Seijun Suzuki

[feihong]

And so, Mirage Theater; to know it is to love it, I guess. Of the films in the Taisho Trilgoy, I had always been coldest on it, perhaps because of Yusaku Matsuda's baffling performance and the way the story seems to continuously break down during the film. This is the third time I've seen the film (the 1st on 16mm, the second on blu ray...), and it must have been a charm, because I found it more clear, direct, and sensible than I ever did before. Seeing it in 35mm for the first time, I did indeed fall in love with it.

Since the last time I saw the film, I've read a little of the writing of Kyoka Izumi, and I think that helped my understanding of the film, just as reading the Hyakken stories that make up Zigeunerweisen help in the understanding of that movie somewhat. Izumi has a particularly detached style, where we are given characters' observations and behaviors but not a whole lot of biographical detail about them or investment in their situations and concerns. Hyakken stories present supernatural conundrums and contradictions––the shocking emergence of the irrational into the rational world––puzzles with no solutions. Zigeunerweisen reflects that storytelling strategy. Izumi, by contrast, focuses on the distance between illusion and reality. There is the constant sense in his writing that there is a veil between the reader and the uncanny things that are occurring in his tales. The supernatural events of his stories seem ambiguous, nearly obscure, so that their validity is always being called into question even as we read through the material of the chronicles.

Mirage Theater (Tom Vick and the other organizers of the festival have opted to call it Kageroza, even though they call Koroshi no Rakuin Branded to Kill, and they call Kanto Mushuku by its English title, Kanto Wanderer) replicates this ambiguity from Izumi's stories in its basic structure. The story Mirage Theater is adapted from has not been translated into English as far as I know, but I can't imagine it plays quite as it does in the film. Suzuki seems to be constantly deconstructing the elements of drama, and testing them for their validity. The characters tease the concepts of their roles and vacillate on whether or not to play the parts assigned to them. Are they even the characters other characters insist them to be? Throughout the film we're presented with story form upon story form, all echoing the needs of the drama, and while the characters watch these stories progress on stages and over the course of dinner table conversations, the characters staunchly refuse to fulfill their own roles in the prescribed drama. At one point Matsuzaki, the Yusaku Matsuda character, finds himself physically unable to leave a room until he reluctantly makes love to the woman inside it, forcing him to participate at least to some extent in the love quadrangle the story insists upon. But the truth of every encounter in the film, versus its illusory attributes, is always being called into question.

I came to really appreciate Matsuda's strange, taciturn performance in the film this time around, and the point at which I really understood why he is ideal for the part is the point where Yoshio Harada entered the picture, playing a bawdy anarchist. It occurred to me that Harada could have played the playwright, Matsuzaki, instead of Matsuda––probably that was an initial plan (Harada had appeared previously for Suzuki in Fang in the Hole, Story of Sorrow and Sadness and Zigeunerweisen). Yet, the more I thought about it, it was clear that Harada could not have provided that level of distantiation Matsuda brings to the part. Like an Izumi hero, Matsuda is detached––so far detached that when a tragic heroine says she's in love with him, Matsuda seems to stand back and consider the situation from an angle almost outside of the film narrative. He doesn't trust her profession of love, but more than that, he doesn't trust his own feeling of love for her. Matsuda might always have been a little too cool for his Kadokawa pictures, but this might be the only film I've seen that identifies this natural remove as a key aspect of Matsuda himself, then makes use of it as part of the narrative/critical structure of the film. Michiyo Ookusu almost matches Matsuda in playing her role at this level of intercessory critical distance. She seems to embody the abstract concept of the illicit lover more than fulfill the requisite aspects of the part. The more Matsuda stares at her, the less like her supposed character she seems; the more abstract she becomes.

The film is beautiful in the most austere way of any of the Taisho films. It's production design is by Noriyoshi Ikeya, who takes over for Takeo Kimura, and who also designed Yumeji. Unlike the Kimura–designed Zigeunerweisen, which was resplendent in purples, mauves, and so many exquisite colors of wood, Mirage Theater is told in greys and blues, the only colorful disruptions being Okusu's vivid wardrobe and the intense Ukiyo–e wallpaper at the end of the film. Scenes are lit very softly, with lots of encroaching black space. There is constant water imagery, and the feeling of crossing the water/crossing a boundary is something which probably comes from Izumi and from Suzuki's understanding of the Taisho films equally (Zigeunerweisen features water as a barrier a little bit, as well––Yumeji will utilize the image in a similar but more subtle way). The feeling that Matsuzaki is crossing the water to be with his presumed lover in death is constantly undercut, though, by the way she keeps showing up alive.

Tony Rayns considered Mirage Theater Suzuki's greatest achievement, and I can finally see it. The film is as abstract in its critical distance from itself as an Izumi story. No story element is taken for granted; Suzuki queries the veracity of every aspect of the story, as his characters do the same. The delightfully diffident analytical element is something Suzuki has created as a parallel to the similar technique at work in Izumi's writing. The movie is heady and free in its abstraction, yet bawdy in its particulars and it features some of the clearest, cleanest, most arresting surreal visuals of any of Suzuki's movies.

Yumeji is playing next weekend, and it is especially worth seeing. It moves much faster than tonight's film, and it is full of delightful performances, exquisite visuals and beautiful music. It's also a very clever and insightful film on the act of creating art.

[Michael Kerpan]

It seems that the Harvard Film Archive and the Brattle Theater are sharing the Suzuki retrospective:

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http://www.brattlefilm.org/category/cal ... un-suzuki/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[DeprongMori]

The Seijun Suzuki retrospective just started today at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive. Tickets in hand to see Youth of the Beast tomorrow.

http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/program/ ... jun-suzuki" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[senseabove]

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.

The Seijun Suzuki retrospective just started today at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive. Tickets in hand to see Youth of the Beast tomorrow.

http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/program/ ... jun-suzuki" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I saw Ziegeunerweisen at the PFA last night and was floored. From what I'd read, I was a bit trepidatious going in, honestly, but I didn't even think to check how much time had passed until an hour in. It was by far my favorite of all the Suzuki I've seen in the PFA retro, and I've seen all of them so far, liking each progressively more.

