Seijun Suzuki

Seijun Suzuki (*1923), the eccentric genius of the Japanese studio system, started out at the Shochiku studio as an assistant director in 1946 before moving to Nikkatsu in 1954, where he made his directorial debut in 1956. At Nikkatsu, he was employed as a contract director, producing cheap B-movies in conveyor belt style for the double bills standard at the time. Suzuki countered the constant sameness of the scripts with stylistic determination and unbridled resourcefulness, creating genre films that pushed at the boundaries of convention. His irrepressible desire to experiment, carry out radical frenzies of destruction and break rules paired with his ironic distance to the laws of the Yakuza cosmos are the mark of a truly unmistakable filmmaker. He subverts genre conventions and frees them above all from their moral ballast, while his visually exuberant style is full of colorful excess, a predilection for motifs with a monochrome background, extreme camera shots and surreal situations. The heads of Nikkatsu, where he shot 40 films in just 12 years, found this all too colorful after a while and fired him after BRANDED TO KILL, arguing that his films were “incomprehensible”. He stopped working for ten years before returning in the 80s and 90s with the independently produced Taisho trilogy, in which he took formalization and aestheticization to new extremes.