


This article traces the historical development of aesthetic practices of colour in the generic and industrial context of Nikkatsu Action Cinema of postwar Japan, and how they influenced the idiosyncratic style of Suzuki Seijun. Nikkatsu Action’s needs as a genre devoted to a youthful and energetic subject matter shaped its colour design, and its filmmakers developed a bright, vibrant colour aesthetic by drawing on neon lighting and coloured light filters. It was within this context that Suzuki’s colour style took shape. His earliest experiments take the Nikkatsu colour idiom and bend its diegetic pretexts to motivate sudden colour transformations. In his later Nikkatsu films, Suzuki elaborates on these experiments by transforming them into a critical component of his formal strategies. In Gate of Flesh (Nikutai no mon, 1964), he gives each of the four main female characters a colour-coded costume, and in each woman’s internal monologue her dress colour becomes the colour of the entire background, suffusing the image with her subjectivity. Suzuki uses sudden colour transformations to punctuate violent action in his later action films, which this article considers in a reading of Tattooed Life (Irezumi ichidai, 1965)’s climax. Suzuki’s experimentation gradually refines his colour design to an abstraction that belies its origins in popular genre cinema.



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The History of a Broken Blue Fusuma: Colour in Suzuki Seijun’s
Nikkatsu Films
William Carroll, University of Chicago




Abstract

    This article traces the historical development of aesthetic practices of colour in
    the generic and industrial context of Nikkatsu Action Cinema of postwar Japan,
    and how they influenced the idiosyncratic style of Suzuki Seijun. Nikkatsu
    Action’s needs as a genre devoted to a youthful and energetic subject matter
    shaped its colour design, and its filmmakers developed a bright, vibrant colour
    aesthetic by drawing on neon lighting and coloured light filters. It was within
    this context that Suzuki’s colour style took shape. His earliest experiments take
    the Nikkatsu colour idiom and bend its diegetic pretexts to motivate sudden
    colour transformations. In his later Nikkatsu films, Suzuki elaborates on these
    experiments by transforming them into a critical component of his formal
    strategies. In Gate of Flesh (Nikutai no mon, 1964), he gives each of the four
    main female characters a colour-coded costume, and in each woman’s internal
    monologue her dress colour becomes the colour of the entire background,
    suffusing the image with her subjectivity. Suzuki uses sudden colour
    transformations to punctuate violent action in his later action films, which this
    article considers in a reading of Tattooed Life (Irezumi ichidai, 1965)’s climax.
    Suzuki’s experimentation gradually refines his colour design to an abstraction
    that belies its origins in popular genre cinema.


  Suzuki Seijun’s colour design appears briefly in many historical and theoretical
accounts of colour in cinema, such as Richard Misek’s1 and Edward Branigan’s;2
there is a vague sense that his colour design is unique and worthy of study
that has not been adequately developed. David Desser considers Suzuki’s late
Nikkatsu films, particularly Gate of Flesh (Nikutai no mon, 1964), in the broad
context of colour filmmaking in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s. While Desser’s
work contains useful information about the introduction of colour technology

1
  Richard Misek, Chromatic Cinema: A History of Screen Color (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell,
2010), pp. 50, 100.
2
  Edward Branigan, Tracking Color in Cinema and Art: Philosophy and Aesthetics (New York:
Routledge, 2017), p. 21.

                                                 Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIX, no. 32, Spring 2019
                                         William Carroll


into Japan around this time, his reference points speak to the limited number of
films available when he wrote the essay in 1994: namely, the early colour films of
Ozu and Kurosawa, and a handful of watershed films like Carmen Comes Home
(Karumen kokyō ni kaeru, Kinoshita Keisuke, 1951) and Gate of Hell (Jigokumon,
Kinugasa Teinosuke, 1953). Suzuki’s immediate context of Nikkatsu’s popular
youth and action films of the 1950s and 1960s, which bears a more immediate
relationship to his colour design, is not discussed.3
   In an interlude on neon lighting in urban-set East Asian cinema, James Tweedie
considers their role in Suzuki’s colour:

     In films like Tokyo Drifter [Tōkyō nagaremono, 1966], the neon sign, cosmopolitan,
     uprooted, and floating above the banalities of the street, presents a vision of the city to
     come, a spectacular space where light is dedicated to the cause of commerce… Suzuki
     embraces this future and develops an aesthetic of ubiquitous and often uniform color,
     with images that look as though they were lit entirely by these same neon signs.4