And I'd love some notes about Japanese folklore, if you care to share more. There were definitely elements that made me wonder whether they were significant, every-day features of Japanese daily life, or nostalgic ones, at least. Like the door-knocker outside Nakasago's house, which you hear throughout the whole movie but are only shown about 3/4 of the way in, and the bells on the little girl and the coins in her footprints at the end...

I have to say, the one thing I'm surprised I've not seen ANY mention of in discussions of Ziegeunerweisen is how intentionally jarring the looping/dubbing and foley effects are. I saw one brief discussion of how Suzuki is playing tricks with diegetic/nondiegetic sound using the gramophone in the opening credits, but the blatant if slight disjunction between sound and sight is present throughout.

Anyway, I can't wait for the other two parts of the trilogy (though I am wondering why on earth the PFA programmed a month between the 1st and second parts, and 1 day between the second and third parts...). I don't know that I'm crazy enough about the other Suzuki I saw to want to own them, but I expect I would buy a nice subtitled Blu set of the Taisho trilogy in a heartbeat, if Ziegeuner is anything to go on.

[Michael Kerpan]

Haven't seen the Taisho films yet. Favorites so far, Kanto Wanderer and Carmen from Kawachi.

[DeprongMori]

Having only previously seen Branded to Kill, Youth of the Beast, and Tokyo Drifter, I was beginning to wonder whether Suzuki was something of a (very entertaining) one-trick pony. Then I saw Zigeunerweisen.

This film blew me away with how different it was in mood and content from the works I'd seen. It has that other-worldly eerieness that only Japanese ghost stories seem to be able to achieve. Both in pace and atmosphere it reminded me a bit of experiencing Kwaidan, though it was certainly its own distinctive work. Very glad to have been at the PFA screening as there seems little opportunity to see it otherwise. The print was gorgeous. It's a film I'd love to revisit and explore its mysteries further.

[feihong]

It's nice to see people liking Zigeunerweisen. I never thought it was a very inaccessible movie, though I've had people tell me it was. I wonder if it's a more divisive experience than I've given it credit for. Watching it at the Aratani Theater in the early 2000s was a transcendent experience for me. Seeing it again at the UCLA screening really only confirmed it for me. But still I find people not really relating to it. One of the main points of Vick's book is to hold up the Taisho Trilogy in the face of the Nikkatsu films and suggest that Suzuki is an artist deserving of more consideration as an artist than being known as just a gonzo, bad-boy hack, whipping himself into crazy mode on otherwise boring crime films. Tony Rayns recently rolled back some of his earlier feelings about Suzuki the artist in his interview on the Eureka Youth of the Beast blu ray, claiming he now thinks Suzuki was better with the constraints of the studio system than without. In his writing on the Branded to Thrill catalog he had previously touted the Taisho films as radical works of art, deeper than the Nikkatsu pictures. I hope enough people discover the Taisho pictures during this tour, so that Criterion is persuaded to give them a chance. I have the Japanese blu rays of the films, but those discs, while they are pretty good, could still stand some improvement, and they could use English subtitles.

Kanto Wanderer is my favorite of the Nikkatsu films. I was almost relieved that Carmen from Kawachi was so good––I'd been waiting to see it for years. I had thought that Criterion had never released it because they thought it was no good––but I think rather they didn't release it because...actually, I have no idea why they didn't release it. It's the third film in the unofficial "flesh" trilogy, with Gate of Flesh and Story of a Prostitute––all starring Yumiko Nogawa. Measuring Nogawa's fierce, physical performances against the work of the standard Japanese actresses of the day (think Shima Iwashita, for instance) really suggests something visceral and florid far beyond the usual, and watching the three films back to back to back showed them to be really captivating as a trilogy, as well as by themselves. I wish Criterion would release them as a bluray box–set. I wish Nogawa had done more work with Suzuki––she does appear in the second Akutaro film, Born Under a Bad Star. Gate of Flesh on the big screen was enormous––one of the more expensive–looking of the Nikkatsu productions, full of grandiose, ghetto–ruin set design and dense, hugely visually active crowd scenes.

Zigeunerweisen is probably my favorite Suzuki film overall, but the other parts of the trilogy just devastated me this time around. I found a lot of depth in Mirage Theater––moreso after having seen a bit of kabuki theater now, and having read some of the stories of Kyoka Izumi, which Mirage Theater is adapted from––and I loved Yumeji, and was able to get much more out of it than on previous viewings.

What the retrospective made clear––at least the films shown in L.A., is that there are a number of phases and modes to Suzuki's various films, and that really people have just scratched the surface of the pictures critically (this might be different in Japan, but I have no way to assess that). One of the surprises of the series was Capone Cries Hard, which had people rolling in the aisles laughing at the screening I saw. It is Suzuki's most out-and-out comedy, with as wild a view of America as Black Rain presented of Japan. It's about a guy driven beyond reason, really, to be a naniwa–bushi singer. He pursues this goal single-mindedly through decades of American history, eventually being imprisoned in an internment camp during WWII and then busted out by his American girlfriend––who is still somehow a flapper in spite of decades of cultural transformation. What was very interesting was the parallel with Suzuki himself, who has said that as an artist he never really changes his approach. The Naniwa–bushi singer keeps hammering away at his craft, regardless of the way time changes tastes. Even when no one appreciates him, he perseveres. And in a way, Suzuki never quite surrenders his own interests to what is contemporary or popular. At one point, there is a strange undercurrent of naniwa–bushi fadism in America, and the singer becomes somewhat successful. But it doesn't affect his artistic focus whatsoever.

It became clear that there is a series of Suzuki movies that are consciously self–reflective, about his work and how it's perceived, running from A Story of Sorrow and Sadness in the 70s through Capone in the 80s, to Pistol Opera in the 90s. Pistol Opera, especially, only makes sense when you begin to view the movie as a self–reflexive exercise. Sorrow and Sadness contains a scabrous critique of the TV culture Suzuki had been mired in for the whole decade. These films haven't really been treated as a thread of Suzuki's career, but it might be time to start doing so, now that they are slightly available. There are even subtitles for Capone floating around the internet now.

There are a few notes on Zigeunerweisen I can think of off-hand––the allusion to the fox den during Aochi's dream sequence, for example.

