Negative, Nonsensical, and Non-Conformist

Front matter

Negative, Nonsensical, and Non-Conformist

THE FILMS OF SUZUKI SEIJUN

Peter A. Yacavone

Contents

List of Illustrations ix

A NOTE ON THE TEXT AND TRANSLATIONS

THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK 19 1 THE RECUSANT 21 2 THE DOG 42

Index

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub. 11486286

319 347 379 391 397

Illustrations

2.1 2.2

WwW UU 09 (9 iw = N

Hádo-boirudo as Transnational Hybridity (Rajo to kenju)

Noguchi Hiroshi’s Muted Cityscapes (Kenjū buraicho:

Nukiuchi no Ryūji, 1960)

Noguchi's Bourgeois Aspirants (Kenjü buraicho)

Film as Fashion Shoot, Shot (1): Shiraki Mari *models" for

a photographer

Film as Fashion Shoot, Shot (2): an innovative jump cut to Shiraki That Obscure Object of Desire: the iconic femme fatale as cinematic shadow

Hado-boirudo Cinema as Abject Simulacrum

The Birdcage: the spunky teenager (Ankokugai no bijo) Polymorphic Perversity: On the Edge of Taste and Censorship (Ankokugai no bijo)

Suzuki's Dog, Shot (1a) (Kutabare gurentai)

Suzuki's Dog, Shot (1b)

“Moving Color": Magritte's portrait of the nude (Black Magic, 1945) Post-war Vacancies: Subete ga kurutteru (1960)

Atypical Suzuki? Crisp architectural lines (Akutaro, 1963)

Out of the Shadows (Yajü no seishun)

Authoritarian Containment of Public Information

Out of the Past—hand-painted red camellia links the monochrome and color sequences

Everything Out in the Open (Yajü no seishun)

Violence at a Distance

The Third Sequence— narrative as viewed through a one-way mirror Transforming Film Noir—Kawachi Tamio calmly slashes

his opponent's face

The (Mis)Information—Mizuno (Shishido) continually directed to the ^wrong number"

A Female Erotic Gaze—Mrs. Nomoto appreciates the wild Mizuno as he enters and beats up her underlings

No Return—the male protagonist does not initiate a returning gaze Modernity as Fetish

Gendered Violence in a Non-Diegetic Yellow Dust Cloud

The Hooded Eyes of the Vigilante (1)

The Hooded Eyes of the Vigilante (2)

Illustrations

The Face of Dehumanization?

Erotic Spectacle as Hyperbolic Fetishism

Erotic Spectacle as Satire

Mediated—the erotic dancer partitioned by the mirror-screen Extreme Visual Contrast (1): Shallowness and Depth

Extreme Visual Contrast (2): The Bisected Frame

The Memory Screen (Kemono no nemuri)

The Red Thread of Attachment (Kanto mushuku)

Color as Emotion or Color as Ambiguity (Kanto mushuku) Haunted Remembrances, Shot (1a)

Haunted Remembrances, Shot (1b)

Lighting and Narrative Meaning, Shot (1c)

Dysfunctional Ellipsis, Shot (2)

Uncanny Passage—the "haunted" blue light shows Katsuta's fear The Mark of Insecurity—the ghostly apparition of the man who scarred Katsuta's cheek

Dream Lover, Shot (1)

Dream Lover, Shot (2)

Urban Modernity as Spatial Disjuncture (1)

Urban Modernity as Spatial Disjuncture (2)

Attention to Detail—the "stoic" traditionalism of Okaru-Hachi and his "art"

A Cinematic Mirror, Shot (1)

A Cinematic Mirror, Shot (2)

A Cinematic Mirror, Shot (3)

A Cinematic Mirror, Shot (6)—the object of all gazes

Reversals of Gender and Power, Shot (1)

Reversals, Shot (2)

Reversals, Shot (3)

Reversals, Shot (4)—Hanako from the “wrong” side

Suzuki as Kurosawa— fighting men pour into the receding street from beside the camera

History Versus Theatricality (1)—The Dull, Earthen Weight

of Labor (Hana to doto)

History Versus Theatricality (2)—the visual textures of Asakusa as a Theatre of Life (Hana to doto)

History as Theatre (Hana to doto)