   Tweedie identifies several crucial elements of Suzuki’s colour design at
Nikkatsu: the prominence of neon lighting, their modern urban location, the
tendency toward uniform colour compositions, and the connection between
the three. Interestingly, however, several of these techniques are not particularly
unique to Suzuki and were common in Nikkatsu’s popular action films in colour
at the time. In particular, the neon lighting montage sequence that Tweedie
describes had been nearly ubiquitous in these films since Inoue Umetsugu’s The
Winner (Shōri-sha, 1957) and The Stormy Man (Arashi o yobu otoko, 1957), and
remained so through the period of Suzuki’s celebrated late Nikkatsu films.
   Because Suzuki was famously fired in 1968 after multiple conflicts with the
studio’s management, he is frequently cast in a familiar role as an iconoclastic
artist. However, when we look at the colour design of Suzuki’s films in relation
to those of broader Nikkatsu popular cinema from the same period, we can see
Suzuki experimenting with a colour idiom that was common among Nikkatsu’s
popular action films. This is not to say that Suzuki’s colour style is merely a
product of the industrial context that he worked in; rather, he gradually refines
an inherited colour idiom into abstraction, isolating colour from diegetic objects
that possess it.
   Suzuki’s colour design was also frequently discussed by the critics who first
championed him in Japan in the immediate wake of his firing. In 1969, Yamane
Sadao wrote on the motif of red camellia flowers in Youth of the Beast (Yajū no
seishun, 1963). The flowers function as a clue, identifying Detective Takeshita’s


3
  David Desser, ‘Gate of Flesh(-tones): Color in the Japanese Cinema’, in Cinematic Landscapes:
Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan, ed. by Linda C. Erlich and Desser
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), pp. 299–317.
4
  James Tweedie, ‘Interlude 3: Neon’, in Cinema at the City’s Edge: Film and Urban Networks in
East Asia, ed. by Yomi Braester and Tweedie (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010),
pp. 89–92 (p. 89).

16
        The History of a Broken Blue Fusuma: Colour in Suzuki Seijun’s Nikkatsu Films


widow as the mastermind behind her husband’s murder by their presence at
the crime scene and on a tree in her backyard. Suzuki singles them out in their
first appearance: in the film’s prologue, the crime scene of Detective Takeshita’s
murder, they are the only part of the image to possess colour. There is a narrative
motivation behind this decision: singling out the flower makes it easier to track
where these red flowers reappear across the film, but the effect of singling
out red in a field of black and white is excessive in a way that cannot entirely
be explained by its narrative function. Yamane takes this a step further in his
analysis: he points out that in the film’s title card, a single character (the ‘no,’ or
‘of’) at the center of the screen is in red while the rest of the title card is in black
and white. He argues that collectively, the title and opening sequence single out
not just red flowers but redness as a quality of its own, distinct from the object
that possesses it.5
   Yamane’s observation can be seen as part of a broader meta-cinematic
celebration of Suzuki’s films by a burgeoning generation of cinephiles,
particularly at the newly formed film journal Shinema 69. In the same journal
issue, Hasumi Shigehiko celebrated the visual tension between apparent visual
depth and flatness in Suzuki’s work; Hasumi argued that this articulated the
inherent tension in cinema between the inherent flatness of the projected image
and the appearance of depth that it produced, a tendency that can be seen in
the abstract fields of solid colour that appear at once flat and infinitely deep in
films such as Kanto Wanderer (Kantō mushuku, 1963), Gate of Flesh, and Tokyo
Drifter.6 Years later, Hasumi would argue that Suzuki’s use of seasonal imagery,
commonly used by other Japanese filmmakers as a naturally motivated stylistic
flourish, isolates the imagery as a stylistic flourish devoid of representation of
what could realistically be called seasons.7 What these accounts identify in
Suzuki’s style is a move toward abstraction: identifying stylistic flourishes,
gradually removing their diegetic pretexts, and distilling them into discrete
stylistic elements. These moments appear fleetingly within individual Suzuki
films, but looking at his Nikkatsu filmography as a whole, a sustained pattern
of distilling and interrogating individual stylistic elements emerges. Suzuki
stands at the crossroads between what David Bordwell has called the ‘cinema of
flourishes’ and ‘parametric narration’.8


