‘I don’t masturbate, I fight!’: the Spectre of Kita Ikki in Suzuki Seijun's Kenka Ereji (Fighting Elegy, 1966)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper reconsiders the genre filmmaker Suzuki Seijun's relationship to the political moment of 1968 through a reading of his 1966 film Fighting Elegy. This reading is informed by critical discourses surrounding Suzuki at the time, particularly drawing from a 1969 essay on the film by critic Gondō Susumu at the cinephile film journal Cinema 69. It argues that his methodology of seeking out the film's reactive structure of interest helps to understand the politics of the film, and in turn helps us to recover the politics within Suzuki's Nikkatsu filmography as a whole, as well as that of the cinephiles, who have frequently been written off as simple formalists. This paper expands on the involvement of members of the radical Wakamatsu Production Company in Fighting Elegy and his other late Nikkatsu and post-Nikkatsu work, as well as its unfilmed sequel, whose screenplay was published in the wake of the Suzuki Seijun Incident in 1968.