Theatrical (Anti-)Melodrama—the stylized sets of the curt finale Cinema Palimpsest: superimposition of the protagonist and her imaginary world (Nikutai no mon)

Caligari and Frontality

Cinematic "Inter-Subjectivity" (Nikutai no mon)

The Hell of Romantic Attachment— Harumi runs toward freedom, only to find she cannot leave the patriotic Mikami behind

123 124 124 125 125

nn

Illustrations

The Myth of Domesticity—Sachiko’s meager dishes fallen, along with her hopes of “a decent marriage”

Portrait of A Marriage? Harumi “composes herself”

The Stylization of Death

Violence Out-of-Sync, Shot (1)

Violence Out-of-Sync, Shot (2)

Rage Against the System— Harumi reacts to her

intolerable entrapment

The Restoration of Order? Prostitutes jeer at Mikami

in retaliation for his violence

Sadism and Sexploitation in Suzuki Norifumi's satire

Ero shogun to nijüichi nin no aisho (1972)

Nakedness as Freedom—Harumi dreams of running free Nakedness as Art

Masochism and Distance

Masochism and Concealment

Pornography’s Threat in a Media Regime

The Frontier as Fashion—Kobayashi Akira as a Japanese film star in Western cowboy dress (Wataridori, 1959-62)

The Frontier as Fashion—Montgomery Clift’s stylized

“Frontier Youth” outfit (Red River, 1948)

Discontinuity in Action, Shot (1) (Tokyo nagaremono) Discontinuity in Action, Shot (2)

Imposed Style, Shot (1a)

Imposed Style, Shot (1b)

Theatrical Style as Falsity

Heroic Action as Dance

An Icon of the Genre—the gun “triply emphasized” by film style Iconic Shorthand—the villain Otsuka is viewed only

by extreme close-ups

The Action Hero as Commodity—Watari Tetsuya as “Third Time Phoenix Tetsu”

The Libidinal Economy —exotic sexual promise of Akasaka’s neon signage

Stage Door—the illusive, elusive space of the affluent Club Alulu Club Manhole: Youth, Sexual Suggestion, and Excess

What Lies Beneath—through “The Manhole” and into the Abject Women and yakuza

/ xi

154 155 158 159 159

160 160

171 173 173 174 174 177

201 203 204 204 205 xii

6.24 6.25 6.26

6.27 6.28

6.29 6.30 6.31 6.32

6.33 b m D

NNN M m ©

/ Illustrations

Masculinity and Commodity Fetishism

Urban Flâneur? (Tokyo nagaremono)

Violence and Genre Cinema— Kiroku cajoled into violence (Kenka erejii)

“Sex” and the Middle Class—Kiroku masturbates by playing piano Between a Rock and a Hard Place—Women Under

a Militarist Patriarchy

Violence and Sexual Fantasy, Shot (1)

Violence and Sexual Fantasy, (Shot 4a)

Violence, Fantasy, and False Time (Shot 4b)

Natural Imagery and Martial Training—Kiroku receives training from a self-proclaimed “master” in a mountain glade Symbolic Méconnaissance—falling cherry blossoms Cinematic Negativity, Shot (1) (Koroshi no rakuin)

Cinematic Negativity, Shot (3)

Cinematic Negativity, Shot (4)

Surrealism and Abjection

Surrealist Transformation

Butterflies and the Avant-Garde—surrealism and metaphors of femininity (Tobenai chinmoku)

The Butterflies of Death (Koroshi no rakuin)

Iconicity of Noir

The Protagonist as Demon

Sex and Subjugation

In the Tunnel—downward slide of masculine competition Political Allegory—Who Is Number One?

