The Silencing of Seijun Suzuki

After the recent death of filmmaker Seijun Suzuki, aged 93, The Skinny looks back on the defining moment of the master provocateur's career: when he was sacked from his film studio after delivering his infamous 1966 masterpiece, Branded to Kill

As seems suitable for such a maverick of narrative structure, let’s start this story of Seijun Suzuki somewhere in the middle. In April 1968, the then 45-year-old film director was fired by Kyusaku Hori, president of Japanese studio Nikkatsu. In a fiercely competitive marketplace, the struggling Nikkatsu were desperate for economically bankable films. Oblivious to previous reprimands for his often-outrageous back catalogue and always keen to be contrary, Suzuki delivered them Branded to Kill. When the studio had greenlit this hit man action flick, they foolishly expected something conforming with the staples of their self-styled studio sub-genre, Nikkatsu Action. What they received was a genre-defying visual assault. To them, an unprofitable and incoherent mess of surreal imagery and distorted plotlines. From the vantage point of history, a masterpiece.

For the post-war generation, Nikkatsu Action was an antidote to the realities of mid-century Japan. It presented a swaggering and exotic borderless aesthetic, often set to swinging jazz scores with Tokyo or Hokkaido settings aligned with New York or the American West. This was an abrupt departure from the golden era of Ozu, Kurosawa and Mizoguchi – masters who had dealt in their own intimate way with the reflective post-war period in Japan – or the provocative new wave experiments from Oshima and Imamura. A new generation yearned for youthful rebellion and westernised cool: stories and images of kids tossing the shackles of Japanese society to do and say whatever they wanted.

Ironically, while Nikkatsu offered this on screen rebellion, it confined directors to profit proven genre templates. A zealous fanbase had distinct expectations for the heartthrobs and leading ladies Nikkatsu had carefully cultivated. Suzuki had already caused mayhem by disfiguring the character played by one of the studio’s brightest stars, Akira Kobayashi, in The Flower and the Angry Waves, but as he noted laconically in a 1997 interview, “The decisions I made went against the grain.”

This was always the problem. In 1947, Suzuki passed an exam to become an assistant director with Shochiku and enter an extremely formal studio system, where assistants could pick mentors such as the legendary Ozu to work with. Never moving above 16th in line, he moved over to Nikkatsu as they were coming to an end of jidai-geki (period swordplay) films and moving into the modern day with yakuza gangster flicks, admitting with a characteristic lack of pretension that he made films simply to make a wage.

A WWII navy veteran, it is presumed that Suzuki witnessed things that not only darkened his vision, but often lent an absurd comedy to the drama and violence he constructed onscreen. Yet prior to 1963 and Youth of the Beast (a downbeat gangster flick Suzuki calls his first ‘signature film’), his crimes were of a lesser nature. He had generally toed the line in relation to Nikkatsu’s stock in trade, but from here on in he started to display a distinctive voice and vision in defiance of the genre guidelines applied to Nikkatsu’s stable of filmmakers.

He encompassed subversive and challenging themes including sexuality and violence in films such as Fighting Elegy (working from a script by the master director Kaneto Shindo: Kuroneko, Onibaba). Then, in 1966, a curtailed budget for Tokyo Drifter ironically forced Suzuki to adopt more outlandishly creative tactics – transforming a standard Yakuza gangster script into what the Guardian described as "A high octane, whiplash of colour, sound and mind-wrenching images", made iconic by Tetsua Watari’s powder blue suit. Suzuki subverted not only the horizon of expectation in terms of themes and content, but also in the fundamental narrative structure of film. “There’s no grammar for cinema,” he said during his 1997 retrospective at the Japan Foundation and Filmforum in Los Angeles. “In a normal movie, they take care to show time and space… but in my films spaces and places change.”

If Tokyo Drifter stressed the fault lines in the relationship between the director and the studio that employed him, Branded to Kill caused them to erupt. When the word’s No 3 assassin misses his sniper shot after a butterfly lands on his rifle, the hunter becomes the hunted. A series of escalating dream-like events are projected over visuals of butterflies and dead birds, culminating in a head-to-head battle for survival in a deserted boxing ring. The genre’s romanticised machismo was replaced by a surreal absurdity: a sideswipe at genre conventions.

Even scenes of murder take on a preposterous spoof quality: the killer (a cooked rice fetishist – he likes to inhales its aroma) shoots a target up through the plumbing and plughole of a sink.  For a film intended to sell tickets to a mainstream audience, Suzuki offers nothing to decipher the nonsensical ambiguity of events. As the film progresses, an already challenging narrative unravels in tandem with our protagonist’s mind. Audiences shunned it. A studio might forgive a film for making no sense, less so the mortal sin of making no money.

Suzuki’s sacking was long and protracted. He filed suit and eventually won, but was blacklisted and spent much of his middle years in cultural exile making TV, before returning in 1977 to make Tale of Sorrow and Sadness. In 2001 he revisited Branded to Kill, directing an inverted remake of sorts. Pistol Opera blossomed the original's monochrome into psychedelic colour and swapped Joe Shoshido (a Nikkatsu Akushon staple) for model-turned-actress Makiko Esumi and a female led cast, yet the film maintains the glorious insanity of the original. His final film was 2005's Princess Racoon, with the Chinese megastar Zhang Ziyi.

Suzuki died just last month at the age of 93, and while it’s easy to weigh the true cultural capital of Branded to Kill from the present day, during the 60s Suzuki was simply viewed as a director who commercially did not make the grade. While studio boss Hori refused to release Suzuki’s films for a retrospective while the situation was still raw, his work has received adulation ever since. Suzuki’s work is now shown internationally while the successful and iconic titles of Nikkatsu Akushon are largely ignored outside Japan.

When he died last week, the world of cinema bowed for an outlaw master, making the story behind Branded to Kill hard to distinguish between a cautionary tale for rebellious directors, or a template for a legacy.

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Beyond Branded to Kill – three more to watch:

The Flower and the Angry Waves (1964)

One of the jewels in the Nikkatsu crown, Akira Kobayashi has his beauty and honour tarnished in this ninkyo (chivalrous) yakuza tale. His character's face is marked halfway through, then his cowardice revealed in the final act – normally inconceivable for both the star and the genre.

Tokyo Drifter (1966)

Seemingly a shallow comment (until you see it) but the highlight when this monochrome offering flips to lurid technicolour is Tetsuya Watari’s powder blue suit. An honourable yakuza gangster attempts to prove that he and his boss have gone straight in a highly-stylised beauty that sits somewhere between The Avengers and the French New Wave.

Fighting Elegy (1966)

Sexual frustration is the raw fuel, refined by the system into militaristic violence. Reminiscent of Full Metal Jacket in theme, if not style, in its depiction of young men moulded by institutional brutality.