives of his films taking place in Germany, France, the UK, and the US, but he has always been loved in Japan. It would be easy to compare him to the auteur directors of France, or America, but he contends that his movies are not about himself. 'Films should be about ideas', Suzuki says, and if there's anything you can say about his work it's that his certainly do contain some rather imaginative ideas.