Branded To Kill (1967)

Director: Seijun Suzuki
Country: Japan 

"Branded to Kill" is like free jazz: no rules, no conventional timing, no straight narrative and no romantic bullshit, instead it is an acid trip, or if you prefer is Melville, Buñuel, Furukawa, Godard and Andy Warhol mixed in a blender. 

Full of abstract, surrealist and artistic scenes and surprisingly pop-art images encrusted into the film, a beautiful chiaroscuro cinematography in combination with Naozumi Yamamoto incredible acid-jazz soundtrack, which provides a fastidious synchronicity that helps to maintain the energy through the entire film, this picture has been labeled as noir, but that's only part of it, because it's also a mistery-thriller with a chunk of satire and dense sex scenes that imply sadism and fetichism (snuffing the boiled rice and leg fetichism as well) and of course with a lot of action sequences too. 

Branded To Kill is starred by the magnificent and legendary actor Joe Shishido -well known for his role in "Youth Of The Beast", another Suzuki tour de force- is about a cold blooded killer who becomes the target of a Yakuza organization after failing the assasination of a foreign detective, he also becomes obsessed both with a woman (Mizuku) and with the misterious number one gunman. It has many remarkable scenes but I would like to write about the ones that fascinated me more. 

One of the most famous "eye scenes" in the history of cinema is from Luis Buñuel's "Un Chien Andalou" (1929) but in Suzuki's Branded To Kill we have a very powerful and brutal scene involving an eye too, also Suzuki created a beautiful pop-art picture in movement in this film, when Goro Hanada shoots the first of four men behind a billboard's animatronic lighter, that sequence is simply beautiful, and maybe the most ingenious one is when Hanada shoots the second guy in the face through a pipe drain (Jim Jarmush stole this one for his 1999 film "Ghost Dog") . 

Technically Suzuki used jump cuts, fade out transitions, static, handheld camera and point of view shots and in addition to the animated images he also used inverted colors in some scenes; silence is executed in a deftly way and complements the acid-jazz soundtrack .

Due to its complex, tricky and non-conventional narrative, the audience can get lost while watching the movie, but that's the beauty of it, maybe the number one never existed and Hanada gone crazy, maybe the woman he loves is actually dead or if you want to think that everything could be an hallucination feel free to do it, you can think whatever you want about the plot, the story and the ending, because Suzuki made one of the most twisted and unique movies ever; this is an absolute and crazy masterpiece that I saw twice in a row and no wonder Suzuki got fired and banned from the Japanese industry during 10 years after this!. 

If you want to know more about the production and background of this film click here to check out this film essay written by the great saxophonist John Zorn who is also a big fan of "Branded To Kill"   enjoy!

                                 

Witchhammer (1970)

Director: Otakar Vávra
Country: Czechoslovakia

The Catholic Inquisition has been one of the most horrible things "invented" by human beings, along with other terrible chapters in the history of humanity as the Otoman Empire, the Nazis, the Atomic Bomb or the Communist regimes around the globe. "Kladivo na čarodějnice" in its original title, is a film about the massive witch trials that took place in the 18th century in Europe during the Austro-Turkish War perpetrated by the Catholic Inquisition. 

The storyline is focused on two characters, Boblig Von Edelstadt, an inquisitor judge, a ruthless and greedy murderer bastard who lives as a king and Kristof Lautner, a Presbyterian priest, a reasonable and compassionate man who fights against injustice and cruelty. Most of the people falsely accussed of witchery were women, all innocent, and most of them rich, so the clergy and judges could get rid of them and take over their possesions, i.e all this inquisition bullshit was a matter of business instead of spirituality as they claimed at the time. 

Boblig Von Edelstadt is the evil himself, he uses extreme methods of torture to get the confessions he wants, such as the "Spanish boot" which puts a brutal pressure on the victim's legs to the point of crushing the bones or the "thumbscrew" which crushes the victim's thumbs in a horrible and excrutiating way, his guide to obtain these confessions from the "witches" in order to judge them is a book called "Witchhammer" (whose name gives the title to the movie). Innocent people died not because of their religious beliefs but because their money was the real target.
  
This is a great film for many reasons, is well constructed, has precise dialogues and superb acting, the torture scenes are very realistic and I think is very accurate about this topic, also the film was supposed to be a criticism of the Communist regime which took over Czechoslovakia after World War II, if that was the case this parallelism between the Catholic Inquisition and Communism is fair because in my opinion Communism was a terrible and evil way of ruling a country, they deprived people from civil rights, freedom of speech, they tortured and dissapeared hundreds of people accused of subversion and homosexuality was criminalized, so basically it was "you are with us or against us" just like the Inquisition times. The scene that exemplifies that perfectly is when the judges are eating and making fun of people and telling disgusting sexual jokes, we can see that they were the real evil, and of course if somebody has any other thing in mind he was whether possesed or was a wizard and therefore should be executed. 

We also see similarities with the Betrayal and Crucifixion of Jesuschrist when father Kristof is imprisoned and like Jesus who was judged for crimes he did not commit including witchery and blasphemy, Kristof is tortured and accused of having made a deal with the Devil because the people who testified against him were tortured as well.The ending of the film is bleak, no happy-ending here, we can read "Mr. Boblig Von Edelstadt lived in piece and prosperity and still be married" and we have to take that punch because Mr. Boblig is one of the most brutal villians in the history of cinema; I would like to add that this film could be a perfect suplemental for another great movie about witchery: Häxan (I have written about it too on this blog), so you can watch both movies and see how evil the Catholic Church was at the time.