5
  Yamane Sadao, ‘Shudatsu-sha-Suzuki Seijun: Tsubaki no hana wa naze akai no ka?’, Shinema 69,
2 (1969), 64–73 (p. 69).
6
  Hasumi Shigehiko, ‘Suzuki Seijun to sono chinmoku no naritachi’, Shinema 69, 2 (1969), 49–57
(pp. 50–53).
7
  Hasumi, ‘Suzuki Seijun, mata wa kisetsu no fuzai’, Yurīka, 4 (1991), 38–57. Hasumi points to
Kanto Wanderer’s finale, in which Suzuki uses seasonal imagery for winter, summer, and fall in
different scenes over the course of a single evening.
8
  Bordwell defines a ‘flourish’ as a momentary stylistic device that stands out partly because of its
uniqueness, whereas ‘parametric narration’ involves stylistic patterns across an entire film that
function self-reflexively. Though there are clear stylistic patterns like this in Suzuki’s work, they
tend to function across films rather than within a single film. See: David Bordwell, ‘A Cinema of

                                                                                                  17
                                         William Carroll


   I argue that Suzuki’s colour aesthetic has its roots in the colour idiom of
Nikkatsu Action Cinema, but becomes distinct by a move toward abstracting
colour. I do not use ‘abstract’ to mean necessarily non-narrative or anti-narrative;
Suzuki’s Nikkatsu Action films are all narrative films, and as with the flowers
in Youth of the Beast, his colour design is frequently at least partly motivated
by narrative concerns.9 I use Paul Coates’ definition of abstract: ‘the complete
separation of color and object’.10 After experimenting with the possibilities
offered by an inherited style in the early 1960s, Suzuki abstracted colour design
from diegetic objects into a discrete element of film form.


The Nikkatsu Action Cinema Colour Idiom

   Though there were practices of adding colour to black-and-white film in the
post-production process in Japan in the silent era,11 the Japanese film industry
began its transition to colour in earnest in the 1950s. The colour processes
used were largely determined by the studios: Shōchiku and Tōhō adopted
Fujicolor, Tōei adopted Konishiroku’s Sakuracolor process, while Daiei adopted
Eastmancolor. There was widespread frustration in the industry with the colour
palettes offered by Fujicolor and Sakuracolor: Fujicolor was inadequate for its
reds, Sakuracolor for its yellows.12 Eastmancolor offered a richer colour palette
than either of these processes, and quickly became preferred; its one significant
drawback was the tendency for colour values in prints to decay more rapidly,13 but
preservation was not a major concern for studios at the time. Nikkatsu released
its first colour feature, The Green Music Box (Midori haruka ni, Inoue Umetsugu)
in 1955, using Konicolor, a newer colour stock from Konishiroku.14 Subsequently,
Nikkatsu switched its colour process to Eastmancolor, and would take advantage
of the latter’s expanded colour palette for the films discussed here.15


Flourishes: Decorative Style in 1920s and 1930s Japanese Film’, in Reframing Japanese Cinema, ed.
by Desser and Arthur Noletti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 327–45.
9
   Laura Lee has argued that Suzuki’s use of still frames in Satan’s Town (Akuma no machi, 1956)
and Carmen from Kawachi (Kawachi karumen, 1966) originates in a desire to mediate a character’s
subjectivity through unconventional means, but that its resulting effect also interrogates the act
of representation and cinema’s boundaries with other art forms. Suzuki’s use of the solid colour
backgrounds arguably function in a similar way. See: Laura Lee, Japanese Cinema Between Frames
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 54–56, 70–72.
10
   Paul Coates, Cinema and Colour: The Saturated Image (London: BFI Palgrave, 2010), p. 30.
11
   See: Hiroshi Komatsu, ‘From Natural Color to the Pure Motion Picture Drama’, Film History,
7 (1995), 69–86.
12
   Okajima Hisashi, ‘Color Film Restoration in Japan: Some Examples’, trans. by Akiko Mizoguchi,
Journal of Film Preservation, 66 (Oct. 2003), 32–36 (p. 33).
13
   For a technical and historical discussion of Eastmancolor, see: Heather Heckman, ‘We’ve Got
Bigger Problems: Preservation during Eastmancolor’s Innovation and Early Diffusion’, The
Moving Image, 15.1 (Spring 2015), 44–61.
14
   Ivi, p. 35.
15
    Jasper Sharp, ‘Japanese Widescreen Cinema: Commerce, Technology and Aesthetics’