Because foxes are considered shrewd illusionists in Japanese folk tradition, this sequence is given a strange cast in the film. The woman Aochi meets and follows in the sequence appears to be Sono, Nakasago's wife––but she never introduces herself, and she might also be Koine, the geisha. Aochi isn't totally sure that Koine and Sono aren't the same person, to begin with. Aochi follows her into a house which might be Nakasago's house, but the house is fractured, broken up by the rising and falling of the on-set lighting into discreet chunks of hallway, stairs, etc. Just as the identity of the woman is othered/weirded by her lack of introduction and ambiguous motives (and the presence of her exact double in the film), the visual breaking up of the house makes it a magic or illusory space, which briefly flares with flame when Aochi seems to decide the space isn't real. Then Aochi characterizes the experience by comparing it to a night in the past in which a fox lured him towards its den with an illusion. "Am I like that fox?" asks Sono/Koine. And then she goes on to say: "I could very well be that fox. And you could be in a fox's den." These lines retroactively characterize the dream sequence as that sequence from Shinto folklore, in which a fox casts an illusion for a person and lures him into the fox's lair (that exact sequence is portrayed in one of the writer Uchida Hyakken's stories, which are the basis for this film). The immediate cut after the line "you could be in a fox's den" is to Nakasago's actual house, where Aochi sits alone with Nakasago's actual wife, Sono. The associative edit is unmistakable, from Sono/Koine the fox to Sono the homemaker––and fox spirit? The cut leads directly to the seduction in the scene that follows. Is Sono a fox, luring Aochi into her den? Is her tryst with Aochi the beginning of his undoing?

The imprints of the metal studs on the girl's sandals at the end of the film are interesting, especially because the inscriptions on the metal studs seem to be buddhist sutras to protect the wearer of the sandals when walking in the land of the dead, similar to the Hoichi the Earless sequence in Kwaidan, where sutras inscribed on Hoichi's body protect him in the land of the dead. The implication then at the end of the film being that Nakasago's daughter is a living being, or a quasi–living being, walking in a world of the dead. Water imagery throughout the Taisho trilogy consistently represents the barrier between the living and the dead, and throughout the films people spend a lot of quality time in boats or watching other people in boats. There's ambiguity; who is living, who is dead? The question returns again and again throughout the films.

I think the bells on Kayko's dress are charms to ward off evil kami, or spirits. This might be an outfit Kayko wears for holidays––I think Aochi first sees Kayko when she and Koine are on their way to the temple near where Aochi is led into the fox's den, and that might account for Kayko's costume having the bells sewn into it––it is like a shinto festival tradition. Nakasago and Kayko both get a recurrent sound associated with them which initially appears diegetic and later becomes non–diegetic. Kayko's bells, and the hollow knocking sound of Nakasago's door knocker are both sound cues relating to old Japanese traditions. As non–diegetic sounds, they echo deeply and I think are meant to be sounds that travel from one world into another.

The film is full of intrusive echoes and impressions, understood, I think, to mean attempts to communicate between the world of the dead and that of the living. The impressions Kayko's sandals leave in the land of the dead reflects not just her otherness, an intruder in that environment, but also Kayko's unnatural entry into the world of the dead,

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serving as a mouthpiece for her father.

The sounds which echo through the film are further attempts to push through that barrier: the intrusive voice which talks back to Aochi's wife from out of nowhere. The acorns on Nakasago's roof, followed by the unearthly clacking sound which frightens Sono. And parallel with those, the uncanny emergence of Sarasate's voice from out of his music––an aberration and an intrusion into the recording, now considered valuable communicative material.

I've also been reading the Uchida Hyakken stories that are the basis for Zigeunerweisen, and it's very interesting to see how freely Suzuki and his co–writers adapted the Hyakken stories. The story Disc of Sarasate appears in the film almost in its entirety, but the different sequences of the story are spread out over a broad portion of the narrative.

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Roughly, the story details Nakasago's friendship with an unidentified narrator. Their several encounters revolve around luncheons, dining with a geisha, Nakasago's marrying someone who looks like the geisha, Nakasago's freaking out over the unearthly voice the narrator describes, the death of Nakasago's wife and Koine the geisha's return to take care of Nakasago's child, Nakasago's death, and the visits Koine and Kayko make to the unnamed narrator's home to request the return of books and the Sarasate record owned by Nakasago. The story reaches its conclusion when the narrator returns to Nakasago's home with Koine and Koine dresses as a geisha again and serves the narrator Nakasago's beer, then she becomes frightened and tells him Nakasago isn't home, and asks him to go away. At that point, the story is over.

The character Aochi does not appear in the Disc of Sarasate story, but rather in a story called Bowler Hat. The Aochi in that story, though, is an anarchist imp wreaking havoc in his friends' lives, and he bears a lot more similarity to the Nakasago figure in the movie. The unnamed narrator of Disc of Sarasate seems to be the personality template for the Aochi of the film, but several times in the film Aochi wears the bowler hat he wears in the Bowler Hat short story. So Suzuki is reconfiguring the traits and elements of the characters in the Hyakken stories to serve his narrative. There are also sequences adapted from another Hyakken story, which I think is called something like In the Tuberculosis Ward, but then sequence where Aochi is beguiled by the fox is lifted out of yet another Hyakken story. The adaptation Suzuki and his co–writers are making seems to aspire to encapsulate a majority of Hyakken themes and modes into one work, which is a pretty interesting approach. As a side note, the professor character at the center of Akira Kurosawa's last movie, Madadayo, is Uchida Hyakken.

