100 years Nikkatsu: gangsters and geisha

(Branded to Kill)

“A specialist in entertainment films can do anything, even make artistic films. Woohaha! Watching films is a waste of time. Mine or anyone else’s.” I remember my interview with Seijun Suzuki as if it was yesterday. How does he remember Branded to Kill? “I don’t. I have forgotten everything.” You’re either a free spirit or you’re not. Branded to Kill (1967) burns itself into your memory if you like wild and adventurous films. Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino have imitated it. Descriptions are doomed to fall short, but to give you an idea: think of tight, black-and-white, compelling jazz, corrosive sarcasm, and an exceptionally inventive hired killer who is crazy about the aroma of boiled rice. What happens in a scene doesn’t necessarily have to make sense, so long as it is exciting. The yakuza film, at times bloody and reminiscent of film noir, seems to be heading at a speed of a hundred ideas a minute towards a Final Combat, but Suzuki prefers a more surrealistic fading away into madness. His bosses weren’t amused and gave Suzuki the sack. History proved Nikkatsu wrong.

(Gate of Flesh)

Nikkatsu is the oldest of the big five Japanese film studios and is now a hundred years old. The Offscreen festival is celebrating that centenary by screening a number of exceptional films from the studio’s catalogue. Their selection includes two more by Suzuki. Youth of the Beast (1963) is a visually overwhelming, hallucinatory, colourful descent into a brutal underworld of gangsters, drugs dealers, and pimps; John Woo is working on a remake. Gate of Flesh is a must-see if you want an almost neo-realist portrait of the despairing Japan of the years after the Second World War – or want to see prostitutes hanging each other upside down, naked, and torturing each other if someone dares to provide sexual services without charging for them. In Gate of Flesh Suzuki heralds the “roman porno” (romantic porn) genre that would make Nikkatsu famous. A major decrease in cinema-going in the 1970s persuaded Nikkatsu to concentrate exclusively on producing erotic films. Within that context, a new wave of directors was able to experiment with form and style.

(World of Geisha / Secret Chronicle: She Beast Market)

One of the films Offscreen is showing is Tatsumi Kumashiro’s World of Geisha, the story of a young geisha who breaks all the rules by falling in love with her first client. I have no idea whether Noboru Tanaka’s Secret Chronicle: She Beast Market is really an erotic avant-garde masterpiece, as Offscreen claims, but I am looking forward to finding out.

Offscreen Film Festival: 100 years Nikkatsu 16 > 24/3, Cinéma Nova, rue d’Arenbergstraat 3, Brussel/Bruxelles & Cinema Rits, rue A. Dansaertstraat 70, Brussel/Bruxelles, www.offscreen.be