Iam a Bullet (The Fetishization of Violence) (Performance, 1968/70)

Reluctant Voyeur—Hanada despairs at the unbridgeable distance (Koroshi no rakuin)

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Training for Power—in extreme pursuit of “hardness” Negativity as Farce

Blocked Up—the frame bisected by a partition while the head of the protagonist is barely glimpsed

Deframing—a composition with Hanada’s feet flashing across the bottom of the frame

Empty Space and the Moving Camera

Non-diegetic Style and Satire in the 1960s

Excess Visuality—spotlighting on an area with no

narrative function

The Allegory of Excess Visibility

Uncanny Femininity

Disjunction of Sound and Image

Discontinuity Aesthetics, Shot (1)

209 210

212 213

216 217 218 218

237 238 238 241

243 244. 245

245 246 247 247 248

Illustrations / xiii

Discontinuity Aesthetics, Shot (2)

Aesthetics of Death (Pisutoru opera)

Aesthetics of Nihilism—the chic Cosmopolitan Killer

The Colors of Hell (Nakagawa’s Jigoku)

At the Doorway (Zigeunerweisen)

The Blue Light of Haunting

Cinema ina False Light

The Return of the Oppressed—Aochi glimpses the three beggars Interior: Hell

Beguiled by a Fox? Aochi struggles to define the uncanny Sono Representation Breaks Down (in the face of female sexuality), Shot (1)

Representation Breaks Down, Shot (2)

Representation Breaks Down, Shot (3)

Erotic Grotesque Nonsense

Violence at a Distance, Shot (1)

Violence at a Distance, Shot (2)

Violence at a Distance, Shot (3)

The End

What Price (Male) Freedom? The crimes of Nakasago are laid out for the viewer

Miraculous Transformation

The Phonograph as Technological Uncanny

The Cinema of Painting (Yumeji)

Anarchism and Earthiness—a solemn ceremony (Kageró-za) The Consequence of Power—haunting corpses of birds Miraculous Transformation (II) (Kager6-za)

Breaking the Wall

“Hysterically Phallic" Capitalism

Cinematic Keren, Shot (1)

Cinematic Keren, Shot (2)

Cinematic Keren, Shot (3)

Backdrop: Shinako willfully brings down the makeshift theatre In the Realm of the Virtual

Imaginary Signifier—Matsuzaki views different scenes through a spyglass

The (Virtual) Realm of the Dead

The Double as Death— Matsuzaki watches himself watching his double

Whither the Present? Shot (1)

Whither the Present? Shot (2)

Suzuki’s Homage to Dreyer—Reiko as Jeanne D’Arc

(Hishü monogatari)

308 309 309 310

Introduction

In 1958, Suzuki Seitaro was a 35-year-old, lower-ranking, critically unrecognized contract director at Nikkatsu studios, despite the fact that he had already made fifteen feature-length program pictures. When he changed his professional name from “Suzuki Seitaro,” his birth name, to the more flamboyant "Suzuki Seijun,” no one in the press or film industry seems to have taken notice. They ought to have. Forty-five years later, in 2003, the octogenarian Suzuki was still directing films, long after the economic collapse of the Japanese studio system; he had won every major Japanese film award and significant international awards, including a lifetime achievement award at the 1991 Sao Paulo International Film Festival. The most prominent directors of the 1990s throughout Japan, East Asia, and the English-speaking world were citing him as an important influence, including Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Miike Takashi, Aoyama Shinji, John Woo, Wong Kar-wai, Quentin Tarantino, Baz Luhrmann, and Jim Jarmusch, who actively sought the master's stamp of approval on his work of hard-boiled homage, Ghost Dog (1999). We may add to the list, of late, the director of La La Land, Damien Chazelle, who toured Japan and announced his indebtedness to the 93-year old director just one month before Suzuki passed away, in February 2017, from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.!

I do not relate these facts in order to extol a clichéd narrative of an artist's slow rise from derision to fame and unmitigated triumph. Such judgments are relative. As a filmmaker, Suzuki never attained the same respect nor the degree of centrality to Japanese media discourses as many others (Kurosawa and Oshima Nagisa, for example). Even in his 70s, he struggled to finance his films. His narrative is, however, about the cultural endurance of a notably distinct film practice against remarkable adversity. How did the career of this director, who was fired from his studio and quietly blacklisted by the entire studio system in the late 1960s, outlast by decades the careers of major contemporaries at Nikkatsu and other studios? How did his influence on filmmaking practice arguably come to be more significant and widespread (especially internationally) than that of the younger, more fashionable, and highly publicized directors of the nuberu bagu (Japanese New Wave) such as Oshima and Yoshida Yoshishige? Why did it take Japanese film criticism so long to recognize this powerful strain of influence, and why does it remain so underrepresented in academic film studies today?

