BRANDED Thoughts
Posted December 12, 2008 at 1:00am by Kyle Griffin
Just saw a fairly beautiful 35mm print of BRANDED TO KILL, in all its incomprehensible glory. Nikkatsu Studios fired Suzuki after making BRANDED, citing "making incomprehensible films" as the reason. My thoughts: if comprehension and BRANDED TO KILL are opposed, I'll take BRANDED. Sometimes, when people make movies, they put objects in front of the camera and try to erase themselves as an influence-they want the objects to speak to them (James Benning, Andy Warhol). Others want to say something themselves, and put objects in front of the camera to help them say it, or to support an argument (the bulk of narrative cinema). Suzuki is an artist working for people who want him to tell their story, or to make a traditional narrative film. A good employee would then film objects to support the story. Artists, however, often don't make good employees (they tend not to be, in the Shakespearian sense, "respectable men"). Suzuki wants to do his job, but he likes also to have a dialogue with things, not to make a diatribe using things. So, Suzuki treats the story like an artist like Benning treats objects. Benning leaves the camera on a lake for ten minutes, forcing us to look at (listen to) the lake instead of seeing it as a means to an end (this is how the hero gets from here to there, this is a shot meant to relax the viewer before hurling him/her into another action scene, etc.). Suzuki uses a similar but seemingly opposite method in order to make his story talk to him (us). He manipulates things in a hyperintensive way, destroying the organic link between things and foregrounding their manipulation. In this way the "mission," and with it the mission's designer and his or her intentions are highlighted. A bullet travels an absurd trajectory through a bathroom pipe to reach its target, a hitman sets a building on fire by throwing an object that looks like a can through a window and shooting inside. What kind of fools would use objects in this way? What kind of fool would shoot a scene this way? What kind of fool would believe it? All these actions seem absurd, but probably possible if only one or two more shots were added in each case. Audiences usually laugh when they see the previously mentioned BRANDED scenes, possibly because they know how close to normal movie reality-or, real movie foolishness-these absurd shots really are. Normal, "comprehensible" movie reality.
Another incomprehensible film plays tomorrow at the PFA-Nagisa Oshima's VIOLENCE AT NOON (1966). This film is connected to BRANDED, for me, not just because they're both Japanese, from roughly the same time period, and employ French New Wave-inspired techniques, but also because I watched them for the first time on consecutive days, and I had to watch each one a second time immediately after the first screenings due to the "What the fuck?" factor. While Oshima uses jump cuts and novel edits to tell his story, methods that often lead-as they do in Suzuki's hands-to a sense of frenetic invention and chaos, Oshima's film tends to instill a sense of gravity, of the limits of the world. Suzuki's worlds explode, Oshima's implode. Can't wait not to comprehend it again.