18
        The History of a Broken Blue Fusuma: Colour in Suzuki Seijun’s Nikkatsu Films


   What Watanabe Takenobu calls ‘Nikkatsu Action Cinema’ took shape in
1956, beginning with the films Season of the Sun (Taiyō no kisetsu, Furukawa
Takumi) and Crazed Fruit (Kurutta kajitsu, Nakahira Kō), each starring Ishihara
Yūjirō.16 Ishihara’s star, and that of Nikkatsu Action more generally, rose further
the following year with the popularity of I Am Waiting (Ore wa matteiru ze,
Kurahara Koreyoshi) and particularly The Stormy Man. Michael Raine has
given a detailed account of how Nikkatsu promoted Ishihara’s rise to stardom,
emphasizing, among other things, the importance of the theme songs in Ishihara’s
films (particularly The Stormy Man), which were released by Ishihara as singles
with a cross-promotion strategy.17 This set underway a practice of multimedia
stardom at Nikkatsu, and as a result of this practice, Nikkatsu Action films often
feature musical performances in a nightclub stage space. The stage spaces of
modern Ginza nightclubs would become foundational to other aspects of the
genre’s aesthetics, particularly as the studio adopted anamorphic framing (whose
dimensions more closely mirrored stage spaces) and colour.18
   In The Winner and The Stormy Man, Inoue took advantage of the films’ exterior
nighttime scenes in Tokyo’s Ginza district and interior stage spaces in nightclubs
as a pretext for intense colour design. Though the association between musical
performance and colour would appear to replicate the prominence of colour
design in Hollywood musicals, an important difference quickly emerges. Richard
Misek makes a useful distinction between surface color (the colour of objects as
they appear in white light) and optical color (colour created by lighting).19 He
argues that even within musicals, Hollywood films tended to use white light and
to create their more elaborate colour schemes with surface color: the props, set
designs, and costumes, as spelled out in the guidelines of Hollywood’s Society
of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE).20 At Nikkatsu, however,
Inoue and other filmmakers quickly began using coloured light filters in stage
spaces, street scenes in the Ginza district (motivated by off-screen neon lights),
and even in interior spaces in the Ginza district (motivated by off-screen neon



(unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Sheffield, Department of English Literature, Language
and Linguistics, 2013), pp. 213–18.
16
   Watanabe Takenobu, Nikkatsu Akushon no karei na sekai (Tokyo: Mirai-sha, 2004), p. 24.
Mark Schilling has condensed much of the information contained in Watanabe’s book in English,
alongside new interviews and Schilling’s own critical evaluations. See: Mark Schilling, No Borders,
No Limits: Nikkatsu Action Cinema (Godalming: FAB Press, 2007).
17
   Michael Raine, ‘Ishihara Yūjirō: Youth, Celebrity, and the Male Body in Late-1950s Japan’, in
Word and Image in Japanese Cinema, ed. by Dennis Washburn and Carole Cavanaugh (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 202–25 (p. 214).
18
   Nikkatsu began incorporating colour and anamorphic lenses in the mid-1950s, and transitioned
completely to anamorphic in June 1958. The colour transition was more irregular: after 1959,
shooting in colour became more common but was not universal (Watanabe, Nikkatsu Akushon,
pp. 24–25).
19
   Misek, p. 6.
20
   Ivi, p. 128.