The extraordinary circumstances of Suzuki's rise to artistic prominence is self-evidently a worthy subject of historical scholarship, revealing as it does the upheavals of the Japanese film industry since 1960 and the rise of trans-cultural media networks of producers, distributors, critics, and fans through which Japanese studio genre films (and the cult of genre auteurism) took on a virtual life. This book, however, is neither a biography nor an industrial history of a studio or genre, though aspects of all these will come into play. It is an interpretative and cultural study that canvasses the entirety of Suzuki's cinematic corpus and asks a range of questions about its significance—questions which rise up from the surface of these extraordinary filmic texts themselves and demand attention. What makes Suzuki's films so different from those of his contemporaries—including his top-ranking Nikkatsu rival Imamura Shohei, his own mentor Noguchi Hiroshi, and his many successful apprentices such as Hasebe Yasuharu— that they have wielded such an influence and given rise to notorious cultural scandal? And what, in the history of narrative film, is the conceptual significance of a director who gaily asserted that “time and space are nonsense in my films"??

Marking Difference

In a response to the work of the critical theorist Paul de Man, a notable literary critic of the 1970s once posed a question that is applicable to any aesthetic endeavor: "How does meaning get started anyway? Does it arise only in ironic repetition . . . or through excess, usurpation, overflow? ... Ora cascade of newness . . . metonymic, hyperbolic, metaphorical?”? I am inspired by these very rhetorical operations in Suzuki's films— irony, excess, figuration, and the like—to pose a question throughout this study that is parallel to those questions above. How, in narrative film, does difference get started? How do we detect difference, and degrees of difference, and how may it be measured? The structuralist legacy of academic media studies has inclined us to analyze mass media productions as instantiations of large, aggregate blocks of dominant structures and ideologies. But an individual film, in all its historical contingency, is better metaphorized as a loose and fragile ball of thread—of countless interwoven formal and ideological strands.

Two decades of puzzled reflection on the distinctly demonstrative film practice of Suzuki Seijun have brought me to the conclusion that it is perilous at best, and foolish at worst, to ignore, misunderstand, or fail to theorize film-textual difference. To take the larger view of Jan Mukayovsky: "the history of art, if we examine it from the standpoint of the aesthetic norm, is the history of revolts against reigning norms."^ My aim throughout this book is to pinpoint the (hitherto unrecognized) contribution of Suzuki's films to such a period of overthrow, to appreciate the semantics and character of an "event in discourse that expands the space of meaning."? Film history, perpetually biased and incomplete as it is, has much to gain by isolating what is remarkable about the films of Suzuki even within the well-trodden generic grounds upon which they are built.

How does difference get started? The answer that I derive from my reading of Suzuki's films, and related films, is that it is established primarily through a process of ceaseless negation or negativity. Of course, to assert that there are such operations of “negation” or, indeed, “irony” within a cinematic text is to presume that there are meaning effects within those texts that are the product of an intentionality, a creative agency, at work in and through them, insofar as we can detect it. That creative agency, which is conventionally assigned to the transient collaboration of a set of filmmakers (directors, designers, actors, and the like), is the basis, though a shifting and elusive one, of what the critic or scholar means when he or she speaks of a particular film practice whose contours may be traced in the continuities between films that, paradoxically, serve to differentiate them from others.

A “negative” film practice operates in a way that is remarkably similar to what Dudley Andrew described as the role of figuration in film discourse: amore or less “calculated introduction of dissonance into any stage of the film process.”° Difference is also necessarily relational to the constraints of the particular institutional context of its making: in Suzuki's case, the post-war Japanese studio system, with its hierarchies of power, cultures of censorship, and economies and conventions of filmmaking. But it also relates, broadly, to the struggle of any film practice for aesthetic (and, indeed, existential) survival in and amongst those practices associated with one's peers, one's antecedents, one's cultural institutions, and amidst the buffeting tides of cultural and historical change.

Given that Suzuki was a director of modestly budgeted, low priority

“B” pictures, often not in control of the scripts and stars assigned to him, “difference” in his films is often located on the level of editing, narrative structure, cinematic mise-en-scéne, and stylistic gesture—precisely because these things are not verbalized and therefore do not give up their meanings and ideological subtexts readily, either to the viewer or to the controlling eyes of the studios and other organs of cultural authority. That is, after all, one method of survival.

