"...we acknowledge the landscape as an opposition to authority... when firing his gun Norio Nagayama intented to tear those landscapes to pieces."

(Masao Matsuda, The Landscape Theory)


On April 25,1968, when Kyusaku Hori, the then-president of the oldest Japanese film company Nikkatsu, fired a contract director Suzuki Seijun because of his forty-second film Branded to Kill (Koroshi no rakuin) , an autoironic gangster career film on the contract killer no. 3 who wants to become the killer no. 1, and banned screenings of all his films the hierarchy of Japanese industrial studio cinema finally collapsed. After the release of the film, film critic Koichi Iijima wrote: "The woman buys a mink coat and thinks only about having sex. The man wants to kill and feels nostalgic about the smell of boiling rice. We cannot help being confused. We do not go to theaters to be puzzled." Hori has concluded: "Suzuki makes incomprehensible films. Suzuki does not follow the company's orders... Therefore, his films are not good. Suzuki can no longer make films anywhere... It is shameful for Nikkatsu to show his films. Nikkatsu cannot have an image of making incomprehensible films. His films are prohibited from exhibition at any commercial theaters or at any theaters specializing in retrospective screenings."

At a time when the young French New Wave filmmakers enlisted American B-movie studio filmmakers in their politics of authors, Japanese "New Wave" filmmakers affirmed "termite art" by a B-movie studio director of war generation Seijun Suzuki. This program reveals mutations of genre transgressions that sparked the solidarity of Japanese film rebels of the 1960s, who at the same time opposed the anxiety of influence of the great Japanese masters-humanists ("white elephants", if we appropriate an opposition by Manny Farber) and declared a program picture director as a symbol of their resistance. An unsuccessful planning of a "Seijuna Suzuki Marathon", a retrospective in 1968 at the film club ran by Kazuko Kawakita, provoked the establishing of "Seijun Suzuki Committee for the Joint Struggle" by Nagisa Oshima's creative company, Koji Wakamatsu's production company, Masao Adachi, Masao Matsuda and many radical filmmakers, scholars, artists and students. They launched a mass demonstration in which hundreds of protestors demanded the repeal of Nikkatsu's dismissal and the cessation of censorship of Suzuki's films. Anarchist film theorist Masao Matsuda set up "All-University Fighting Committee for the Defense of Cinema" and two new film concepts, the landscape theory and the movement theory, have been created by activity of "Seijun Suzuki Committee" and by working on the landscape film by Masao Adachi AKA Serial killer (Ryakusho renzoku shasatsuma). This paradoxical affinity or "Suzuki Seijun Problem" (as the incident is called) confirmed Suzuki's cult status in Japan, strengthened by the fact he was blacklisted, after he won a lawsuit against Nikkatsu ("I did not want to accept everything that company had requested from me," in his words), by all Japanese film studios for the next ten years.

Suzuki's cinematic disobedience coincides with the end of the period of dominance of the major studios, with peak production of 546 films in 1956 until the beginning of the period of new modes of precarious film production or independent modes of cinema. Many related film and geopolitical events marked the decade between the two unsuccessful student protests against the re-signing of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty Anpo in 1960 and 1970. In the late 1950s, the film company Shochiku promoted its assistant directors (Nagisa Oshima, Yoshishige Yoshida, Masahiro Shinoda) to New Wave directors (Shochiku Nuberu Bagu), trying to reenact the popular French model, but immediately in 1960 they withdrew from distribution Night and Fog in Japan (Nihon no yoru to kiri) by Nagisa Oshima. It was Oshima himself who attacked the politics of mass production, of studio program pictures (a "class" for which Suzuki directed two to six films a year), as well as critics who ignored films that in such conditions of "capitalist exploitation" innovatively deconstructed components of genres.