                                                                                                19
                                         William Carroll


lights coming in through windows).21 Within a few years, Nikkatsu would begin
increasingly shooting action films on location outside of Tokyo. In cases where
the films were shot in other modern cities, filmmakers would simply use these
cities’ nightlife districts in a similar way to the Ginza in Tokyo-set films. Rural
settings, like those used in Suzuki’s Blood-Red Water in the Channel (Kaikyō,
chi ni somete, 1961) and The Man With a Shotgun (Shottogan no otoko, 1961),
offered filmmakers fewer pretexts for optical colour, and their colour design
featured less formal play as a result.
    The emphasis on optical colour had important implications for the colour
design of Nikkatsu Action films. It gave sequences in nightlife districts a vibrant
colour scheme, but one unlike those found in Hollywood musicals. Since colour-
filtered light would function as the key light for an entire frame, the entire image
would appear in subtle variations in hues of that colour. As a result, the colourful
individual frames in Nikkatsu Action films tend to be either uniform in colour
design, or to divide sections of the image into different colours using multiple
coloured light sources (what Misek refers to as ‘chromatic zoning’).22 It also
allowed for more rapid transformations of the colour scheme of an individual shot
without editing. In The Stormy Man, for example, Inoue uses multiple coloured
light filters cycling over Ishihara during his performance so that he and his
surroundings quickly change colours. Filmmakers also frequently use these rapid
colour transformations to introduce kinetic energy, enhanced by the vibrancy
of the colours, into scenes like Ishihara’s drum solo. Many scenes incorporated
coloured lights coming in through windows and alternating or cycling through
different colours. A particularly baroque example can be found in The Volcano’s
Wind (Umi o wataru hatoba no kaze, Yamazaki Tokujirō, 1960), where Shishido
Jō attempts to break into a safe in a nightclub at night, pink and green lights
alternate shine into the room as the scene’s key light, so that the sequence’s light
scheme in its entirety constantly shifts between pink, black, and green.
    In the mid-to-late 1960s, there was a broad decline in theatrical attendance
across Japan and new competition from Tōei Studio’s ninkyō (‘chivalry’) films,
both of which hurt Nikkatsu’s box office receipts.23 That, along with Suzuki’s
declining stock at the studio, meant that the number of colour films declined
toward the end of his tenure at Nikkatsu: between Fighting Delinquents
(Kutabare gurentai, 1960) and Our Blood Will Not Forgive (Oretachi no chi ga
yurusanai, 1964), fourteen of Suzuki’s fifteen films were in colour; between Story
of a Prostitute (Shunpuden, 1965) and Branded to Kill (Koroshi no rakuin, 1967),
only two of his seven films were in colour. Suzuki had little control over whether

21
   Daisuke Miyao has discussed the practice of using isolated spots of light against mostly dark,
shadowy compositions in what he calls ‘street films’ (urban films set mostly at night of the 1920s
and 1930s); Nikkatsu Action films arguably update the aesthetic for colour by adding colour filters
to the light sources. See: Daisuke Miyao, The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 235–336.
22
   Ivi, p. 143.
23
   Watanabe, Nikkatsu Akushon, pp. 24–25.

20
        The History of a Broken Blue Fusuma: Colour in Suzuki Seijun’s Nikkatsu Films


his films would be in colour, and the studio’s decision-making process regarding
colour could be nebulous and change very suddenly. His assistant director Sone
Chūsei writes that Suzuki had believed, along with most of the film’s cast and
crew, that Carmen from Kawachi would be filmed in colour, only to learn that the
film would be in black and white when the studio issued black-and-white film
stock;24 Suzuki recounts a similar occurrence with Fighting Elegy (Kenka ereji,
1966).25


Suzuki’s Earliest Colour Experiments, 1960–1962

   When Suzuki directed Fighting Delinquents in colour at the end of 1960,
the Nikkatsu Action colour idiom had been firmly established. Suzuki’s earliest
colour films adopt aspects of this colour idiom: performance spaces as a pretext
for coloured light filters, exterior scenes in nightlife districts with neon lights
and key lights from coloured light filters implied to be from neon light sources,
and the use of coloured light filters to facilitate rapid and shocking shifts in an
overall colour scheme. However, even in Fighting Delinquents, Suzuki begins to
experiment with this idiom in unconventional ways, and to push the ostensible
diegetic pretexts of his coloured light cues well past plausibility. Suzuki films
a conversation scene in a nightclub during a performance, and directly shows
the coloured light filters it uses. After showing the transition between red and
blue light filters, Suzuki cuts to a two-shot of a man and woman bathed in a
blue light. The colour is uniform across the frame, but it shifts multiple times
over the course of the scene: from blue to green, from green to yellow, from
yellow to white light, and, finally, to a garish red (fig. 1). Though Suzuki takes
the trouble to show the cycling light filter before the conversation, the uniform
lighting across the frame, particularly as part of the nightclub that is not close to
the stage, seems implausible. Even though the colour shifts are motivated by the
cycling of a light filter, they are timed to turning points in the conversation: the
blue-to-green shift takes place at the moment when the man tells the woman that
her long-ago-abandoned son has reappeared, and the colour shift underscores
the change in her facial reaction when she hears the news. Though the technique
has both a diegetic pretext and a dramatic function in the scene, it is so overtly
manipulative and unrealistic that it turns into a self-reflexive joke about the use
of colour and light shifts within Nikkatsu Action Cinema.
   Suzuki would continue to use similar lighting cycles to create major
compositional colour shifts over his next several films: in Tokyo Knights (Tōkyō
naito, 1961), in a car scene with a rear-projected background of a Ginza street,
using the familiar process of passing lights across the car windows in combination


