Seijun Suzuki

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Suzuki remarries (Japanese article)

He's 88, she's forty and allegedly a "beauty" (though evidence does not seem to be forthcoming). Apparently she's a fan of his movies, that's nice.

[perkizitore]

I thought his health was frail, but apparently not

[karmajuice]

Good lord. He'd be robbing the cradle if he married her mother. Good for him, though.

[matrixschmatrix]

Good lord. He'd be robbing the cradle if he married her mother. Good for him, though.

I think in this case, she's robbing the grave.

[manicsounds]

Suzuki's Taisho Trilogy Blu-ray boxset coming on 12/21/2011

No English subtitles. Extras are postcard reproduction posters, trailers, and still galleries. That's all. Hopefully Kino couldn't be far behind on re-releasing these.

[feihong]

Suzuki's Taisho Trilogy Blu-ray boxset coming on 12/21/2011

No English subtitles. Extras are postcard reproduction posters, trailers, and still galleries. That's all. Hopefully Kino couldn't be far behind on re-releasing these.

Has anyone seen anything of these discs? Is the picture quality good? I'm planning to take the plunge, but if it's all DNRed into mush it will be just a humongous disappointment.

[Giulio]

has kino lost the rights? they're sold at $333.33!!! they went apparently out of print.

hope criterion will think to release them on blu soon, pleaseeeee

[feihong]

Criterion didn't seem overly eager back in the day, when the rights were readily available. There's as much ill-will for the Taisho trilogy out there as good will for it. I've read savage pans and casual dismissals of these movies that are just amazingly harsh. I think the angry and dismissive reactions come from people who buy into the "swinging" attitude of the late-stage Nikkatsu films without seeing that many of those movies have fairly serious undercurrents which dovetail nicely with what goes on in the Taisho films.

Good to know the discs are expensive, though. Maybe that will light a fire under somebody--somebody with better resources than KimStim.

[feihong]

France is getting some Seijun Suzuki blurays, via a company called Elephant Films. 3 bluray/dvd sets, including Branded to Kill, Youth of the Beast, and a movie new to 1080p presentation, Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell, Bastards!

I ordered Detective Bureau. Hopefully it will look great! The packages are kind of spiffy, all told, and I hope this is just the start for Elephant Films and Seijun Suzuki. Two of my favorite Suzukis, Kanto Wanderer and The Flower and the Angry Waves, I think would both look electric on bluray. There are hi-def versions of Take Aim at the Police Van, Gate of Flesh, Fighting Elegy, Everything Goes Wrong and Story of a Prostitute on Hulu and Underworld Beauty has a hi-def version somewhere else on the web. And there's a good many movies we haven't been graced with in the west, like Carmen from Kawachi, Akutaro, and a bunch more still to see.

Checking the last time I posted here, I notice the Taisho Trilogy blu rays were an unknown quantity at that time. I have the discs now, and they look pretty great. Perhaps a little soft, but far sharper, with way better depth of field and color separation than has been delivered on these films before. Timed subtitles for Zigeunerweisen and Yumeji have popped up on the internet, so they are still seeable by those who don't speak Japanese, and these discs are the format I'd recommend for seeing those movies. They really benefit from a clear image.

[tenia]

Detective Bureau 2-3 BD is pretty fine. It has some specks here and there and color timing could be better but that's it.

[feihong]

Yeeeeaaaaahhh! I'm doubly looking forward to this now.

It's maybe a little silly to prefer this film to Youth of the Beast, but I do find Detective Bureau 2-3 a really engrossing movie.

[Drucker]

Suzuki retrospective at Lincoln Center this November.

[beamish13]

For West Coasters, note that this retrospective is coming to UCLA in February 2016. Wouldn't be surprised if it also plays at Vancouver's Cinematheque

[feihong]

Thank you for this heads-up! I missed the 90s retrospective at the Nuart, so this is a great chance to see some classics on the big screen and see some films I've always wondered about. Carmen From Kawachi is a film I've been really anxious to see, as well as Our Blood Will Not Forgive and Eight Hours of Horror.

[beamish13]

Only disappointment is that the retrospective doesn't include the animated LUPIN III film that he directed in the 80's!

[feihong]

It does offer Capone Cries Hard, however, from the same era.