I believe the Kyoka Izumi stories adapted into Mirage Theater are similarly diffused throughout the film, and that the screenplay makes a sort of a mix of different stories––I haven't read enough Izumi to recognize which stories are being represented, though. Ultimately, the central narrative arc of Zigeunerweisen––the wager between Nakasago and Aochi over their skeletons, and the string of ambiguous crimes and seductions that center around the wager––is an invention of Suzuki and the other screenwriters. Nakasago's rambling ways are another invention not found in any of the Hyakken source material. The profoundly unsettling moment in the film where Aochi attempts to look at Nakasago's bones and determine their color, while seeming as if it could be a part of the Disc of Sarasate story, is actually part of Suzuki and his collaborators' own narrative inventions. So the adaptation of stories to film is quite a unique one, where mood and feeling and particular scenes are lifted out of the source author's writing and put to work for a plot structure not found in any of the author's works, articulating a set of concrete themes––the contrast of traditional, "romaticized" Japanese values with more pragmatic values seeping in from the West, the sense of sexual gamesmanship, the juxtaposition of death/decomposition and beauty––which are not Hyakken's own themes at all. I presume Mirage Theater is adapted in a similar style, but again, I haven't read enough Izumi yet to really tell. The adaptation of Zigeunerweisen is said to have taken eight years or more, working on and off. Mirage Theater must have been done in less than a year, working presumably full or part–time. I've never read that anyone but Suzuki and Yozo Tanaka worked on Mirage Theater or Yumeji. In an interview in Asian Cult Cinema Suzuki confirms that Zigeunerweisen was the work of Guru Hachiro, the group he formed with his collaborators at Nikkatsu, which also wrote Branded to Kill (Atsushi Yamatoya, Chusei Sone and Yukihiro Sawada are all name–checked in the interview as being part of Guru Hachiro––presumably all had a hand in Zigeunerweisen? Suzuki mentions Sone repeatedly in reference to the script, and the twisty sexual gamesmanship of the story has Yamatoya's imprint upon it, to my mind––between Trapped in Lust and Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands, Yamatoya's work is full of those kind of situations).

Hyakken was a modernist, who tried to capture a sense of the vivid corporeal aspect of the uncanny––his most famous story is told from the perspective of a person who suddenly realizes he is turning into a kudan––a half-human, half-cow hybrid creature. The story describes in detail his physical sensations of transformation. The incidents of the uncanny in Zigeunerweisen are all tangible occurrences within the narrative. People are either in the realm of the dead or that of the living, but in either space they are actually doing things, making changes, affecting one another. The divide between the two spaces is itself nearly tangible in the film. By contrast, Izumi is a writer more preoccupied with the ambiguity of the uncanny. In his stories, characters wonder and doubt the apparent nature of the mystical encounters they have. Mirage Theater goes on to duplicate that sense of ambiguity, with characters in the film constantly doubting and challenging their apparent roles in the unfolding drama. The playwright's lover in Mirage Theater invites him to commit their love to suicide. "Did I really love you, though?" asks the playwright, incredulous. At one point, the characters begin to communicate using geometric shapes instead of written characters or spoken language. In Japan in the early 80s, it's easy to see Zigeunerweisen, with its positing of a world of Shinto folklore made tangible, had more ready traction with its audiences. My Neighbor Totoro, a few years later, would offer the same tease of a world filled with potentially tangible kami spirit creatures, whose ambiguous nature is disproven within the course of the narrative, but pleasantly validated at the story's close. Mirage Theater failed to attract audiences right after Zigeunerweisen in part because that ambiguity, so important a part of Izumi's writing, made the film a lot less readily accessible to the same audience. We wonder whether characters in Mirage Theater are actually lovers, and the characters challenge the assumption of their devotion to each other. We wonder whether people have affairs together or not. Similar mysteries are present in Zigeunerweisen, but the affairs, encounters, etc. are played out on camera, regardless. Whether real or imagined, the physical reality of the scenes is always apparent.

Still, I wonder if people who aren't already fans of art films are turned off by the lack of music in Zigeunerweisen. Yumeji has a particularly lush score, which moves the action forward and explains emotions behind scenes. Mirage Theater has some of its own very subtle music cues, and it has diegetic music which carries from scene to scene, becoming questionably non–diegetic in the process. Except for diegetic songs and recordings, Zigeunerweisen has, I think only one piece of scoring––the faint echoing drum during the "fox's den" dream sequence. I wonder if it doesn't make the film hard for people to get into. I think Japanese audiences of the 80s had a lot more ready access, and that helps to explain the success of the film in Japan.

[DeprongMori]

Feihong, thank you for unpacking the background stories and some of the symbolism in the films. There is obviously much I missed from a cultural perspective, but the film has its own gravity regardless. Much to look at and think about in subsequent viewings. I certainly hope that Criterion sees their way to a release of the Taisho Trilogy in the wake of this retrospective tour. Or if not Criterion, perhaps Arrow would do it justice.

[feihong]

I also missed most of the cultural context of the film on first viewing, and like you I was mesmerized all the same. Since then I've seen the film maybe 15 or 16 times, but I don't think I quite began to really get a solid sense of the film until I read the Hyakken source material. At that point, starting to see what Suzuki had done to adapt the writing, and after reading some comments from the Branded to Thrill catalog where Suzuki talks about Mirage Theater and the challenge of adapting Izumi in that film, I started to get a sense of the creative work Suzuki and the other writers had done in crafting the shape and purpose of Zigeunerweisen.

But there's so much else to love in the film. I think the performances, for instance, are all very striking and unusual. Even Yoshio Harada, who made a career out of finely–delineated macho archetypes, does something a little more commanding than usual, delivering a character who is somehow a bit more fully–wrought than in some of his other work. I feel that it's pretty easy to "get" Nakasago, and where he's coming from, even as the character gains depth and ambiguity. By contrast, in some of Harada's other iconic performances of the time, in The Hunter in the Dark, for instance, or The Ballad of Orin, or in Suzuki's own A Story of Sorrow and Sadness, his character motivations are somewhat more obscure, and often need to be clarified by melodramatic situations and plot revelations in the later part of those pictures. I don't think any of those are less that really great movies, by the way, but I think it speaks to how well–made Zigeunerweisen is that character and motivation comes through so clearly and directly in the picture. Naoko Ohtani just blows my mind in the film. The remarkable sequence when Koine follows Nakasago to the portside inn where he gambles with the foreigners and where she gambles on throwing herself at him gave me chills on first watch, because of the mad, desperate look in her Ohtani's eyes. How could this intensely on–fire actress have done mostly just a Tora–san movie and some anonymous television both before and after this really searing performance can only be explained by the 80s, I guess? Not a time for the flourishing of a great stable of actors in Japanese film. She should have had great roles to follow this one. And I really like Toshiya Fujita's performance here, with its quiet introspection. The way the rather big man goes meek and quiet is done with a lot of subtlety––more than Fujita usually brought to the screen as a director, I think. The actress playing Aochi's sister–in–law is pretty good, as well––just the right amount of grating, balanced with our increasing sympathy for her as she seems to become Aochi's confidant. And Michiyo Ookusu is a little like a Japanese Shelley Duvall, kooky and cartoonish, but never seeming like it's a put-on.

