begin again & Youth

So I was sitting around (unemployed) and thought I'd try to blog again. We shall see how this goes.

I watched Youth of the Beast (dir. Seijun Suzuki, 1963) today. It's a hard-boiled revenge drama, with an-ex cop (Jo) in the anti-hero role. Suzuki starts the film in black and white, at a murder scene. At the end of the scene the camera fixes on a table with a "colored" flower sitting in a glass. Besides ushering in the use of color for the rest of the movie, I wonder if this is a jab by Suzuki at other Japanese directors who were working in black&white: This is Now. Perhaps the most jarring feature of the film is its embrace of non sequitur as a narrative device. Suzuki jump cuts often, showing no concern for narrative continuity. But what I found most enjoyable about the movie was its elaborate mise-en-scene. There is a justly famous scene in which the head of the Nomoto gang whips a whore as an orange-lit sandstorm blows violently in the background. An early scene in which Jo invites himself into the Nomoto gang makes stunning use of volume contrasts, with silence put to hallucinatory effect.