Branded to Kill

Panel discussion moderated by Devika Girish following the 7/5, 6:30pm screening.

Branded to Kill (1967)
Dir. Seijun Suzuki.
91min, DCP
With Jō Shishido, Kôji Nanbara, Isao Tamagawa, Annu Mari, Mariko Ogawa Hiroshi Minami Hiroshi Chō Atsushi Yamatoya Takashi Nomura
In Japanese with English subtitles

Trust Japanese New Wave bad boy Seijun Suzuki to make the rice cooker into something kinky. Branded to Kill tells the ecstatically bent story of a yakuza assassin (chipmunk-cheeked superstar Joe Shishido) with a fetish for sniffing steamed rice, who botches a job and ends up a target himself. When Suzuki delivered this brutal, hilarious, and visually inspired masterpiece to the executives at his studio, he was promptly fired. But the film endures as a cult classic, the flabbergasting pinnacle of Suzuki’s 60s pop-art aesthetic.

Preceded by Incoherence at the Jul 8 screening

Incoherence (1994)
Dir. Bong Joon Ho
30min, Digital
With Yoo Yeon-soo, Yun Il-ju, Kim Roi-ha, Lim Sang-hyo, Shin Dong-hwan, Kim Seon-hwa, Kim Jin-sung, Park Kwang-jin, Lee Sang-yeob, Bong Joon Ho
In Korean with English subtitles

This short film by Bong-Joon Ho, made while the Korean auteur was in film school, distills the preoccupations that have come to characterize his remarkable filmography. Across three episodes, Incoherence traces the misadventures of badly behaved middle-aged men—touching upon voyeurism and sex, crime and class, politics and perversity. The rice cooker’s gasp-inducing cameo is an early example of the twists that Bong is now famous for: cheeky, salacious, and slyly profound.