The single mystery that perplexes me most in the movie is Sono snapping her fingers during her seduction scene with Aochi. It seems to be the signal for the sexual encounter to follow. Aochi at that point acts as if the assignation is irresistible. But I'm not sure what the whole movement means, where Sono twists her naked torso towards the camera and delivers this full–body, garish finger–snapping. Is she beckoning Aochi to bed? I guess so? I keep thinking there is some other cultural significance to the gesture which I'm missing.

Another thing which perplexed my friends on seeing the movie, now that I think of it, was how Aochi gets the cop to release Nakasago to him in the beginning of the movie, simply by presenting his business card to prove he's a professor. I guess the dimension of social class in play there eluded my friends––the idea that the cop was impressed enough by the class afforded Aochi in his position as a professor of German that he not only pays enormous deference to Aochi, but he trusts Aochi's word that Nakasago isn't responsible for the crime the fishermen are eager to pin upon him. It didn't seem plausible to my friends, but I think it was certainly plausible in the time period.

It's interesting that Aochi identifies Nakasago in the scene as a fellow professor of German––not sure if that's the translation in all cases, or if the subs on some prints present this statement a little differently. In the first print I saw, when the American naval officer invites the other card players aboard his ship, Nakasago's subtitle in retort read "I don't want to get killed." In all other prints and transfers of the film I've seen, he says "I'll think about it." "I'll think about it" seems a little more credible, given how few syllables Nakasago utters in response to the officer's effusive, even poetic invitation to appreciate "wine, women and song" with him. The print touring with the current retrospective, by leaving off subtitling the blind trio's bawdy songs, is really doing the film a disservice. The specific lyrics to these songs are fascinating texts, primarily laid over scenes in the film of erotic tension between the central figures of the film. The songs repeatedly treat the morality of adultery, adding a certain amount of tension to the film's romantic conflicts.

[senseabove]

Thanks for the wonderful write-ups, feihong! I'm jealous you've had the opportunity to see Ziegeuner more than a dozen times!

I definitely felt the lack of subtitles during the songs... I also saw another review mention that Koine changed names to Oine after she moved into Nakasago's, and I thought I noticed the change in how the characters referred to her, but it wasn't reflected in the subtitles. Certainly seems they could do a better job of it... I think we need to start petitioning Criterion!

[beamish13]

So, what's the consensus here on Tale of Sorrow and Sadness? I think the cocktail of satire, pseudo melodrama (the scenes with Reiko's pre-pubescent son talking with his classmate under cherry blossoms are hilariously hyper-sincere) and Lynchian horror (the perfect final shot recalls the opening of Fire Walk with Me) completely gelled for me. Incredible to think that Suzuki's comeback film was a merciless attack on the Japanese culture of the period.

Does anyone here know how it was greeted during its release? The original poster makes it look like a Romanu Porno, which it's anything but.

[Cold Bishop]

Not well if I recall. It was based on a popular manga, and people we're expecting the feel good sports story promised by the source. Not an absurdist riff on media and celebrity.

[feihong]

Supposedly it was a financial failure. I had always heard it was an artistic failure as well, but when I first saw it on DVD it seemed quite good to me.

On the big screen the film is pretty wild, and it seems very sure of itself. Suzuki really goes after television culture very hard, and that aspect of the movie is pretty interesting to me. The scene where Mrs. Senboh's husband chuckles mechanically at the TV--which leads into the series of closeups of all the TV aerials in the town, cut to similar mechanical laughter from every house--is not subtle, but also pretty ingenious. It's interesting that Suzuki has just come off a run of TV movies and commercials, where he clearly saw himself as mired in the publicity machine the film depicts.

I thought the scenes in which Reiko takes so many practice swings her hands bleed was quite funny. Her initial arc is very unusual, and kind of hyper-Freudian––she's a voracious sensual being who is cajoled into winning the golf tournament by her boyfriend's withholding sex. As she gets locked into fame, she becomes an increasingly numb object of exploitation and sexploitation, and is so used up by the end of the film her nails seem to be rotting.

Interesting also to see Koji Wada in a small role. Wada was the star of a lot of Suzuki's films from the middle of his Nikkatsu period––some of the most standardized programmers, like the boxing movie Those Who Bet on Me, and the breathless–but–stale Fighting Delinquents, a "wild kids" film and Suzuki's first picture in color. During Suzuki's tenure with Nikkatsu, Wada's prominence seemed to have depreciated––I was surprised to see him in Gate of Flesh (first time I saw the film I didn't yet know who he was), playing a small supporting role as Abe, the repeatedly emasculated procurer. Even in his heyday as a star, Wada often came across as a poor man's Yujiro Ishihara. Wada shows up in Story of Sorrow and Sadness as the boss of the advertising think tank in the early part of the movie. He wonders aloud if Reiko can really become a star. In the Asian Cult Cinema interview, Suzuki refers to Wada as a "spoiled brat from a very rich family." But in fact he must have gotten along with him decently, as Wada returns for this small part ten years later, for another studio.

"It was based on a popular manga, and people we're expecting the feel good sports story promised by the source. Not an absurdist riff on media and celebrity."