I recently found a chirashi poster for a 1992 film that doesn't show up on most Suzuki filmographies. It's called Peyton Place in Hirotaka:

http://japanmovieposters.blogspot.com/2 ... otaka.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


I found a little bit of info about it on a Swedish website. Apparently it's 56 minutes, and the site describes it as "a crhonicle of modern Japan as seen throughout the halls and surroundings of the director's old high-school."

[beamish13]

Has anyone else here been attending these screenings? Aside from Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter, all of the films have been presented in 35mm prints from The Japan Foundation. I just got back from tonight's double bill of Tattooed Life and Carmen From Kawachi, and they both looked resplendent, with very little dirt, splices or fading-what a great way to admire Suzuki's command of widescreen photography in both color and monochrome. His gift for taking melodrama plot tropes (e.g. love triangles among siblings and women drifting into a series of exploitative and loveless relationships) and subverting them was on full display in both features. Both also have some incredible avant-garde sequences, including a scene done in photo montage in Carmen that made me wonder if Suzuki had seen La Jetee prior to filming it.

I'm super excited to see A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness later this month, and hopefully I'll be able to catch the whole Taisho trilogy in March.

[feihong]

I've been to all the Los Angeles screenings so far and I agree with everything you said.

Carmen from Kawachi was a real eye-opener. That film, the third in Suzuki's "Flesh Trilogy," has always been a bit of a mystery before now. Criterion released the first two parts of the trilogy, Gate of Flesh and Story of a Prostitute (together these screened as a fantastic double–bill), but because they stayed away from Carmen I think there's been a bit of the sense that that third film had been rejected by Criterion. I always used to wonder: was that because it wasn't as good? The screening answered that question decidedly in the negative. The film is a masterpiece, like the other two starring Yumiko Nogawa. Carmen especially demonstrates Nogawa's great range as an actress, and the movie is filled with humor. It has another great role for Tamio Kawaji, who I'm beginning to think of as the MVP of Suzuki's Nikkatsu period. I think the only reason Criterion passed on the film is that it wasn't as luridly sexual as the other films in the "Flesh Trilogy" and it didn't feature the blistering gunfire of the yakuza pictures.

Another film that leapt out of the this series has been Youth of the Beast, which I used to think of as the least of Suzuki's later pictures. One of the things that has become clear seeing these pictures in big, 35mm presentations is the degree to which they plumb the depths of Japan's recent history, and the way in which they engage in a kind of discreet criticism of Japan's rapid industrialization. One of the story elements that leapt from the screen as never before for me was the specter of the Tokyo black market. It's there in design elements, and it suddenly became clear while watching that it's essential to the plot of the film, as well. The Nomoto gang is an organization that springs out of the black market––Nomoto and his brother are extraordinarily sensitive to their origin as the sons of a prostitute. The organization is decidedly thuggish, and filled with perverts of all stripes, but it is trying to buy respectability. The police are in their way, which leads to their surveillance of the police, and which basically sets up the story of the film. But you can then read Tokyo Drifter as taking place just a few years later, when a similar group of yakuza is no longer satisfied with fancy houses, and now they want buildings and corporations. The construction for the Tokyo Olympics becomes the playground of the killings in Branded to Kill.

Our Blood Will Not Forgive was a disappointment; the two lead actors seemed as if they came from separate movies, which is especially bad, because they're supposed to be brothers. It reminded me of The Devil's Own, where Harrison Ford is trying to do a salt-of-the-earth, low-key, realistic Boston cop movie, and Brad Pitt is trying to do El Mariachi, and the two competing stories never meet in the middle. In Blood Hideki Takahashi is a boisterous escapee from an advertising agency, a life force run amuck, and Akira Kobayashi is caught in an underplayed, romantic one-man-against-the-mob movie. Both scenarios are pretty interesting, but these two ideas of the film never interact with one another in any worthwhile way. There is, however a finale in which Kobayashi runs through the wilderness in a brilliant white suit spattered with blood, a handgun in each hand, killing hordes of yakuza coming out of the underbrush. The scene uncannily presages The Killer, and Kobayashi, in this movie, seems a virtual blueprint for that movie's incarnation of Chow Yun-Fat as a romantic and doomed gangster of honor. I think Blood must have been an influence on a young John Woo.

