I mean Carmen from Kawachi, great movie, right there––starring Yumiko Nogawa––completes as natural a trilogy with Story of a Prostitute and Gate of Flesh. Nogawa is the star of all three, they're all about women's roles in a society which Suzuki criticizes pretty heavily, they tend to be thought of as a trilogy already. Great to see Nogawa's humorous side, as we do occasionally, in Carmen. I wonder if everyone's just sleeping on Carmen from Kawachi––the fact that it didn't make it out in Criterion's initial assaying of Suzuki titles seems to have made it a very invisible movie––when I saw it at a retrospective a few years ago the film looked amazing, the audience was very moved by it. You could hear people reacting to all different parts of the film. Also, William Carroll is consistently very complementary of the film in his new monograph on Suzuki.What A Disgrace wrote: Thu Sep 07, 2023 3:05 am
Suzuki - Boxed set of Fighting Elegy, Story of a Prostitute, and Gate of Flesh, with the theme of the box being World War II and the films ordered according to real world chronology
But in the same vein as your trilogy take, I feel like there's a secret trilogy in Suzuki's work which no one addresses––one focused on celebrity, media, and creativity. This is a line you can draw between a group of late-stage Suzuki films which aren't the Taisho trilogy––namely, A Story of Sorrow and Sadness, Capone Cries Hard, and Pistol Opera. All three films are heavily satirical, ripping into and devouring their protagonists for their desire to succeed in a sort of a bleak cultural landscape––Sorrow and Sadness focuses on television in this regard, Capone on immigration and history, and Pistol Opera projects a sort of post-modern detritus, a kind of cultural graveyard, made up of chunks of history, culture, media, etc., all in the process of disintegrating. Both Sorrow and Sadness and Pistol Opera reference the world of highly competitive sports; both Capone and Pistol Opera present recent history through a lens fractured by the nature of interpretation (images of the atom bomb and the various memories dredged up in the monologues in Pistol Opera; the way the madcap, loose history being depicted in Capone is made demented by being recreated in the ruins of an "old America" theme park abandoned in Tokyo). All three films posit variations on an artist figure, caught up in the net of celebrity: the reluctant pro-golfer in Sorrow & Sadness, the naniwa-bushi singer struggling and finding fame in gangland Chicago in Capone, and the no.1 killer, whose assassinations rise to the level of an art in Pistol Opera. In each case, the desire for fame––whether imposed upon them or chosen by them (Reiko in Sorrow only chases fame because her boyfriend demands it; Miyuki in Pistol Opera hones her life so that the pursuit of the no. 1 killer spot is all she lives for), leads to their annihilation. The three films are all in vivid, exciting color, all largely unsung, under-appreciated masterpieces, assured filmmaking with a lot to say. Suzuki is at the absolute top of his game in these––Capone especially is Suzuki's outright funniest movie. Story of Sorrow & Sadness is very redolent of Taxi Driver, in a very productive way. And Jonathan Rosenbaum has a lot of positive things to say about Pistol Opera that I tend to agree with. https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2022/08/bullet-ballet/ They're all very funny movies, with a lot of top-flight filmmaking which marks them out as special. That's the trilogy I want to see on blu ray: "Suzuki on Celebrity." I hope we'll get these pictures on blu ray, someday. There are already 1080p prints of Story or Sorrow and Sadness and Capone Cries Hard circulating out there. Nothing hi-def for Pistol Opera, sadly.
