Tattooed Life

Tattooed Life isn’t Seijun Suzuki’s best film, and it’s far from his most delirious; but still it’s filled with astonishing visual inventions, in fight sequences and elsewhere, that Quentin Tarantino would die for, and surprising emotional depths that Tarantino would never be able to comprehend. I saw this film originally when Scarecrow Video brought Suzuki to Seattle for a retrospective of his films; and now that it has finally come out on American DVD, I’ve been able to see it again.
In the Q&As after nearly all the screenings at that retrospective, Suzuki evaded nearly all the questions he was asked, disclaiming any artistic intent whatsoever, and saying only that he violated continuity rules and skewed camera angles, turned fight scenes into abstract tableaux, mixed genre signals, presented convoluted plot turns as elliptical asides, created absurdly heightened symbolic color schemes, and so on, because he was trying to keep the audience entertained.
In a way, I suppose, he was telling the truth; for the extravagances of Suzuki’s directorial style — at least in his earlier, pre-1967 films; I’m less sure about his hyperstylized recent efforts like Pistol Opera — seem to be refreshingly free of auteurist pretensions. Suzuki doesn’t take his own dedication to pulp with the self-conscious, self-congratulatory seriousness of (yes, again) Quentin Tarantino; rather, Suzuki’s films are themselves so self-conscious and expressionist and daringly extreme that Suzuki himself doesn’t (or didn’t) need to be.

Tattooed Life isn’t Seijun Suzuki’s best film, and it’s far from his most delirious; but still it’s filled with astonishing visual inventions, in fight sequences and elsewhere, that Quentin Tarantino would die for, and surprising emotional depths that Tarantino would never be able to comprehend. I saw this film originally when Scarecrow Video brought Suzuki to Seattle for a retrospective of his films; and now that it has finally come out on American DVD, I’ve been able to see it again.
In the Q&As after nearly all the screenings at that retrospective, Suzuki evaded nearly all the questions he was asked, disclaiming any artistic intent whatsoever, and saying only that he violated continuity rules and skewed camera angles, turned fight scenes into abstract tableaux, mixed genre signals, presented convoluted plot turns as elliptical asides, created absurdly heightened symbolic color schemes, and so on, because he was trying to keep the audience entertained.
In a way, I suppose, he was telling the truth; for the extravagances of Suzuki’s directorial style — at least in his earlier, pre-1967 films; I’m less sure about his hyperstylized recent efforts like Pistol Opera — seem to be refreshingly free of auteurist pretensions. Suzuki doesn’t take his own dedication to pulp with the self-conscious, self-congratulatory seriousness of (yes, again) Quentin Tarantino; rather, Suzuki’s films are themselves so self-conscious and expressionist and daringly extreme that Suzuki himself doesn’t (or didn’t) need to be.