Kanto Wanderer, which is my favorite of the 60s films, was exquisite on 35mm. Knowing there is no blu-ray on the horizon for this film now fills me with sorrow, because the imagery in the movie, on the big screen, was subtle and remarkable. Kanto Wanderer is far from a traditional yakuza movie; its heroes are dull losers, who allow themselves to be distracted by every absurd permutation of the plot, ignoring their real goals for the entire film. It is, I think, a rare film which celebrates a kind of inspired, structural procrastination, which produces some of the most ravishing visual feats of the movie. The shock–white flashback sequences of Katsuta meeting his true love, for instance, are not actually the subject of the movie, but rather a vivid distraction from Katsuta's course. There is also the strange ambiguity of the film's time period. The yakuza in the movie look as if they emerged from the Taisho era, but the schoolgirls whose concerns frame the yakuza drama of the film so ridiculously are clearly modern, contemporary to the era the film was made in. At the train station and in the restaurants in the film, though, the music piped in appears to be from an earlier era, as well, and posters on the walls of some of the rooms and meeting places in the film seem to indicate a past the neighborhoods of the movie have not left behind. Seeing the details of setting close-up, it's clear that there is a dynamic contrast being delivered in the film, between two opposing eras and their differing values. Takeo Kimura's art design is in fact very subtle and minimalist in a lot of cases, and it took seeing the films on the big screen for me to really appreciate their crucial effects.

Seeing Kanto Wanderer and reflecting on Kimura's participation in the films made me deeply regret that The Flower and the Angry Waves wasn't part of the retrospective. That film––Suzuki's 2nd, I believe, with Kimura as art director––is gorgeous even on a fairly crappy DVD edition, so I imagine it would be ravishing on 35mm. The film is one of the strongest on labor organizers' conflicts with industry and the mob, a theme which wends its way through Tattooed Life and some of the other Suzuki pictures, and it features a melodramatic central situation played essentially completely straight by Suzuki––one of the only times he does that. It's obvious from Tom Vick's book that he hasn't seen The Flower and the Angry Waves, though he has seen Man with a Shotgun and some other notable rarities. I watched the Japanese DVD of Man with a Shotgun this week, without English subtitles, just to enjoy some further Suzuki discovery, at least a little bit. It was a boisterous movie, like Tattooed Life and Flower, and I enjoyed that aspect of it. It was easy to tell the thrust of the narrative, but hard to figure out any of the particulars. I hope Arrow or someone puts together a beautiful blu-ray box with a whole bunch of Suzuki films, including some hard-to-find gems like Carmen and Kanto Wanderer. Seeing these films at the screenings have made me realize just what a great filmmaker Suzuki is all over again––not just for his sensationalism, but for the engrossing ideas behind his films as well. I'm looking forward to reappraising Pistol Opera tomorrow, and to seeing my favorite Suzuki films, the Taisho Trilogy, next month. This series has been really special so far. I wish it could just continue, including all viewable Suzuki movies. The prints have been very high-quality, too. Some of them, like Carmen from Kawachi, look almost brand-new. Fighting Elegy was a little rougher, and Gate of Flesh was missing a little bit of audio or visuals from the beginnings of a couple of reels, but things like the intense color of the films becomes so overpowering on a large screen.

[feihong]

Tom Vick was at the Hammer museum screenings tonight of Passport to Darkness and Eight Hours of Fear, signing books, and a question was brought up concerning which Suzuki films were thought to be "lost" pictures. Vick didn't know for sure. He told the questioner that Nikkatsu had sent him all the films they could provide, he thought. This obviously included Man with a Shotgun, as he had screencaps of the movie in his book, though it seemed from the text of the book that Vick hadn't seen The Flower and the Angry Waves and Fighting Delinquents––and those are definitely available.

This has me thinking, though...are any of Suzuki's films definitely lost, or is that just a rumor? Practically the only films I can think of that aren't available through official channels or as bootlegs of some kind are the Blue Breasts films. You can find a source for Cheers at the Harbour: Triumph in My Hands, Singing Rope: Innocent Love at Sea, Satan's Town, Inn of the Floating Weeds, Eight Hours of Horror, Nude Girl with a Gun, Love Letter, Naked Age, Sleep of the Beast, Smashing O-Line, Tokyo Knights, Bloody Channel, Man with a Shotgun, Million Dollar Match, Those Who Bet on Me, Reckless Boss, High Teen Yakuza, Akutaro, Story of Akutaro: In Spite of an Unlucky Star, and Carmen from Kawachi.

