- Time and Place Are Nonsense: The Films of Seijun Suzuki by Tom Vick
For cinephiles, Suzuki Seijun holds a special place in most people's hearts. Films such as Branded to Kill (Koroshi no rakuin, 1967), Tokyo Drifter (Tōkyōnagaremono, 1966), and Gates of Flesh (Nikutai no mon, 1964) have made their indelible mark on global cinema. Suzuki may not be as referenced and debated as the almost holy trilogy of Ozu Yasujirō, Mizoguchi Kenji, and Kurosawa Akira are in academic scholarship, but his works endure and have inspired diverse filmmakers such as Aoyama Shinji, Jim Jarmusch, and Quentin Tarantino. Recently, a series of rereleases on DVD and Blu-ray as well as online streaming sites such as MUBI have brought his films to an ever-widening modern audience.
Tom Vick's Time and Place Are Nonsense: The Films of Seijun Suzuki is the first full-length study of Suzuki's work. It was released as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's 2015 retrospective "Action and Anarchy: The Films of Seijun Suzuki." The volume is thus designed to inform and to celebrate rather than to offer sustained critical analysis. That being said, Vick does sterling work in charting and examining Suzuki's less discussed films, including Young Breasts (Aoi chibusa, 1958), The Sleeping Beast Within (Kemono no nemuri, 1960), The Man with the Shotgun (Shottogan no otoko, 1961), and Capone Cries a Lot (Kapone ōi ni naku, 1985), and debating Suzuki's unique directorial style.
The various chapters in the book each chart aspects of Suzuki's work. These include his war films, Taisho-era films, the role that sex and violence played in his oeuvre, and, of course, his influences and impact. Vick seeks to [End Page 484] place Suzuki inside the wider Japanese film industry as well as to chart the filmmaker's own particular approach. Suzuki's most (in)famous film is, of course, the free-wheeling, unorthodox, jazz-infused gangster film Branded to Kill. Starring cult figure Shishido Joe (he of the enlarged cheekbones), Branded to Kill may be on the top-ten list of many cinephiles, but when it was first shown it resulted in Suzuki's firing from Nikkatsu. His 1967 firing was, in part, a result of his tense relationship with Nikkatsu President Hori Kyusaku who claimed that Suzuki made "incomprehensible films" (p. 16). Nikkatsu, like many studios in this era, was struggling to survive and, rightly or wrongly, Hori believed that accessible, popular film would be the way forward. Although Suzuki had made over 40 films for Nikkatsu over a 12-year period, many of these were not exactly what Hori had in mind. They were visually arresting but narratively anarchic. Films such as Tattooed Life (Irezumi ichidai, 1965), Carmen from Kawachi (Kawachi Karumen, 1966), and Tokyo Drifter are pop-art, action-filled spectacles but they did not meet the clear guidelines that Nikkatsu set out for its B-movie directors.
After his firing, Suzuki sued Nikkatsu and set out on his own as an independent film producer. His films made after Nikkatsu show a director who was intent on exploring the boundaries of film. As Vick notes, one way of looking at Suzuki's artistic evolution is to see it as "progressing from testing the limits to toying with them, and finally to passing through them" (p. 67). This approach to both debating and simultaneously rejecting the boundaries of film can be seen in his Taisho Trilogy. These films, recently rereleased in the United Kingdom in a new box set by Arrow, are an ideal example of this. Often nonsensical, these films interplay ideas of love, sex, and death with a mixture of Japanese folk-law, Western art, and fashion, and elements of Taisho culture, art, and literature. Vick defines the films as residing "in the liminal space between dreams and reality, between art and entertainment—hence their resistance to interpretation except as expressions of irrationality" (p. 150). While this may...