Seijun Suzuki, born Seitaro Suzuki in Tokyo in 1923, the year that Kanto earthquake devastated the city and the important part of the history of the silent film era. It was only with his independent post-Nikkatsu films that Suzuki returned to formative period of Taisho (1912 - 1926), the blend of Japanese historical avant-garde with pop culture of eros-grotesque-nonsense, to artists and writers peripherally involved in the neo-perceptionist movement shinkankakuha and to strong terrorist-anarchist currents of the time. This could be the first pleasure strategy for Suzuki's ghost stories from the Taisho trilogy of time: Zigeunerweisen / Gypsy Airs (Tsigoineruwaizen, 1980), Heat Shimmer Theatre (Kagero-za, 1981) i Yumeji (1991). Another strategy for Nikkatsu genre films can be derived from war lines of survival and flight ("Every person is different. Only the ways of escape are common."), memories of the actual war game in which he was mobilized in 1943 and during which he had survived the sinking of two warships. Suzuki's brutal, masochistic-sadistic grotesque intended to tear catharsis to pieces. A "film with a key" for Suzuki's exploitation genre films and his final short-circuit dramaturgy is Fighting Elegy (Kenka erejii, 1966); a grotesque serious game for prospective militarist fighter, critical adaptation of a novel by Takashi Suzuki, written by a leftist filmmaker Kaneto Shindo and further reworked by director Suzuki himself. Film's narrative announces February 26, 1936, a day of attempted coup d'état (ni-niroku incident, 2-2-6), and Ikki Kita's appearance foresights the young man's flight to Fascism and death. Expressionist scene in the snow landscape of a girl and soldiers marching off to Tokyo anticipates a scene from Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no korida) from 1976, bypass of a lover-deserter with the marching soldiers of Japanese Imperial Army. On this event Yukio Mishima has also made a film based on his novel Patriotism (Yukoku) in the same year, 1966.

Nikkatsu Company (Nippon Katsudo Shashin / Japanese moving pictures) had been established in 1912 by four smaller companies with the purpose of monopolisation of production and distribution, modeled on the American pre-Hollywood film trust Motion Picture Patents Company and based on the idea by Shokichi Umeya, who soon left the company and joined Chinese revolution of Sun Yat-sen. Nikkatsu had four film studios, three in Tokyo which developed contemporary themes gendai geki and style of the new school Shimpa under the influence of Kabuki, and a studio in Kyoto which produced costume dramas jidai geki of old school Kyuha. For the centenary of Nikkatsu company we will see for the first time 22 films from the factory of eccentric Suzuki, nineteen genre films and three post-industrial, independent cinematic deliriums. In 1953, Suzuki moved from the studio Ofuna of Shochiku company, which cultivated aesthetics of quality and a specific "flavor" of a family melodrama shomin geki, to the newly re-activated production of Nikkatsu company which decided to compete with the Big Five Studios with aesthetics of action and entertainment, films about and for young people seishun eiga and a double-bill production policy: low budget, accompanying feature films soemono eiga or B-films tsuide eiga. In the 1950s, program pictures, as part of double-features (sometimes triple), had the effect of short-term increase in production and further commercialization the Japanese film industry.

During eight years as assistant at Ofuna studio in Shochiku, Suzuki learned, in his own words, "the ABC of melodrama", and in the Nikkatsu he further "mastered all genres tricks" aimed for young, angry rebels, in the crossovers of melodramatic version of borderless action (mukokuseki akushun) and mood action (muudo akushun) films, a hybrid hard-boiled film noirs, which connects the old Japanese type of nihilistic hero with loserness of American and French crime movies; yakuza gangster thrillers and related genres with the nomadic outlaws, wanderers; black comedies with elements of ero-guro-nansense, exploitational sex and violence in erotic films (eroduction): soft-porn movies (pinku eiga) and "romantic" porno films (roman porno), as well as films inspired by Shintaro Ishihara's novels about the Sun tribe (taiyozoku)... Suzuki is the successor of several lines of Japanese film history, from contemplative disobedience by Mansaku Itami and Sadao Yamanaka, members of cinematic counterculture of the time, to humorous hallucinations of violence by Masahiro Makino. Film critic Tadao Sato also associates Suzuki's destructive humor with literature of Edo period, with gesakusha farces.

