Four play

ArtForum, April, 1999 by Howard Hampton

Urine picturesquely running down a hit man's socks into his wing-tip shoes, a systematic pillow girl servicing an army battalion on the Manchurian frontier, a cold-blooded killer getting aroused sniffing at a pot of rice, a frustrated student pounding a plano's keys with his erect penis.

There's no business like Japanese show business, at least as practiced by '60s B-movie savant Seijun Suzuki. Favoring violent non sequiturs and theatrical artifice over narrative continuity and genre boundaries, he hit audiences with hot and cold blasts of displacement, playfully tactile uses of image and sound, mind games masquerading as hand jobs. In a dizzy succession of heedless low-budget vehicles, Suzuki transformed cheap thrills into outbursts of unaccommodated emotion. Staging banal exploitation as hallucinogenic three-penny opera, he deployed imagery and editing for sensual alienation effects, modifying cinematic syntax as casually as a rock modifies stained glass. They're the work of a middle:aged rug rat feverishly tunneling from the whorehouse to the art house shades of John Zorn's Spillane, a work whose dada's-got-a-gun ambiance itself paid aural tribute to Suzuki. (The album cover even featured a cool rear-view shot of Suzuki regular Jo Shishido.)

In America, we're only now getting a chance to catch up with Suzuki's lost-in-baroque-spaces oeuvre - movies that seem even farther out today than when they were first made. Never granted a theatrical release in the US, Suzuki's campy, somewhat atypical Tokyo Drifter(1966) and his electrifying 1967 jigsaw massacre Branded to Kill were officially released on video last year for the first time. Branded to Kill is the film that got Suzuki fired from Nikkatsu studio on the grounds of being "incomprehensible," no small feat in a film culture where the weird, the perverse, and the obscure have always been staples. With its black-and-silver-nitrate landscape of identity crisis and incipient nervous breakdown - gangland interpreted via dating-game theory: kinky assassin with ego crisis seeks like-minded sphinx fatale - the film suggests a delicately barbarous hybrid of two contemporaneous opposites, a Point Blank makeover of Persona.

Now four more Suzuki titles have reached the US market (also from Home Vision Cinema [(800) 826-3456]): Youth of the Beast (1963), Gate of Flesh (1964), Story of a Prostitute (1965), and Fighting Elegy (1966). All emerge from what Leslie Fiedler would call culture's dirty "undermind," where bad dreams fondle gothic forms and hysteria softly oozes through cracks in the hard imperial shell of manhood, militaristic sadism, and sublimation. Combining the off-key lilt of Sam Fuller's two-fisted hyperbole with Jean-Luc Godard's cartoon nihilism, penchant for enigmas, and delight in entropy for its own sake, these pictures are saturated in the squalid and the ridiculous. Alongside Papa Sam's and Uncle Jean-Luc's more excessive incursions into stylized brutality, they join a fetish-movie roll call marked by irony and obsession: Johnny Guitar, Kiss Me Deadly, Touch of Evil, Videodrome, and Naked Killer, to name but a few.

Not to omit David Lynch: Lost Highway could easily pass for a belated, flesh-color variation on Branded to Kill, with Lynch's erotic-paranoid methodology closer to Suzuki's grab-bag poetic dissociation than the intellectualized sleaze of even Nagisa Oshima's celebrated Cruel Story of Youth (1960). It is possible to argue that Suzuki represents the last word in Japanese schizo-aesthetics, that idiomatic confusion of high and low, sleazeball content and contemplative form. But at the same time, the sticky tendrils of his work reach across territorial confines, or beneath them: The mad intersexuality of Branded to Kill feels less like homage than a makeshift cinematheque where clips from German Expressionism, French New Wave, Monogram shoot-outs, and softcore porn are scrambled and superimposed. It's a cinemaniac's fantasy version of film history - celluloid as an organism that knows no borders.

As Youth of the Beast opens, it looks to be a standard film-noir setup. Good cop and bad girl lie dead, investigators take the scene for an obvious murder-suicide. But in the corner of the black-and-white frame, there is a startling object: a single bright red rose. We're thrust into Unpleasantville: an abrupt cut to garish teens dancing in the full-color street, a senseless beating, the roving thug next getting drunk with a bevy of bar girls. In typical Suzuki fashion, the antihero is suddenly isolated from the noise of the crowded bar, the camera now observing him from a soundproof room behind a two-way mirror, the aquarium effect conveying a barracuda's fishbowl existence. Later, in the rival gang's headquarters, the back wall is a movie screen on which American and Japanese B pictures are projected behind the marionette-like "real" gangsters, asynchronous cliches mocking the tough-guy puppet theater of the main action. (In Branded to Kill, the film-within-a-film projections have an even more surreal, he-Man Ray quality.) On one level, Youth of the Beast operates as a nasty, pachinko-machine burlesque of contorted triple-cross plotting; on another, it uses the incongruous beauty of that rose as a spore gradually contaminating the rest of the picture with irrational feeling. A sandstorm howls outside a mob kingpin's mansion as though blowing straight from his id. Later, the avenger slumps in a remote doorway, his apparent victory engulfed by desolation and inertia.