24
   Sone Chūsei, Sone Chūsei jiden: Hito wa nanomi no tsumi no fukasa yo (Tokyo: Bunya-sha, 2014),
p. 105.
25
   Interview with Suzuki Seijun, Tokyo Drifter DVD (New York: Criterion Collection, 2011).

                                                                                              21
                                      William Carroll




            Fig. 1: Fighting Delinquents (Kutabare gurentai, Suzuki Seijun, 1960)


with rear projection to suggest movement, he cycles through a series of colour
filters so that the villain is bathed sequentially in orange, green, yellow, pink, and
blue light. In a performance sequence in Reckless Boss (Muteppō daisho, 1961),
Suzuki uses spatially discontinuous editing to show three performers suddenly
shift to different parts of a nightclub so that they appear suddenly under purple,
red, and yellow lights. In The Wind-of-Youth Group Crosses the Mountain Pass
(Tōge o wataru wakai kaze, 1961), Wada Kōji fights with another man at a festival,
and the other man throws three different coloured juices at him in succession.
As each juice splashes across Wada’s face, the lighting shifts: red light for the red
juice, yellow light for the yellow juice, and green light for the green juice. Though
Suzuki maintains a diegetic pretext within each of these sequences, the pretexts
seem to become flimsier with each successive film.
    These colour cycles in Suzuki’s earliest colour films contain the seeds of what
will become Suzuki’s personalized colour style in his later films at Nikkatsu. First,
the uniformity imposed by the coloured light filters would persist even as Suzuki
incorporated surface colour in his colour design: rather than intricate colour
patterns, Suzuki’s colour design at Nikkatsu favored vibrant solid colours in
lighting, costume design, and set design. Second, the sudden colour shifts would
become important for his later action films, in which he often punctuates violent
action either by similar sudden shifts in colour through lighting, or blocking and
staging. Third, Suzuki is typically less interested in an individual colour per se
than he is with colour vibrancy and with the visceral shock created by sudden
colour shifts. In his later Nikkatsu films, the significance of colours will likewise
not be found in the ‘meanings’ of individual colours, but rather in the ways that
they repeat across a film as a motif, or shift suddenly in a scene.


Forging a Style, 1963–1966

  Perhaps Suzuki’s most famous use of colour is in Gate of Flesh. In a technique
that grows directly out of Suzuki’s colour cycles in his earliest colour films, Suzuki
deploys a schematic colour design of solid colours, assigning one to each of the

22
        The History of a Broken Blue Fusuma: Colour in Suzuki Seijun’s Nikkatsu Films




                    Fig. 2: Gate of Flesh (Nikutai no mon, Suzuki Seijun, 1964)


four central women in the film who work at a cooperative brothel. The bright,
solid colours of the women’s outfits stand out against their drab surroundings
in the bombed-out slums of Tokyo in the immediate postwar, and they also
distinguish the four central women from the other sex workers in the film, who
wear dresses in a neutral main colour with patterns or prints on them. By using a
consistent colour for each of the individual women throughout the film, Suzuki
creates a colour association with individual characters that he can draw on to
provide subjective access to the characters at specific moments.26 As each of the
four women delivers an internal monologue in succession, the colour of her dress
extends to the background set colouration (fig. 2). Though Suzuki develops
this technique with surface colour in addition to optical colour, the emphasis
on colour uniformity in the costume designs, and particularly in the frames
overwhelmed by a uniform solid colour, derives from the effect of the coloured
light filters seen in his earlier films. Using surface colour and post-production
colour additions, Suzuki modulates the amount of colour at different moments
in the film. The series of internal monologues is the most extreme example, but
at other moments, such as when the three other women are torturing Maya, a
gauzy green haze infuses the screen and surrounds her.
   The internal monologues in Gate of Flesh point to another tendency in Suzuki’s
late Nikkatsu films, beginning with Kanto Wanderer: his tendency to use negative


