While there are now fewer recent books on famous Hollywood directors – probably because criticism by now has covered almost any aspect of their work – new publications on, so far, underrated and ignored directors are being published more often.
Peter A. Yacavone’s Negative, Nonsensical, and Non-Conformist is one of those books.
It centers on the detailed analysis of the entire 49 feature films of legendary Japanese director Suzuki Seijun (1923 – 2017), whose plots and ways of presenting a story are not always easy to follow, in particular, when it comes to traditions of narrativity and audience expectations.
Yacavone is certain that some critics may “… wish to emphasize his [Suzuki’s] skills as a narrative artist more than I have done: for this book has appreciated Suzuki as the antagonist of conventional cinematic narration.”
His work for the country’s largest film studio Nikkatsu developed from average melodrama featuring juvenile violence and yakuza plots in the late 1950s to groundbreaking, fresh and highly surreal movies in the mid 1960s. His Tokyo Drifter (1966) is a masterpiece. In fact, for the Nikkatsu owners, he turned out to be too experimental and with each production, Suzuki was harder to control. Finally, in 1967 he was fired and experienced several years of disappointments and unemployment, as he was blacklisted nationwide and branded as difficult and even a dangerous director for the reputation of any film studio.
His 1967 Nikkatsu film Branded to Kill was the last picture he completed in the 1960s. He returned to directing in 1977 with A Tale of Sorrow.
Eight chapters which introduce a variety of films that either are part of a trilogy, are loosely related to each other, or are part of a locale series or deal with a particular philosophical or aesthetic theme. The sections approach Suzuki’s approach and cinematic development over time, thereby often cross-referencing to several films from various periods. As, naturally, he did not simply continue shooting hard-boiled yakuza films or focus on shifting roles and images of disillusionment of post-war Japanese masculinity when with Nikkatsu. Instead, he expanded his cinematic visions to include at some point the supernatural, deities, shamanism, scenes of violence and torment, links to kabuki performance, ancient Japanese myth, and its historical imagery. As it could be expected, Suzuki’s approach to all of these aspects was not to simply emulate them, but to create moments of tension, when traditional characters, settings and plots clashed with his modernist and avant-garde approach, which is one major reason why his films from the 1980s, for example, are so hard to classify, but are fascinating blends of ideas, traditions and often the surreal. And, as the title hints at, they have that particular nonsensical, and non-conformist quality.
“This book has, necessarily, emphasized the continuities of a directional practice as a textual (not an empirical) phenomenon, a way of reading the intentionality of that most highly constructed of aesthetic forms, the cinema. …. But when we consider, firstly, the insights of fifty years of deconstructive criticism, and secondly, the director’s own insistence on an open, evasive signification and on the “doubleness” of all our mental and cinematic reckonings of reality, we must concede that there can be no one single superior construal of Suzuki’s film practice – no one Suzuki the auteur – just as there is no one reading of his films, ideological or otherwise.”
Yacavone, Associate Professor of English at Shanghai International Studies University, at times goes into very long descriptions of single scenes, often shot by shot or stresses studio lighting, the use of color and meticulously lists montage, dialogue and cuts of the mass of films referred to here.
The title comes with hundreds of film stills and a complete filmography of Suzuki’s feature films from 1956 to 2005. The only flaw here, in an otherwise highly informative and masterful study that will unquestionably become a standard title on Suzuki, is the author’s decision to use the original Japanese movie titles in the text, as not all readers will be familiar with those.
Review by Dr. A. Ebert © 2024
Peter A. Yacavone. Negative, Nonsensical, and Non-Conformist. The Films of Suzuki Seijun. (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, Vol. 99) University of Michigan Press, 2023, 402 p.