How do we measure difference and evaluate its meaning in that nexus of formal practice, intentionality, and ideology that constitutes films and groupings of films?’ This book makes claims for the necessary (and often slighted) work of textual interpretation in establishing sounder methods and evidentiary standards of reading, misreading, and going beyond the meaning effects of individual film texts in order to discover how and what a group of films (like Suzuki’s) communicates to its viewers. Therefore, although this study takes as its objects the films of one director (and the films that have a demonstrable relation to them), the guiding methodology throughout is not auteurism, as traditionally understood, but close film-textual interpretation.

Nevertheless, to the extent that my use of textual “intentionality” or “agency” may be viewed as a form of “authorship,” I must stray very briefly into the contested waters of film theory in order to clarify my operative assumptions about these concepts.

What’s ina Name? The Director as Object of Study

In this book, I am designating a composite, yet potentially contradictory, “authorial function” named “Suzuki” that is found within the text and is (re-)constructed in each reception of it—generally with reference to other texts that are associated with “Suzuki.’® Film scholars, among others, negotiate the continuities between these countless film receptions by bringing to a viewer’s attention the evidence of patterns of intentionality that they have gleaned from textual analysis. This level of textual agency, while associated, according to common practice, with the name of the director, nevertheless accommodates a collaborative view of filmmaking that argues for the “significant difference” produced by other creative agents, including actors;? it need not oppose itself, like classical auteurism, to the “author function" of these other collaborators,'? should anyone wish to describe them. Thus, the intentionality and practice that I label as "Suzuki" should be understood as the directorial endorsement of a collaborative agency forged by the director and significant creative partners such as cinematographers Nagatsuka Kazue and Shigeyoshi Mine, production designer Kimura Takeo, editor Suzuki Akira, and a host of regular actors and assistant directors.!! This view is particularly well suited to the kumi system of the Japanese studios in which the director would work with the same collaborators from film to film. It leaves open a space for judicious assessment, across the multitude of films associated with the “Suzuki gumi” team of collaborators, of what meaning effects of a given film may be more or less representative of their agency and what may have come into being without necessarily having been endorsed by them at all (e.g., to take an obvious case, the documented censorship of certain films).

I must acknowledge, nevertheless, that this abstract (in the precise sense of the word), delicate, and fine-tuned definition of “the director” as a textual agency and an object of critical study is not necessarily what most habitual film viewers, film critics, or even academics mean when they discuss the qualities, ideologies, and comparative virtues of a “Suzuki” or a “Kurosawa.” Common usage generally conjures up images of an individual creative “talent” on a film set or in an editing suite telling others what to do. Nor, unlike some contemporary media theorists, do I think that this conventional “image” of the director is wholly invalid or irrelevant to the proper object of Film and Cinema Studies. It is both common-sensical and inevitable that we will continue to study film directors of some cultural notoriety and contemplate the potential intersection between directors, the films attributed to them, and the meanings of the films. But if using the name of the director to designate a primary (though not only) source of filmic meaning is to be acoherent, let alone justified, procedure—a problem that Yoshimoto’s famous book on Kurosawa could not quite get past—we must distinguish “the author as empirical origin . . . from the author as effect of the text."!? That is to say, there are always at least two “Suzukis” just as there are at least two “Hitchcocks,” two “Kurosawas,” and indeed two “Kimura Takeos,” since the general principle I am stating holds true for production designers, etc., as well as directors.

There is (1) Suzuki the artist and thinker as we know him from his films, which is a construct that both he and his collaborators are responsible for, but not in control of; and (2) Suzuki the man—a career film director making decisions throughout a production process—as we know him from research and reminiscence, memoirs and public appearances. When I use the name “Suzuki” in this text, it will not be difficult for the sensitive reader to estimate, from the context of a given sentence, whether (1) or (2) is being implied. But it is indeed a special and proper object of “director study” to make critical statements and judgements that are true for both (1) and (2), that is to say, when I am proposing some kind of an intersection between the two; for example, when I strongly assert that Suzuki’s budget limitations and insecure position in the studio system influenced the very meaning of certain film narratives themselves as well as the formal operations by which they appear to have been constructed. At present, I do not see how critics or scholars can justify relating the director as a “real world” creative agent to the intentionality that is manifest in the highly constructed artifact that is a film text without resorting to this “double discourse”; but it is a small price to pay for intellectual pursuits that are enjoyable to a great many and have obvious significance at least in reference to the films and filmmaking of the past century. It is worth remembering that throughout the latter, since Griffith if not since Méliés, the “director” (though sometimes confusingly referred to as “producer” in the popular media of the classical Hollywood period) consistently reigned supreme in discourse if not in fact. 13