26
   Desser reads the colours symbolically based on a misunderstanding of an interview in which
Suzuki reads several symbolic interpretations of the film’s colours by critics, though Suzuki has
subsequently said that he only supplied these readings to mock them, and that his only intention
was to pick colours that stood out from the background and were consistent across the film. Desser
acknowledges that Suzuki’s supplied readings do not map meaningfully onto the characters, but he
supplies alternative symbolic readings (‘red = leadership’) that seem arbitrary at best. See: Desser,
p. 315; ‘Interview with Suzuki Seijun’, Eiga Hyōron, January 1960, p. 20; ‘From the Ruins: Making
Gate of Flesh’, Gate of Flesh DVD (New York: Criterion Collection, 2005).

                                                                                                  23
                                        William Carroll


space backgrounds with abstract colour design. In the climax, the protagonist
Katsuta slices a man, sending him through a fusuma in the background. The
set collapses around the man, revealing a solid red colour. Shot perspectivally,
the red in the background appears to have no beginning or end, and becomes
simply an abstract field of colour. In subsequent films, Suzuki would continue to
use these abstract colour backgrounds, particularly in action sequences. In some
cases, the colour of the background shifts to punctuate action, as in a scene in
Tokyo Drifter where the background shifts from red to white as Tetsu shoots a
gun out of an enemy’s hand.
   These abstract colour fields are a perfect example of the phenomenon that
Hasumi had described when he discussed the play between flatness and depth
in Suzuki’s films. The perspectival framing gives the impression that the red
wall is not a wall but a vacant mass of red that expands outward indefinitely: it
relies on perspectival framing and sets that are built, lit, and filmed to prevent
a clear distinction between ground, wall, and ceiling. These bear a relationship
to a common production technique in cinema to leave large empty spaces,
usually to be filled in during post-production. These date back to the tendency
in early cinema to leave a large, black field of empty space to be filled in by
another superimposed shot later, and have a legacy through the use of chroma
key effects.27 However, Suzuki frequently leaves these spaces empty in post-
production, filled only by bright colours that occasionally transform in response
to actions that take place in front of them. In subsequent films, Suzuki continues
to use these primary-coloured negative spaces in a variety of ways: marking out
subjective spaces for characters to deliver internal monologues (Gate of Flesh), as
backgrounds that shift colour, seemingly responding to the diegesis rather than
being part of it (Tokyo Drifter and other action films), or exploiting the negative
space for its ambiguity (The Fang in the Hole, Ana no kiba, 1979).
   These fields in a solid colour derive in part from the way that the emphasis
on optical colour within Nikkatsu Action Cinema produces uniform colouration
over an image. There is, however, another influence that becomes significant for
Suzuki in this period that we should consider in looking at this new colouration
scheme. Kanto Wanderer and Tattooed Life (Irezumi ichidai, 1965) are both
examples of Nikkatsu’s attempts to compete with Tōei’s ninkyō films.28 Ninkyō
films foregrounded both the conflict between giri (‘loyalty’ to the clan) and
ninjō (‘human sympathy’), as well as the conflicts between these values and the
social transformations in the early modern era.29 Instead of the modern urban


27
   Trond Lundemo, ‘The Colors of Haptic Space: Black, Blue, and White in Moving Images’, in
Color: The Film Reader, ed. by Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price (New York: Routledge, 2006),
pp. 88–101.
28
   Suzuki’s The Flowers and the Angry Waves (Hana to dōto, 1964) is also a ninkyō film. Some
Nikkatsu films also adapted ninkyō themes to the modern, urban settings of other Nikkatsu Action
films, including Our Blood Will Not Forgive and Tokyo Drifter.
29
   Watanabe Takenobu, ‘Ninkyō eiga sōmokuroku: 1961–1969’, in Ninkyō eiga no sekai, ed. by
Kusumoto Kenkichi (Tokyo: Arechi, 1969), pp. 212–35.

