Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Bullet With Butterfly Wings

Branded To Kill(1967)
directed by Siejun Suzuki
"Un Chien Adalou" inspired Yakuza film, with some of the finest editing Ive ever seen (that goes for the black and white cinematography too).
Butterflies, bullets, mirrors, again and again as death, action, and cinema, refracted around themselves and each other, in a whirl wind of jump cuts and shadows.
Fans of Lynch, Buneul, or Takashi Miike will enjoy.
I can see how this inspired, alot of film makers, but it still doesn't look like anything else Ive ever seen.
Suzuki was told if he made his increasingly strange films, only more radical he would be fired and he answered this by making his most disjointed and expressionistic film yet in Branded To Kill.
Much better than "Gate Of Flesh", the hedonistic technicolor torture porn, and the highly color saturated epic surreal continuation "Tokyo Drifter".
Though the plot is more intentionally confusing, the images and the experience on a whole, is inspired...and a very good, very strange time.
Like an miniature epic Spy Vs. Spy in Japan, in a dream you forget when you wake up in the mourning, but can't stop thinking about for the rest of the day.
Funny too.



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