Also, there had been more than a decade of these Cruel Story–style movies already in Japan––the genre Tale of Sorrow and Sadness falls into quite squarely. There had been films like Eiichi Kudo's The Great Killing and Teruo Ishii's Shogun's Joys of Torture and the Cruel Story of Bushido films. Pinku Eiga adopted this fairly medieval story form a lot, including things like Noboru Tanaka's Beauty's Exotic Dance: Torture! and Kumashiro's Painful Bliss!! Final Twist. Even Retreat Through the Wet Wasteland can be seen in terms of this story mode, where an individual gets ground under the wheel of an oppressive or repressive system, and we watch their descent into depravity, despair, or death––sometimes all three. Of course, Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth outflanks most of these pictures in its sense of constant, extending degradation, crushing to its main characters. Suzuki's own Everything Goes Wrong is in a similar vein. But even mainstream pictures like the Gosha chambara movies follow this form to some degree. Hitokiri is the best example, but Hunter in the Dark has this despairing flavor to it as well. The popular films on the way would be quite different, from the big–budget fantasies of Kinji Fukasaku (Message in Space, Samurai Reincarnation) to the nostalgic sci–fi of Nobuhiko Obayashi (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Exchange Students, School in the Crosshairs). Primarily these pictures would be more upbeat, less engaged in social criticism than films of the previous decade, and infused with a more youthful spirit. Even when the Tales of Suffering story mode reappeared in that era, it was in a new context, with a more defiant spirit of youthful anarchism, like in Sogo Ishii's Burst City or Shinji Somai's Sailor Suit Schoolgirl with a Machine Gun. Slice-of-life movies became a much bigger thing. "Problem pictures" were suddenly no longer pop in Japanese cinema, and I think audiences in the late 70s were reacting against films that presented the system as unbeatable, repressive, and evil. They were turning away from those kind of pictures. Japanese cinema of the 80s focuses on smaller subject matter, for the most part––or at least, more intimate subject matter. So films start to appear that look inward, towards the family, for instance, as the object of a more intimate criticism. The Family Game and Crazy Family both have elements of this approach. No subject so external and encompassing gets much traction with audiences in the years following Story of Sorrow and Sadness. No prominent Japanese movie I can think of in the next decade makes the bald suggestion that our lives are being warped beyond recognition by the values of consumer culture. Zigeunerweisen, by contrast, was a much more inwardly–focussed film. It stepped into a somewhat nostalgic past, captured, Like Totoro a few years later, a lush, forested landscape that people realized was vanishing in 80s Japan. It dealt with a personal struggle so intimate that even bystanders within the film don't have an inkling that anything's going on. Zigeunerweisen is about facing changing values––Sorrow and Sadness is about values being warped and eroded. So I think the times and tastes had a lot to do with the movie not being a hit.

" I'm jealous you've had the opportunity to see Ziegeuner more than a dozen times!"

To be fair, I have been obsessively hunting the movie most of my life. I first read about it in 1996, when I came across Thomas and Yuko Mihara Weisser's Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia––the fantasy, horror & Sci–fi volume. It was years before I was able to find any further trace of the movie. I have seen Zigeunerweisen so many times because I bought it on DVD when it was released in the U.S., and I bought the Japanese blurays when they were released. I have subs for the blurays and watch the film that way. I worked with a group that screened the Taisho trilogy in the early 2000s, to what turned out to be a very small audience. Zigeunerweisen remains one of my 3 or 4 favorite films. I've been requesting that Criterion consider the film for a long time. Since maybe about 1998 or so? I stopped when Kimstim got the rights. But it was pretty crushing when Kimstim released the DVDs, not very well compressed, with burned–in subtitles--and greeted by dislike or disinterest from reviewers and "Asia Extreme" DVD collectors of the time. I'm not sure if Kimstim has lost those rights, or if Kimstim is still in business? I should get back to requesting Criterion take a look at the film. I wish there was a little more critical interest in the film, as I feel that would give the film a little more traction. It is one of the films Tom Vick submits for re-evaluation in his book, but he really doesn't do much in the way of critical analysis on any of the films in the book. With Zigeunerweisen he outright leaves it up to the reader, saying something to the effect that the Taisho trilogy are all films which leave the individual audience members to make their own meaning of what they are seeing. I don't think that's exactly true. The notes Tony Rayns writes in Branded to Thrill suggest he sees the thematic particulars of the films in much more detail, but they are just notes, part of the catalog of a long-ago exhibition, I believe. I feel like Zigeunerweisen and the other Taisho films, and perhaps many of Suzuki's other films, would benefit from the kind of detailed explication Kurosawa and Ozu films have received in English–language publications.

[djproject]

http://www.brattlefilm.org/category/cal ... un-suzuki/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Started last Wednesday and will continue until June 2 for those in the greater Boston area (or can access it for a spell).

[Michael Kerpan]

Commuting across the river to Cambridge for 8 days in a row (plus plenty of trips before and after this stretch) for the Retrospective.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Tale of Sorrow and Sadness is often said to be based on a manga, but it was actually based on a treatment by Kajiwara Ikki, not any previously published material. Kajiwara (who also co-produced the film) specialized in sports-themed manga (Ashita no Joe, Tiger Mask, etc.) so the confusion is understandable. From what I've read the final film doesn't have much to do with what Kajiwara came up with. The film was apparently seen as a letdown by critics who were expecting "more" from Suzuki's comeback, perhaps because (as feihong notes) the film came near the end of a then-trendy cycle and didn't blow the hinges off the doors of perception, or whatever. I've also heard it claimed that Tale of Sorrow and Sadness was another Branded to Kill situation where Suzuki delivered something the studio didn't want and was banished into the wilderness as a result, but at least one of the film's producers (Fujioka Yutaka, who worked mainly in anime) was fine enough with it to employ Suzuki on various installments in the Lupin the Third franchise. (On a related note, the second Lupin TV series, on which Suzuki served as supervising director, is finally getting a complete R1 release starting this year.)

[Michael Kerpan]

How good was this second Lupin 3 series?

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

I've only seen the 24 season one episodes that Adult Swim used to rerun endlessly. I thought they were good breezy fun but have no idea if they kept that up for 155 episodes. The whole series is up on Crunchyroll and about half the run (including the two Miyazaki-directed episodes) is on Hulu.

[senseabove]

I've been requesting that Criterion consider the film for a long time. Since maybe about 1998 or so? I stopped when Kimstim got the rights. But it was pretty crushing when Kimstim released the DVDs, not very well compressed, with burned–in subtitles--and greeted by dislike or disinterest from reviewers and "Asia Extreme" DVD collectors of the time. I'm not sure if Kimstim has lost those rights, or if Kimstim is still in business? I should get back to requesting Criterion take a look at the film.

I emailed their suggestions address about it Mulvaney's reply was just a generic "I'll pass it on and thanks for supporting Criterion." Does Eureka have a similar address? I think they could do a great job with it, or maybe Arrow could do one of its LE box sets?

[Mr Sausage]

Please keep all posts about Suzuki's death to their proper thread.

[senseabove]

Seijun Suzuki Archives posted about two Suzuki BD/UHD box sets coming out in Japan, but unfortunately I'm not finding anything else about them...

