Saturday | May 14, 2016 9:00 pm

The Call of Blood
(Oretachi no chi ga yurusanai)

Screening on Film

Directed by Seijun Suzuki.
With Akira Kobayashi, Hideki Takahashi, Chikako Hosokawa.
Japan, 1964, 35mm, color, 97 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
Print source: Japan Foundation

Though Suzuki created it in the midst of his stylistic breakthrough, The Call of Blood has never received the same amount of attention as other films he made around the same time. Nikkatsu icons Hideki Takahashi and Akira Kobayashi star as brothers—one a gangster, the other an ad man—who unite to avenge their yakuza father’s death eighteen years before. The film features a bold use of color, an absurdist concluding gunfight, and, in one memorable scene, an impressively illogical use of rear projection as the brothers argue in a car while ocean waves rage around them.