hazardes

excuse me while i gush about one of my favourite films for a few minutes

a few months ago i popped into my local HMV one lunchtime to have a browse, they were having a sale in their blu-ray section and i picked up an interesting looking box set from Arrow Video, three films by a Japanese director called Kinji Fukasaku that i vaguely recognised (had i seen one of his films before? i thought i had)

i'll probably talk about this particular box set in another post, but after watching the films inside i fell down a lengthy Wikipedia rabbit-hole where i discovered that the director had a vast and diverse career spanning 4 decades, had made over sixty films, and that nearly all of these were unknown outside of Japan. one that was mentioned over and over again was the 5-film Battles Without Honour and Humanity series from the early 1970s, coincidentally also available as a box set from Arrow. i picked this up the next time i was in town for £25. i've always done this, if i see something that i really like i'll try and find out as much as possible about the people who made it, what else have they done? who else did they work with? can you still buy it? are there books? very rarely do i watch something good, and then move straight on to something else. what usually happens next is i'll jump on ebay and try and collect everything i can, which is why my house is full of collections of tat from my various obsessions over the years (Misfits vinyl, 2000AD, “Asia Extreme” DVDs, the Persona videogame series...)

anyway, i digress, back to the Fukasaku films: based on documented events, and with a meticulously researched screenplay by Kazuo Kasahara, the films are adapted from the prison memoirs of a real-life yakuza boss that were published as a series of weekly magazine articles in 1972, and were responsible for creating a whole new genre in Japanese cinema; jitsuroku eiga (“actual record films”)

the first film starts with a bang (literally) with the nuclear explosion over Hiroshima that brought about the end of World War II, and this is precisely what it did to my brain when i watched it. i'm guilty of overusing certain phrases in my writing (you'll probably notice eventually) and “mind-blowing” is one, however in this case it's entirely justified. i ended up watching all 5 films in the space of one long bank holiday weekend

i'd never seen anything like this

set in Hiroshima in the immediate aftermath of the end of the war, the opening half hour or so is an assault on the senses. shot documentary style with grainy footage, newspaper clippings, voice-overs, and with frantic handheld camerawork, it tells how various yakuza gangs formed in the chaos of the open air black markets during US occupation of Japan. the violence is brutal, and because of the way it's been shot with the handheld cameras you feel like you are right there

the remaining hour or so of the film is a gripping tale of honour and betrayal, double-crosses, and brutal revenge. it can be kinda hard to follow the plot in places, as there is a large cast of characters with complicated, shifting allegiances, but i have found this makes the film stand up to repeated viewings (i must've watched it four or five times now)

there are several scenes shot in the street, and in public spaces, including one memorable scene where someone gets stabbed to death at a train station in broad daylight, these were shot “guerilla style” with no permit, and genuine reactions from terrified members of the public who had no idea what was happening. and that ending, damn. Bunta Sugawara's character Shozo Hirono finally decides he's had enough of all the bullshit from the bosses, and sets things up beautifully for the next film Hiroshima Death Match

i have to quickly mention that soundtrack by Toshiaki Tsushima. man, what a banger this song has so much strut and swagger to it, it fits the mood perfectly

i'll talk more about what i find fascinating about the yakuza and their place in postwar Japanese society in another post (strokes chin) but it strikes me even with my very limited knowledge how open they were about being gangsters. becoming a yakuza is seen as a legitimate (if regrettable, so sad) career choice for impoverished young men. this film doesn't gloss over the violence at all, but does show the working class yakuza in a very sympathetic way (one of Fukasaku's earlier films is called Sympathy for the Underdog)

can you imagine seeing this in 1973? this is one of the most exciting pieces of cinematic art i have ever seen, even now in 2024

has Battles Without Honour and Humanity become my favourite film of all time? quite possibly. although it might be one of the other ones, i'll let you know after i've watched them all again, it's definitely one of them though