Suzuki responded to the challenges of a double-bill program, his B-films were shown after A-films and he tried to predict the effect of the main feature. Two of his films were part of double-bills with Shohei Imamura's films: with A-film Insect Woman (Nippon konchuki, 1963) Kanto Wanderer (Kanto mushuku) was shown, while the main feature Intentions for murder (Akai satsui, 1965) was followed by Suzuki's Story of a Prostitute (Shunpu-den). This minority position for genuine filmmaker caused the explosion of style in the impossible conditions of 28-day film production. Suzuki's idea of image: "What remains in our memory is not construction but destruction. Power of destruction. When something is destroyed, the consciousness that it is, or was, there first begins to form. Even in terms of civilization and culture, the power of destruction is stronger." Suzuki’s first method of film landscape destruction is "deviant decoupage", which radically breaks and cuts through space, time and narrative, throws in and out of frame, detours points of view of his personal pataphysics. The other Suzuki's method treats the body as landscape, it challenges the vitality of the living body, its skin, flesh and meat. The body is tattooed, whipped, beaten, injured, killed and burned. Suzuki's fetish is sliding frames, images inside the images, within glass and mirrors, framed with masks, screens, curtains, first as decor and then, in the foreground - wipes as film punctuation. His film Youth of the Beast (Yajū no seishun,1963) is posessed with frames, while Branded to Kill continues the communication with the projection screen in its images. Landscapes look through moving frames, train and car windows or courtyard gates and passages. Suzuki's film beast is in a sliding box, it opens the double floors, screens, walls, ceilings, it appropriates forms, it dances. Its climate has different seasons, female characters take on male roles, genres keep only traces of codes. Suzuki's "war" camera sees through walls, goes through holes in the floor, it records a world of "Japanese roulette" beneath glass floors or in the reflection of the soy sauce bowl. A strong theatrical sign derives from the personal symbolism of colors and light, and expressionistic black and white imagery, artificiality of decor and costumes, the mixture of the studio spaces with the real landscapes, choreography of mise-en-scène. "Abolish the green," wrote Oshima on green interiors of Japanese family melodramas. Nikkatsu "abolished" Suzuki's shot of green moon which ended the singing Tokyo Drifter (Tokyo nagaremono, 1966) in the first version of the film. Jump cuts and ellipses stop the "view" of images, tension of death drive of Suzuki's moving and still image.

This redemption of Suzuki's invisible cinema follows the revisionist politics of Japanese film studies that finally gives up of the East/West (here/elsewhere) rhetorics, and opposes the division of theory/history. There is an increasing number of studies which include ignored, overlooked, unknown features and relations within the Japanese film research, as well as more complete provocative approaches to "long term" dynamics, geopolitical and aesthetic relationships of Japanese film and cultural history. However, although the Suzuki's cult status was carried out of Japan in the mid 1980s (the first retrospective outside of Japan was held in Pesaro, in 1984) and the traces of his influences are visible in the films by Jim Jarmusch, Wong Kar-Wai, Quentin Tarantino, his genre transgressions are still marginal area of interest of film studies. Suzuki is the first Japanese filmmaker with a retrospective of this scale in our cinemas; not even in the age of ex-Cinematheque there had been a more complete retrospective of the most well-known classical directors like Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse, Akira Kurosawa or of some of modernist authors Nagisa Oshima, Yoshishige Yoshida, Shohei Imamura. Because of the need for a systematic study of the history, theory and criticism of Japanese cinema, authors who have "dropped out of the system," as Vlado Kristl said, are presented at Film Mutations: The Festival of Invisible Cinema. With this year's expanded Mutational program, we continue the cooperation with Japanese filmologist Go Hirasawa, who was one of curators of "Eros + Politics" program in 2008, when we introduced the theory of landscape and theory of movement by Matsuda with films by main guest Koji Wakamatsu as well as films by Nagisa Oshima, Yoshishige Yoshida, Masao Adachi, Motoharu Jonouchi... Over the next two years, Film Mutations will link the relations between film catharsis and capital which are introduced by this program, because the overlap of century of cinema and capitalism in Japan is our central strategy.

With our regular partners and co-organizers Croatian Film Association and Art-Cinema Croatia in Rijeka, opening of Suzuki's film boxes was made possible by our main partners: Japan Foundation in Tokyo, Japanese film company Nikkatsu, Japan's Embassy in Zagreb and the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna. We are grateful to the Japanese film scholar Go Hirasawa and Austrian Japanologist and film scholar Roland Domenig who will give a lecture, and we are especially grateful to Seijun Suzuki that we will see for the first time his movies on film at cinema Tuskanac in Zagreb and Art-Cinema Croatia in Rijeka.