Heat-Shimmer Cinema

Consider the opening scene of Zigeunerweisen (1980), the first film in Suzuki Seijun’s so-called Taisho trilogy, to be emblematic of the whole, as it models the kind of mesmeric interpretive process that viewers must re-enact in the films that follow, Kagero-za (1981) and Yumeji (1991). Sometime in the Taisho era—the brief imperial period in Japan that lasted from 1912 to 1926—two old friends and former colleagues from a military academy listen to a record of the Basque violinist Pablo de Sarasate playing his composition “Zigeunerweisen” (“Gypsy Airs”). During a lull in the music, over the crackle of the gramophone needle, someone on the recording murmurs unintelligibly. Is it Sarasate himself? What does he say? Why the urgent tone? The friends listen again; the mystery remains. A voice calling out from the rustling of the past, the meaning of which is impossible to discern, but which beguiles all the more for being so indecipherable—Sarasate’s fascinating enigma is a double for Suzuki’s own. Each film in the Taisho trilogy seems to harbour a similarly indistinct message from the past that eludes resolution even as it taunts the viewer (or listener) with the promise of significance.

This spectral, transfixing quality is absent entirely from the brilliantly demented B-pictures like (1964) or (1966) that Suzuki churned out at Nikkatsu in the ’60s, which made him a among cinephiles.