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        The History of a Broken Blue Fusuma: Colour in Suzuki Seijun’s Nikkatsu Films




                   Fig. 3: Tattooed Life (Irezumi ichidai, Suzuki Seijun, 1965)


nightclubs that characterized Nikkatsu Action films, a more prominent setting
for ninkyō films was the upstairs bakuchiyado (a secret gambling den). These
incorporated Japanese architecture into their staging: shōji and fusuma30 could
be broken down in combat, or simply opened, to create a sudden, dramatic
change in the composition.31
   Suzuki adopts this strategy in later action films, but he incorporates colour
transformations into these spatial transformations. In the climax of Tattooed
Life, the protagonist Tetsutarō moves laterally across a thinly lit trajectory in
the foreground towards his enemy’s house, and his movement is followed by
tracking shots until he reaches the entrance. Tetsutarō then moves from a flat,
virtually monochromatic image into depth and into colour. This incorporates the
colour shifts into the action: aggressive movements forward into depth reveal
new colours as he opens doors and reveals new coloured doors behind him,
and aggressive movements outward towards Tetsutarō reveal new colours as
they break down doors. Since fusuma are traditionally the colour of the paper
from which they are made,32 the blue and yellow colors are abstracted from the
surfaces that they appear on; rather than blue and yellow fusuma, they are blue
and yellow on fusuma. It culminates in a showdown with his opponent against
a white ceiling (fig. 3). The sequence begins in a flat, nearly monochrome image
of Tetsutarō and his black-and-white kimono against an all-black background.


30
   Shōji and fusuma are both rectangular screens and function as both doors and walls; however,
shōji are translucent while fusuma are opaque.
31
   As Noël Burch observes, this use of Japanese architecture in fight choreography has been
common since at least the chanbara (‘swordfighting’) films of the 1920s set in the premodern era;
ninkyō films simply draw on this practice in their early modern setting. See: Noël Burch, To the
Distant Observer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 118.
32
   Some fusuma may be decorated by paintings, and there is also a tradition of kinbusama (‘golden’
fusuma), but the solid, bright colours seen here would be unusual even in these cases.

                                                                                               25
                                  William Carroll


Opening the fusuma suddenly introduces both depth and colour into the image,
and the colours shift as he progresses. After he and his assailants successfully
break down all of the fusuma in combat, the sequence culminates in another
nearly monochrome image of Tetsutarō facing off against his opponent, and the
extreme low-angle through the apparent floor of the house throws the sense of
perspectival space into confusion. There is a clear formal progression into and
out of depth that Suzuki complements with sudden colour transformations as
new spaces are revealed. To the sudden shifts in dominant colour that we saw
in his earlier lighting cycles, or even the series of internal monologues in Gate
of Flesh, Suzuki now adds not just a shift between colours, but a shift into and
out of colour. In the more famous climactic shootout of Tokyo Drifter, Suzuki
uses a similar progression of nearly monochrome to wild colour shifts to nearly
monochrome again, though he uses lighting shifts rather than the play with
blocking and depth that we see in the climax of Tattooed Life.


Conclusion

   The personal colour aesthetic that Suzuki refined during his career at
Nikkatsu grows out of a broader colour idiom that was commonly used by his
contemporaries at the studio; it could even be seen as a distillation of these
tendencies. The prominence of optical colour in the form of stage lights or neon
light that were common across Nikkatsu Action films allowed Suzuki to isolate
colour itself from the objects in front of the camera, and to shift the colour
schemes of images very suddenly. Even as Suzuki makes films with settings far
from the glamorous nightclubs of the Ginza district in Japan’s high-growth period
like the early modern era or the decimated slums of Tokyo in the immediate
postwar, he builds on an approach to colour design that was shaped by these early
experiments, and develops new ways to isolate solid colours in his compositions
and to shift those colours unexpectedly. His approach abstracts colour in the
sense that Coates uses the term, causing it to function as an autonomous stylistic
flourish that could suffuse the screen with a character’s subjectivity, underscore
violent actions, or perform other functions while forgoing a diegetic pretext.
In spite of these self-reflexive colour techniques, Suzuki’s films are resolutely
located in popular genre cinema. Through colour, he was able to prevail over
the limitations of his industrial context and to abstract individual colours as
elements of film form that could be isolated and transformed independently of
any diegetic objects that might be said to possess them.




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