Marking Difference

Throughout the following, broadly chronological analysis and interpretation of perhaps forty of the forty-nine feature films attributed to Suzuki as director, I attempt to define the formal and ideological contours of a remarkably consistent filmmaking practice that evolved into the shape of what I have called the "Suzuki Difference," a practice that is defined by the search to differentiate itself from dominant filmmaking practices and ideologies (i.e., the Japanese studio system taken as a whole) and also from received counter-practices, such as the documentarian aesthetics of the nuberu bagu as conditioned by the cultural politics of the Japanese New Left of the 1960s.

It would be too easy, perhaps, to interpret the Suzuki Difference aesthetically by reference to a list of formal devices which were unconventional, indeed unacceptable to the studio system at the time when Suzuki and his crew of loyal collaborators first employed them: discontinuous editing and narratively dysfunctional ellipses, non-synchronous sound and visuals, pervasive non-diegetic lighting and coloration, non-diegetic graphics and inserts, flat theatrical backgrounds, etc. Some of these devices were also used in the transformational period of 1959-1961 by younger contemporaries such as Masumura Yasuzo, Oshima, and (in the West) Jean-Luc Godard. In most cases the "experiments" we find in Suzuki's films significantly pre-dated these, but what is important is not simply a formal/ stylistic precedent. Due to the media prominence of the nuberu bagu directors and a shrinking audience of mainly young men, the studio system gradually accepted stylistic change to the extent that, by 1969, even formulaic entertainment like Gojira tai Hedorah/Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster (Toho, 1969) operated according to stylistic parameters that would have been unthinkable in 1966. What is important, then, is the conceptual or critical use to which these formal operations are put. It is the rich semantic complexity of Suzuki’s practice that differentiates it from the work of other studio directors, even those of the 1970s who followed Suzuki's lead in applying a much broader palate of filmmaking technique to their work. Ultimately, Suzuki's film practice is perhaps best appreciated not so much in the company of his fellow Nikkatsu directors or those of the nuberu bagu, but alongside a broader strand of trans-cultural modernism in the narrative arts encompassing Soseki Natsume (whose Botchan and Yume Jüya/Ten Nights of Dream have their analogues amongst Suzuki's output), Luis Bufiuel, von Sternberg, Welles, Ichikawa, and Teshigahara.I will argue that Suzuki's films constitute, necessarily within the idiom of popular genre filmmaking, a reflexive cinematic form as an alternative and highly idiosyncratic politics of the image, a critical negation of the workings of patriarchy and social control in popular film—yet without abandoning, and indeed embracing, a cinema of visual pleasure.

A question arises: how do we define unconventional form or elements of style in cinematic practice? Obviously, deviations can only be measured from norms. Another concept of film theory that I have brought to bear on the exploration and elaboration of the “Suzuki Difference" is the "classical narrative style" of the Hollywood and Japanese studio system, by which I mean an unwritten, historically contingent "code" of filmmaking practice, or better, a rigorous "formal economy" of practice that dominated these studios' film productions (and many others) from roughly 1919- 1966. Some version of a "classical" cinema predominantly associated with the studio system exists in the diverse and otherwise incongruent theories of Bordwell, Deleuze, Burch, McCabe, and many others. In two articles from the 1990s, Bordwell claimed that the Japanese studios, from the Great Kanto earthquake (1923) to 1945, more or less (that is, normatively) obeyed the principles of classic continuity editing, including, for example, shot-reverse shot, axis of action, match on action, POV (“point-of-view”) editing, and other facets of the classical narrative cinema.!^ Bordwell's complex argument—based on a sampling of 163 films— includes an “ornamental” function of style that reduced the excessive “redundancy” of Hollywood’s stylistic economy without violating it. Moreover, such expressive effects quickly established conventions of their own as “the reigning style reserved a canonized function for them." ^

