frame[o]ut – UNGEHORSAM
Open-air film festival

Fri 25.07., 21.30h, Courtyard 8, free entry
indoor backup venue: Arena21

film: BRANDED TO KILL
D: Seijun Suzuki | JP 1967 | feature film | 91min. | OV with English subtitles
Joe Shishido, Kōji Nanbara, Annu Mari u.a.
Fiction

Killer No. 3 - played by Joe Shishido, the man with the most prominent chubby cheeks in film history - has a weakness for fragrant rice and beautiful women. He is soon plunged into misfortune by the femme fatale Misako and from then on stumbles through a world that becomes increasingly strange and hostile to him. In Branded to Kill, director Seijun Suzuki breaks down film noir into its surreal components in order to assemble a completely new cinema: feverish, absurd, stylized to the point of grotesqueness. Like an overexposed fever dream by Jean-Pierre Melville, whose highly stylized murder scenes later gangster cinema - from Jarmusch to Tarantino - will learn a thing or two from. Suzuki not only destroys the linear narrative style, but also undermines the conventions of the studio system in which he had previously worked. Branded to Kill marked the biggest turning point in his career - it was the film that finally broke the Nikkatsu studio's back. Suzuki's work was too unconventional, too far removed from the commercial expectations of the time. After his already controversial Tokyo Drifter, the director was dismissed, sued and de facto banned from his profession for a decade. A classic of disobedient feature films!

At the time of Branded to Kill's release, Seijun Suzuki was already looking back on a long career characterized by commissioned work for Nikkatsu. In the 1950s alone, he was responsible for 13 films as a director, most of them gangster films. When he returns to the cinema after the enforced break, he will prove with films such as Zigeunerweisen, Kagero-za or Yumeji that he has only radicalized himself artistically in the meantime. Fortunately! Today, however, Branded to Kill is still considered the pinnacle of his work. A film aimed at an audience interested in cinema that goes beyond narrative certainty.

Film still © Rapid Eye Movies

In cooperation and co-production with MuseumsQuartier Wien