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Here's an article on the two sets, with links to the preorders on Amazon Japan. The first box is "Seijun and Men" and includes Branded to Kill, Fighting Elegy, Youth of the Beast, Our Blood Will Not Forgive, Victory Is Mine, Age of Nudity, and Love Letter. The second is "Seijun and Women" and has Carmen from Kawachi, Gate of Flesh, Story of a Prostitute, Kanto Wanderer, The Bastard, and The Naked Woman and the Gun. Branded to Kill, Love Letter, Carmen from Kawachi, and The Naked Woman and the Gun come from 4K masters, but both sets are standard Blu-ray only (plus a DVD of extras). Given that it's taken this long for any Suzuki films to hit Blu in Japan—twelve years after Criterion's BDs of Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter—UHDs are probably too much to ask. And speaking of Tokyo Drifter, to judge from the comments on the article, I'm not the only one wondering why it isn't included.

[feihong]

CDJapan has listed, in addition to the Seijun and Men and Seijun and Women boxsets coming soon, a "4k digitally-restored UHD/Bluray set of the Taisho Trilogy coming April of 2024. $160, meaning about $50/film, instead of the other set's lower per-film price––and it's a safe assumption none of these have English subtitles. Still, looking forward to all this incredible Suzuki stuff coming up.

[feihong]

Amazon Japan has a number of Seijun Suzuki movies up on their Prime Video service right now––many of which have had no home video release at all up until now, anywhere in the world (though all have screened on television, and bootlegs exist for them). Amongst the films Amazon Japan Prime is listing are the Akira Kobayashi melodrama Young Breasts (aka Blue Breasts, which seems a more literal translation, but which, for some reason isn't being used anymore), Carmen from Kawachi, Our Blood will Not Forgive, and the Koji Wada action vehicle Blood-Red Water in the Channel. There are also several which haven't had more than a single, usually poor-quality home video release in the past, including Fighting Delinquents, Take Aim at the Police Van, Underworld Beauty, Fighting Elegy, Kanto Wanderer, and Everything Goes Wrong. Also, Capone Cries Hard is now streamable, with a trial membership for Shochiku Plus. There's also a number of films with at least one perfectly respectable blu ray release that are streaming now, as well, including Hi-Teen Yakuza, Tokyo Knights, Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell, Bastards!, Sleep of the Beast, Smashing the 0-Line, The Boy Who Came Back, Man with a Shotgun, Gate of Flesh, Tokyo Drifter, and Story of a Prostitute. The Taisho Trilogy is on there, too. In fact, Nikkatsu Action Cinema is by and large extraordinarily represented on Amazon Japan prime; you can see tons of the Rambling Guitarist movies, there's a whole Koji Wada section, there's Hideaki Nitani and Hiroyuki Nagato movies. You can even see things like Song of the Underworld, the Yujiro Ishihara vehicle which Suzuki's Kanto Wanderer remade.

The service is notoriously hard to use if you don't live in Japan, and I haven't been able to find access. But it's encouraging to see that so many Suzuki movies are available there––including pictures like Young Breasts, which gets significant discussion in William Carroll's new book on Suzuki, and which long existed as the single worst-quality bootleg of any of Suzuki's movies. Hard to tell if any of these are truly high-definition transfers, but we know Kanto Wanderer, Fighting Elegy, Gate of Flesh, Story of a Prostitute, Our Blood Will Not Forgive, and Carmen from Kawachi are in the forthcoming blu-ray boxes. Hi-def transfers of The Flower and the Angry Waves, Capone Cries Hard, Living by Karate (aka A Hell of a Guy), and Our Blood Will Not Forgive have shown up over backchannels in the last couple of years, as well. So there are a lot of Suzuki movies armed for potential HD releases some time in the future.

By the way, Carroll's book, Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema, is excellent. It offers a wealth of previously unavailable information on Suzuki's films, new analysis of his filmmaking style, a much clearer analysis of the Seijun Suzuki Event than is usually detailed, and some interesting interpretation of the work of Japanese film critics who have written significant film criticism and analysis of Suzuki's movies, like Shigehiko Hasumi and Koshi Ueno. Carroll has translated notes from Chusei Sone on the background of the films, on Guryu Hachiro (Suzuki's late-Nikkatsu-era scriptwriting group), and on Suzuki's working relationships. He greatly expands what we know of Guryu Hachiro––here repeating Chusei Sone's claim that Guryu Hachiro entirely rewrote Kaneto Shindo's script to Fighting Elegy, and also charting the way in which the group that made up Guryu Hachiro worked their way into the Seijun Group at Nikkatsu, and then continued to work with Suzuki for decades after he was fired. There are some sources he doesn't seem to deal with––as a matter of form he seems to dismiss all of Suzuki's own comments on his work (this makes a kind of sense, as Suzuki's own commentary has proven unreliable in the past––something which Suzuki has even jokingly acknowledged––but it does mean we don't hear reference to any of the commentaries Suzuki gives on the previously-released Nikkatsu DVDs for films like Eight Hours of Terror and Cheers at the Harbor: Triumph in My Hands), and he never references Tadao Sato's writing on Suzuki in Currents in Japanese Cinema, nor Sato's interviews about Suzuki on the various documentaries for the Criterion releases. What clearly seems like direct information in Suzuki's interviews in Asian Cult Cinema and Bug Magazine don't seem to be referenced, either. He never takes on Suzuki's persistent claim that he rewrote and shot Eight Hours of Terror as a musical comedy, and then was forced to reshoot the original script (there is evidence that the film had songs). But the analysis is fascinating––on a few films in particular, including Young Breasts, The Fang in the Hole, Carmen from Kawachi, and The Boy Who Came Back. Carroll doesn't dismiss the Taisho Trilogy (he mostly seems to accept Tom Vick's critical redemption of their reputation, and Rachel DiNitto's article on Zigeunerweisen), but he spends more time on Suzuki's television output, writing a decent amount about A Mummy's Love, Choice of Family: I'll Kill Your Husband for You!, The Fang in The Hole, and Suzuki's contributions to Lupin III. He also references Cherry Blossoms in Spring flatteringly––which I cosign as well.

