Flipping around the channels of late-night TV in my Tokyo apartment in 1984 I came across what seemed like a B movie from the sixties. The studio: Nikkatsu. The star: Shinishido Joe. The director: Suzuki Seijun. I was not at all prepared for what I was about to see, and I remember spending much of the following hour or so riveted to the screen with my mouth open. That night changed my life and set me on a journey to explore the darker side of a culture known predominantly for its classical beauty.

What I discovered were entire genres of popular films that had never been seen outside of Japan. Harb-Boiled noir, Nikkatsu Action, Toei Pink, Roman Porno. Far from the highly respected award-winning films on the international film circuit, these were the popular low-budget B pictures that the public thrived on. This, then, was the world of gossip columns, fan magazines, and superstars who graced the walls of Yakitori shops, nomiya (bars), and family-run businesses. This was the life and blood of Japan, neatly hidden from foreign eyes who, it was assumed, would not understand what the attraction was in the first place.

In the post-war fifties and sixties, Japan had its own version of the Hollywood star and the studio system. Names like Watari Tetsuya, Kitahara Mie, and Kobayashi Akira may be largely unheard of in the west, but in Japan they are as famous as Bogart, Monroe, and Brando. Countless directors flourished in the studios of Daiei, Toei, and Nikkatsu as directors for hire -- auteurs in their own right. By comparisson, Kurosawa's work is considered more "Western." Here we are looking at a whole new aesthetic, where plot and narrative devices take a back seat to mood, music, and the sensuality of visual images. Character development is often distilled into moments. There is a quality of timelessness -- The Floating World translated to the scope screen.

Of all the B studio directors, the one who perhaps most deservedly has earned the title auteur is Suzuki Seijun. Of the forty-two films Suzuki made for Nikkatsu, the final fourteen films he made between 1963 and 1967 are some of the most important, original, and Japanese films of all cinema, and of all his disturbing masterpieces, none is as powerful or unique as Branded to Kill. Each time I see it I discover something new -- it's like seeing it for the first time.

Astonishing. Exhilarating. Inspiring.

Nobody utilized Cinemascope like the Japanese (its similarity in shape to the Kabuli stage is suggested as a possible reason) and the use of the scope screen reached extravagantly delirious heights in the hands of master cinematographers like Mine Shigeyoshi and Nagatsuka Kazue, and directors like Suzuki Seijun. In Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter (Tokyo Nagaremono), each shot is a masterpiece of Japanese design. These traditions go back centuries, but on the scope screen they hit us afresh and right where we live.

Born in 1923 during the short-lived and quirky Taisho period in Japan, Suzuki inherited a powerful appetite for Haikara (modern style) that was tempered by his experiences in World War II. As the member of a meteorological unit, he was twice shipwrecked in the Philippines and Taiwan, and bore witness to atrocities we can only imagine. His nihilistic philosophy is quite apparent in his work -- "Making things is not what counts: the power that destroys them is" -- as a kind of playful irreverence that echoes the French New Wave that influences Suzuki and his contemporaries.

Suzuki Seijun's Branded to Kill is a cinematic masterpiece that transcends its genre. It is about as close to traditional Yakuza pictures as Godard's Alphaville is to science-fiction. Suzuki paid a price for his brilliance, however. Fired for "incomprehensibility" after making Branded to Kill, he was unable to work in film for ten years. This film is his seminal work; a genre film from a major Japanese studio by a team of creative geniuses who made no compromises. But here the genre is merely a point of departure.

Destination: Out.

John Zorn

John Zorn is a New York-born composer who has been living off and on in Tokyo since 1984.

CAST

Hanada Goro ... Shishido Joe

Hanada Mami ... Ogawa Mariko

Nakajo Misako ... Mari Annu

Number One Killer ... Nanbara Koji

CREDITS

Director ... Suzuki Seijun

Producer ... Iwai Kaneo

Camera ... Nagatsuka Kazue

Script ... Guryu Hachiro

Music ... Yamamoto Naozumi

Design ... Kawahara Naozumis

Editor ... Tanji Mutsuo

Assistant Director ... Kuzuu Masami

ABOUT THE TRANSFER

Criterion presents the American premiere of Branded to Kill in a pristine transfer from the original Nikkatsu-scope master.

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