What is the "classical narrative" economy to which Bordwell refers? He writes that "in classical filmmaking the overriding principle is to make every instantiation of technique obedient to the . . transmission of fabula information. Departures are motivated by longstanding genre conventions (e.g., the musical)."!*? That is to say, the singular priority of this kind of filmmaking is the exposition of narrative, or more precisely, the exposition of what Bordwell calls "an integral fabula world" —essentially, the ^world" in which the narrative takes place, what I have called “diegesis” throughout this book." The "diegetic" elements of the filmmaking are the elements that exist for the purpose of constructing the "narrative universe" in which the characters (and their thoughts, perceptions, actions) can be said to exist. We could say that the primary (sometimes only) function of these elements is to convey narrative information. On the other hand, the “non-diegetic” elements of filmmaking, which from a certain point of view are much rarer than the diegetic ones, are elements that, logically speaking, do not create or contribute to the “narrative world,” but exist for some other purpose. The most obvious example of the latter is the orchestral “underscore” that is ubiquitous in classical Hollywood movies, which “comments” on the story world, so to speak, without being a part of it. Throughout narrative cinema, however, non-diegetic visual elements are considerably more unconventional than orchestral soundtracks and the like. I make use of the term “non-diegetic” throughout this book as a way of linking together many disparate formal devices and filmmaking choices that Suzuki employs to various ends. For in addition to their being deliberately non-conformist, they collectively contribute to an experiment in cinematic communication and expression beyond the confines of the story and its basic telling.

According to Bordwell, the structural principle that ensures the efficient transmission of narrative information—the primary engine of classical narration, so to speak—is causality, which “commits classical narration to unambiguous presentation. . . . The viewer concentrates on constructing the fabula, not on asking why the narration is representing the fabula in this particular way.” 18 In other words, "the viewer's interest is entirely suspense oriented."!? Further, “most explicitly codified into rules is the system of classical continuity editing. The reliance upon an axis of action orients the spectator to the space.” Physical space must be represented logically, predictably, and efficiently, but such simplifications come at a cost: the viewer’s comprehensive mastery of depicted space imposes far severer restrictions on shot change (i.e., editing): Bordwell judges that “ mismatched screen direction and inconsistently angled eye lines are less likely; perceptible jump cuts and unmotivated cutaways are strictly forbidden.”?°

Bordwell’s account of “classicism” has been rightfully criticized for its “self-imposed consistency,””' but it is not his wealth of textual evidence so much as his qualitative interpretation of “boundary” cases that is legitimately in question.?? I suggest that we can retool Bordwell's distinction between “problematic” and “unproblematic” violations of classical narrative economy (in regards to the function and intent of a stylistic event) as a useful tool for mapping both the aesthetic and ideological boundaries of the system.”

Unfortunately, we do not enjoy a similarly systematic or evidentiary analysis of the Japanese post-war cinema. Eric Crosby provided some textual evidence for the claim that post-war studio practice adhered to “classical" compositional norms. We can moreover supplement the films that Crosby has sampled with the many films of Nikkatsu's higher-ranking directors from 1954-1966 such as Inoue Umetsugu, Saito Buichi, Noguchi Hiroshi, even the young Masuda Toshio. Even theorists who reject Bordwell's concept of "classicism" would be unable to argue that the practices of these directors differ significantly from the formal economy that Bordwell identified in prewar Japanese film, or indeed in its Hollywood antecedents. In fact, I would argue that most films of the post-war studio system, for myriad historical and economic reasons, were far more conservative in their stylistic economy (continuity, camera movement, reliance on the scene as the principle narrative unit) and more closely oriented towards Hollywood practice than had been the prewar cinema, for instance Ito Daisuke's influential chanbara. Noél Burch (in a seminal, though dated, study) viewed a significant number of post-war studio films and came to this same conclusion.?^ The post-war cinema to 1965 simply had no equivalent to the extraordinary stylistic breadth of technique and differential quality of Naruse's astonishing "subjective" montage from 1931's Koshiben ganbare/Flunky, Work Hard! It took the films of Suzuki and of a very few contemporaries to violate the normative spatio-temporal economy and narrative functionality described above, in all its tolerance for “ornamental novelty," consistently enough to break it.