Some details in the book I find I really obsess over. Carroll has put together a lot of notes on the releases of Suzuki's films, which are fascinating. It's now somewhat well-known that Kanto Wanderer was the B-picture on a double-bill with Shohei Imamura's The Insect Woman, for instance, but it was interesting to learn that Suzuki's third movie, Satan's Town, was the B-picture behind Crazed Fruit. Carroll does a lot to break down the myth of Nikkatsu president Kyusaku Hori's declaration that Suzuki's movies make "no sense and no money." And he does a lot to position Suzuki's career in the era of Nikkatsu action cinema, showing that Suzuki was by no means unsuccessful at what he did there. Carroll talks about how one might measure the success of the films, and he points out that there aren't box office grosses for the individual films––since they are all released in double bills, sometimes alongside newsreels (early Suzuki pictures are frequently released with newsreels covering the season's sumo wrestling results). Carroll in general measures the success of the films by how long they stay in theaters. He makes clear Nikkatsu's process here, which seems to be to keep films in a theater for a certain length of time––all of Suzuki's early films stay in theaters for 6 days, except for An Inn of Floating Weeds, which plays for 5 days. Nikkatsu would play hit films for longer, cycling them through with other pictures for longer program runs (Suzuki's biggest hit, Gate of Flesh, gets paired with 3 different B-pictures––but Carroll also complicates the "A-picture, B-picture" hierarchy that Suzuki describes, showing how some of Suzuki's own pictures are clearly A-pictures, but that other programs make it patently unclear which picture is the A or B picture––he also shows how some of Suzuki's pictures start as the B-picture on a double-bill, but become popular enough that they end up the A-picture on another double-bill). Using this run-length as a measuring stick, then Nude Girl with a Gun appears to be Suzuki's first hit picture, a film which plays for 15 days––which may account for its surprise inclusion in the upcoming blu ray set. Carroll compares this film to Hitchcock's Vertigo, and says it might have been an homage, except that Suzuki's picture predates Hitchcock's by a year. Suzuki then gets bigger budgets and a bigger star for the Akira Kobayashi melodramas The Boy Who Came Back and Blue Breasts, but neither film seems to move the needle, each playing for that 6-day average run. His first failures appear to be Passport to Darkness (a really good picture) and Naked Age, which both run only 4 days, but Smashing the 0-Line seems to be a modest hit, running for 9 days. Afterwards, Everything Goes Wrong is a total disaster, playing for only 3 days. Carroll doesn't say it quite, but there seems to be an arc of success with Suzuki's films, and at this point he gets paired with rising star Koji Wada. Fighting Delinquents runs for 14 days, Tokyo Knights for 9. After that, the Koji Wada films decline (except for Blood-Red Water in the Channel, which bounces back again for a 9-day release). Carroll notes that Koji Wada's box office declined in general over this period, and he pivoted to supporting roles (which is why we see him playing saps and dimwits in Gate of Flesh and Carmen from Kawachi, and eventually in Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss). But Suzuki now gets paired again with Akira Kobayashi, now the number-2 star at Nikkatsu, for three films in the rising genre of Yakuza films. Kanto Wanderer plays for 15 days, The Flower and the Angry Waves for 14 (Carroll notes that Flower was one of Suzuki's most high-profile films of the era, used frequently in his defence during the Seijun Suzuki Incident and the trial––even though it is mostly forgotten today). Then there's Gate of Flesh, his biggest hit at Nikkatsu, playing for 18 days. Suzuki follows this with Our Blood Will Not Forgive. Chusei Sone claims that the failure of that movie meant that the studio forbid Suzuki from working with Kobayashi again, and that Suzuki's reputation amongst the top brass at Nikkatsu begins to decline from this period. But the film plays for 7 days, better than Suzuki's average (though with 3 big stars, it likely cost more to make than Suzuki's other movies). There are other signs of immediate disciplining on Nikkatsu's part. In the Bug interview, Suzuki claims that his next film, Story of a Prostitute, was meant to be shot in color, but that they were told it would be in black-and-white on the first day of filming. Story of a Bastard: Born Under a Bad Star and Tattooed Life look like an upswing in Suzuki's fortunes: the first plays for 8 days, the next for 9––but then Carmen from Kawachi only plays for 4 days (there's no documentation of this, but it seems the studio again takes away Suzuki's star; he only gets to work with Yumiko Nogawa again 28 years later, in a video production called Tale of Youth at Hirosaki High School {I have also seen this translated as Peyton Place in Hiraoka}). The last rush of Nikkatsu films, Suzuki fares much better, and he appears to be taking on evidence of a cult following. Tokyo Drifter is a hit, playing for 16 days, Fighting Elegy for 10 (though the sequel is cancelled), and Branded to Kill for 12 days. But by this point Nikkatsu is pruning their stable of talent (Suzuki writes an essay describing another director who is fired before him), and Suzuki is gone. The later movies' fortunes don't seem to be measured by the quantity of days kept in circulation, though we do get a number for Capone Cries Hard: it runs for 32 days straight. That fewer Japanese films are released in the 80s could account for the longer run for the movie, but I wonder if it suggests that Suzuki's later movies had much greater box office success in general? Inflation certainly plays a role. But I can't find any more information on the later movies, besides Suzuki's claim that Zigeunerweisen was a huge hit, but that they lost their shirts on Kagero-za the next year.

I don't know what to make of all this, quite, but it's very fascinating. You wonder how many of these runs were curtailed because Nikkatsu execs didn't have faith in the picture––and some of Suzuki's biggest failures seem to be programmed with far weaker-sounding films, or films with no major star involved. All of the Suzuki films I've seen are good––except maybe Our Blood will Not Forgive, which seems like two potentially good movies awkwardly stitched together––but which also features a potential inspiration for John Woo's The Killer in Akira Kobayashi's bloody gun finale in the countryside, in a white suit. Lots of the ones I've only seen with fansubs have turned out very spectacular––Living by Karate is a really good Koji Wada film, A Mummy's Love and Fang in the Hole are clear predecessors to Zigeunerweisen, and Cherry Blossoms in Spring, an early V-cinema project, is one of Suzuki's most avant-garde and best films. And films I've seen in repertory which have never had any love on home video––like Satan's Town and Passport to Darkness, proved really worth it. There are also pictures I didn't think much of, which after repertory screenings improved their way into masterpieces––I'd put Fighting Delinquents, The Flower and the Angry Waves, Tale of Sorrow and Sadness and Pistol Opera into that category. There's a lot out there for the cineaste to appreciate in Suzuki, I guess is how I'd end this ramble. His work continues to fascinate me.

[Mr Sausage]

The service is notoriously hard to use if you don't live in Japan, and I haven't been able to find access.

Would a VPN set to Japan work? Using one set to America is how I access Prime video in America, for instance. Unless there's something Japan specific preventing it, changing your IP location ought to work.