Climbing Mt. Suzuki
Section One

By Robert Keser

Japanese critics voted Seijun Suzuki’s elusive ghost drama Zigeunerweisen (aka Tsigoineruwaizen, 1980) as the key movie of that entire decade, yet few Westerners saw this indelibly haunting film at its scattered festival showings. With no theatrical or video distribution (it has only recently become available in Japan, but without English-language translation), still fewer have seen it in the decades since then. Yet this cryptic work, which posits a permeable border between the living and the dead, stealthily lodged in the brains of those who did see it, and critical approval verified that Suzuki had raised himself out of the exploitation-film swamp in which he had started, transmuting the base elements of lurid yakuza plots into the relative gold of the cult film.

In the more than twenty years since Zigeunerweisen, Suzuki kept busy as a TV panelist in Japan’s equivalent of “Hollywood Squares”, and as an actor in TV commercials, pop sitcoms, and an occasional film, most recently Sabu’s Blessing Bell (Kofuku no Kane, 2002). While producing a few more titles (including some contributions to anime), Suzuki basically remained silent as a film artist. Hence, news of Pistol Opera, the first new Suzuki film in a generation to win distribution in the west, stirred considerable excitement.

When the long-awaited Pistol Opera appeared, with its unexplained ellipses and baffling images, it was a pinnacle of abstraction, a reductio ad absurdum of the yakuza hit man narrative. While the action seems linear and transparent—Suzuki shows clearly what happens—what happens seems arbitrary and sometimes nearly impenetrable. According to a news story in The Asahi Shimbun, when a man in the audience repeatedly complained that “I can’t make heads or tails out of this”, the mischievous director feigned amazement that Pistol Opera could be regarded as anything more than “action-packed entertainment”. (1)

Perhaps the grumbling spectator was reacting to this purported thriller finding room for a vaudeville turn by a Hello Kitty-type nymphet, herself an inexplicable addition to this yakuza assassin plot, who proceeds to recite “Humpty-Dumpty” (in English), while a follow spot leads her around the stage. Or perhaps it was the Fellini-esque children’s tea party where the same moppet gets slapped, but then licks whipped cream off her guardian’s finger?

It’s not every day that even the sharpest cinema observers throw up their hands at decoding such an accomplished film. Jonathan Rosenbaum, for one, wrote: “Can I call a film a masterpiece without being sure I understand it?…I couldn’t give a fully coherent synopsis of Pistol Opera if my life depended on it…Having recently seen the movie again with subtitles and read a few rundowns of the plot, I’m only more confused about its meaning.” (2)

Attempting to describe Suzuki’s method, Eric Campos wrote: ”To tell this simple, but decidedly convoluted story, the characters use body language more than actual dialogue to convey their thoughts and feelings, creating even more confusion,” (3) while Ken Fox points out that the “audacious finale, which plays out in a wholly symbolic realm, will leave even the most adventurous moviegoers scratching their heads. See it with a friend; you'll appreciate the second opinion.” (4)

By the end, when one player says “I had a dream of Mishima”, it’s no surprise that she recounts her attempts to stitch the writer’s decapitated head back on (alas, without success). In fact, it is the theatricality of Paul Schrader’s poetic biographical film Mishima that Pistol Opera reproduces, not least in the dance-like finale, which looks like a shoot-out at Harper’s Bazaar and seems to throw sense to the winds. Among a dizzying clutch of elements, this involves a revolving stage, a guillotine, and four bald “slaves”, writhing in loincloths and chains, on a whirligig spinning out of control, much like the carousel careening off its axis in Strangers On a Train. And who would not be confounded by the carnivalesque International Terror Expo that features bottles of pickled embryos?

How to connect these images to meaning? Always unpretentious, Suzuki himself never indulges in self-important symbol-mongering; on the other hand, he makes few concessions to our desire for narrative logic and hardly encourages vicarious identification with the characters. Michael Atkinson, for one, advises that Pistol Opera “is the work of a cantankerous, self-pleasing coot, dismissing narrative conveniences in favor of gumball-colored vogue-noir, goofy digressions, bulldozing sight gaggery, and an inexhaustible tank of style…Expect the unexpectable, and it may be your movie of the year.” (5)  Note the fine point: Suzuki produces not just the unexpected but the “unexpectable”. 

So rarefied is Pistol Opera that watching it feels like landing on the very summit of a mountain, without benefit of the context gained from ascending the lower slopes. Can the director’s earlier works reveal his embedded themes, encrypted meanings, or even a consistent use of symbols? Can the critical pickaxe chip away at solid themes of politics and gender?

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“Living is difficult. Dying is cowardly.”