Criterion has Gate of Flesh, Story of a Prostitute, Youth of the Beast, Fighting Elegy, Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter. They released Everything Goes Wrong on Hulu, in HD, even. Take Aim at the Police Van was on Eclipse. Home Vision released Kanto Wanderer, Tattooed Life and Underworld Beauty. Arrow just did Voice in the Shadows. Kino did Detective Story 2-3: Go to Hell, Bastards! Yume Pictures in England released Fighting Delinquents and Flower and the Angry Waves. Flower was re-released in Japan a few years ago, in a better transfer, so Nikkatsu has access to that one, I think. There's a Taiwanese disc of Our Blood Will Not Forgive.

Passport to Darkness played tonight in a beautiful, pristine print, so even if the negative no longer exists, there is at least this one perfectly preserved print of the film.

Capone Cries Hard is on DVD courtesy of Geneon, Story of Sorrow and Sadness is still with Shochiku, and the Taisho films are actually on blu ray in Japan. The later movies are in great shape, I think. The only things I can think of that could be missing are some of the TV movies, like A Mummy's Love, There's a Bird Inside a Man, etc. There are versions of Good Evening, Dear Husband: A Duel and Fang in the Hole, so at least some of the TV productions remain viewable.

I wonder what that rumor really amounts to? I'm not sure I believe the films are truly lost. Maybe Blue Breasts 1 and 2?


Incidentally, the screenings were a lot of fun. Eight Hours of Fear, in spite of the old review in Asian Cult Cinema panning the picture, turned out to be lots of fun, with lovely cinematography and a wonderful cast of scenery-chewing character actors. One musical sequence even survives the studio–mandated reshooting and re-editing of the picture. The picture is kind of a combination of Stagecoach and 12 Angry Men. It does not seem so much like a B-movie. The crowd clearly loved it, as well.

[beamish13]

I was present at the previous night's double bill of Pistol Opera and A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness. The former I hadn't seen since I worked at a Blockbuster Video circa 2003, and while its still beguiling, I appreciated its mobius-strip, self-reflexive logic far more on this go-around. Tale of Sorrow was incredible, too; imagine Single White Female with dashes of Rocky IV and Misery and you might get a hint of where it goes. It's a film that equates television viewing with mindless apathy, as evidenced by static shots of suburban homes overlaid with the sound of viewers cackling. TV is everywhere in that film-in portable sets, being watched in corporate meetings and finally, being used to punctuate the total destruction that envelopes the final scenes. Another incredible achievement from Suzuki.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

I wonder what that rumor really amounts to? I'm not sure I believe the films are truly lost. Maybe Blue Breasts 1 and 2?

Googling Japanese websites turns up evidence of various screenings over the last couple of decades; for example, they were both included in the "Suzuki Seijun 48-Film Challenge" at the 2006 Tokyo International Film Festival. The first film was shown just last year as part of a Suzuki retrospective in Argentina, and both were in a Moscow retrospective in 2013. Those screenings were also sponsored by the Japan Foundation, so I don't know why they haven't been included among the American screenings. Perhaps they don't have any English-subtitled sources and haven't gotten around to retranslating them.

[feihong]

Then I don't think any of the films are necessarily "lost." I mean, there's a way to see each of them, even if it's not a perfectly high–quality way to see the films.

It might be that the negatives of some of the early films are lost? I can't remember where this rumor even comes from originally. Maybe one of the essays in the Branded to Thrill catalog? I know I've read it somewhere, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't bear out in practice.

As far as what Nikkatsu sent Tom Vick for research purposes, I assume it was those two big DVD sets they released in 2006? Which totals 12 films, I think. One features Branded to Kill, Eight Hours of Fear, Toast at the Harbour: Victory in my Grasp, Kanto Wanderer, Tokyo Drifter and Naked Age. The other, Carmen from Kawachi, Flower and the Angry Waves, Story of a Prostitute, Man with a Shotgun, New Wind Over the Mountain and Akutaro, I think. Amazon claims these discs have audio commentaries by Seijun Suzuki, incidentally––maybe something for Criterion or Arrow to look into at a later date? I can't find any official releases for the earlier movies, like Satan Town and Those Who Bet on Me, so I can't imagine where the bootleg sources I've heard of over the years are sourced from. Maybe these were released on VHS at some point?