That’s the human dilemma in the films of Seijun Suzuki, as spoken by a despairing whore in The Story of a Prostitute, his complex and darkly compelling 1965 spectacle-melodrama about Chinese “comfort women” forced to service the Japanese army. All of Suzuki’s output of fifty-plus films (depending on whether or not TV works count), from his earliest pulp titles down to Pistol Opera, end with the implication that there’s no choice but to muddle through.

Suzuki’s unique career arc began in 1956: the year of his first feature film was also the year of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Bigger Than Life, and Eléna et les hommes. In Japan, Suzuki emerged alongside leaders of the radical cinema like the more consciously intellectual Nagisa Oshima (Cruel Story of Youth/Seishun Zankoku monogatari, 1958), as well as a generation of lesser-known provocateurs like Yasuzo Masumura (Red Angel/Akai Tenshil, 1966), the renowned poet Shuji Terayama (Throw Away Your Books, Go Out In the Streets/Sho o suteyo machi e deyou, 1971), and the still controversial Kinji Fukasuku (Battle Royale/Batoru rowaiaru, 2000). (6) Their polemical passion and stylistic experimentation directly challenged the traditional masters, in opposition to the restraint and indirection of films like Naruse‘s A Wife’s Heart  and Ozu’s Early Spring  (though Suzuki’s work would correspond with Mizoguchi’s).

From his heyday at Nikkatsu Studios, riding the wave of financial expansion in the surge of capitalist Japan, Suzuki’s first works were frank exploitation products, often nakedly designed to showcase pop singers and models. Popularly dismissed as hackwork, though full of quirky visual strategies and kinky details, they utilized the structures of gangster dramas and the soft-core “pinku-eiga” genre. (7)

In fact, Nikkatsu was a veritable hotbed of directors who were explicitly linking sexuality and politics, including colleagues and rivals like Yoshishige Yoshida (Eros Plus Massacre/Erasu purasu Gyakusatsu, 1969), Koji Wakamatsu (Go, Go Second Time Virgin/Yuke yuke nidome no shojo, 1969),and the Marxist Tatsumi Kumashiro (A Man and a Woman Behind the Fusuma Screen/Yohojan Fusuma no urabari, 1973). (8) Not aspiring to political analysis, Suzuki was pushing the same boundaries as the earthy and ribald Shohei Imamura (The Insect Woman/Nippon konchuki, 1963), who shared his penchant for audacity and strong women characters.

Although Suzuki predates the Nouvelle Vague, his opposition to militarism, his espousal of frankly depicting sexual behavior, and his critique of women’s exploitation in society all served to associate him with the movements led by 1960s rebels like Godard and Fassbinder and Pasolini.  This association with European models helped to stimulate interest in Suzuki’s works during the decades of eclipse when he was denied work in the studio system, leading to international retrospectives that have now circled the globe and raised him to cult stardom. 

The distinctively inventive stream of visual imagery of these films, rivaled in fertility only by the more nature-oriented lyricism of Sergei Paradjanov (in films such as The Color of Pomegranates, 1969), was achieved by six cinematographers but only three production designers, suggesting that the latter were the more significant collaborators. If Suzuki tends to keep his camera distant, letting angular compositions in medium and wide shots predominate, relating his characters to their settings and spaces, he equally takes adventurous visual risks: one sequence can unexpectedly turn into a series of freeze-frames, while another expresses a character’s turbulent emotions by tearing a filmic image into shreds before our eyes.

Suzuki even hearkens back to silent film conventions with the cameo insert. To suggest that one character is thinking about another (or to reflect a character’s influence on the action), an image of the absent player materializes for a few moments at one side of the wide screen. This is not any conscious reaching for picturesque retro effects (as in practically any Guy Maddin film), but just a chance to employ an archaic tool of film rhetoric.

Though always asserting the auteur’s subjectivity, Suzuki himself describes his seeming detachment from his protagonists: “…in foreign films the camera stays on the principal character. When he stands up and goes somewhere the camera follows him. Wherever he goes, the camera is waiting. But we do it differently here [in Japan]. In Kabuki they show everything at once. The interest is in seeing where and how the actors enter and exit. They appear right in front of you and go off somewhere in the distance. The continuity comes from the unity of atmosphere. On the other hand, in American films the continuity comes from the movements of the individual characters. That’s the big difference. What we make here is a series of pictures, so the movement of any one character is secondary”. (9)

Continue to Section Two.

Climbing Mt. Suzuki
Section One
Section Two
Section Three

A still from Suzuki's acclaimed Ziguenerweisen.

Secret assassin fun in Pistol Opera.