Those films in the Nikkatsu DVD boxes tally pretty well with the movies Vick references in detail in his book. He spends a decent amount of time on Man with a Shotgun, and he references Eight Hours of Fear and New Wind Over the Mountain quite a bit, discussing shots and story details. He also references a few films not included there, like Passport to Darkness––I don't know where he might have seen it before. Vick's principal aim in the book, as I see it, is to rehabilitate the reputation of the Taisho Trilogy and some of the other later works, and he doesn't bother to treat the earlier Suzuki movies as much more than competent genre pieces. I don't entirely disagree there, but you do see a visceral interest in the early movies that goes a bit beyond what most of Nikkatsu's stable of directors were prepared to do, and I think some of the early noir has a kind of intensity you don't see in most of the contract work from other Nikkatsu filmmakers.

[feihong]

Zigeunerweisen played at the Hammer in Los Angeles tonight. It looked stellar, with better contrast and more detail than when I last saw it in 35mm, back in 2002 or so. I hope someone from Criterion has seen how good this looks, and I hope they can't stop salivating at the mouth until they have procured the rights to release the movie.

The film played great. There was no applause at the end, as there had been for the other films in the series, but maybe people were lost in thought at the film's conclusion? There was also no introduction, as there as for every film up until last weekend. I don't know if a lack of context had anything to do with it. Maybe everyone came for the Nikkatsu Suzuki and got left dumbstruck by the contrast.

A whole group of friends of mine came out for this one, and they generally seemed to like it. A few explanations of the folk roots of some of the elements of the story––the idea that foxes can mesmerize people with illusions, etc.––and scenes made a good deal of sense to people. As I watched Tsui Hark's The Blade last night, and read the evidence of another translator turning himself/herself inside–out trying to explain "jiang hu" in a subtitle, I just wondered why people can't provide some crib notes for some of these pictures and give everybody a better chance to make sense of things. Understanding what jiang hu refers to makes much sense out of The Blade, and getting a few notes on Japanese folklore really helps with Zigeunerweisen. It reminds me how useful the culture guide supplied on DVDs of FlCl was.

This print of the film featured different subtitles than the last version I saw. This time none of the songs were translated. Naoko Ohtani's credit "in a dual role" was not translated. Little things, but kind of a shame.

I hope some company good with blu rays endeavors to pick this movie up for the English–speaking market. Kino nowadays, for instance, could do pretty well with it. The Japanese blu ray itself is not bad, though it's a little soft. But a disc with subtitles is well–deserved. The film is freakin' beautiful, and fascinating. It's an exceptionally interesting and worthwhile validation of Suzuki as an artist with some range and with a fascinating personality in his work. It deserves a bigger audience than it's had in the past.

[beamish13]

I was there, too! As with every screening in this series, yet another stellar print, albeit c/o The Kawakita Memorial Foundation instead of The Japan Foundation. I'd never seen it before, and I've avoided the KimStim DVDs of the Taisho Trilogy due to hearing about their poor quality. I loved its amalgam of gothic/psychological horror elements, and despite a Facebook friend's warning that it was glacially slow, I thought it was extremely engaging from start to end.


I'm trying to make Kagero-Za and Yumeji this week. Would you recommend both? There's sadly been so little written about these films in the West (although I did buy Tom Vick's book).

[feihong]

If you liked Zigeunerweisen, the other two are so worth it. I don't find Zigeunerweisen slow, but I think because it doesn't have a score that drives the plot, it feels slower to some people. I find Stanley Kubrick movies far slower, but people don't seem to feel that way.

Mirage Theater is a little more extreme. It abandons the ghost story structure as it goes on and dissects more the nature of storytelling. The characters are grousing about the drama they were in by the end. It's fair to call it an experimental film.

Yumeji does have a beautiful score, and a corresponding sense of forward drive. It is a genuinely beautiful movie, and rapturous about the beautiful women Yumeji paints and attempts to paint. It's absolutely worth it, no matter what. People who found Zigeunerweisen slow will most likely not feel that way about Yumeji.