Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema, by William Carroll. Columbia University Press, 2022, 286 pp.

Abstract

Suzuki Seijun’s extensive filmography cuts across such a wide range of genres and styles that only his most extravagant films have typically stood out to Western programmers and audiences. The absurd and comical excesses of films such as Tokyo Drifter (Tōkyō nagaremono, 1966) and Branded to Kill (Koroshi no rakuin, 1967) have led to an image of Suzuki as primarily a purveyor of idiosyncratic provocations. His position within the annals of postwar Japanese cinema has perhaps been further complicated by his extensive genre work for studio Nikkatsu, despite the richness of many of these films; when placed alongside contemporaneous directors who were more explicitly experimental, political, or poetic, Suzuki’s filmography has seemingly proven more challenging to assemble under a coherent authorial identity. William Carroll’s Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema offers an effective re-evaluation of Suzuki’s career, presenting a lucid study of the work of a director who has often been dismissed as a “formally inventive but frivolous and nonsensical filmmaker”, one whose innovations within a rigid studio system conflated genre filmmaking with avant-garde experimentation, and whose dismissal by his studio galvanised a politically agitated Left into active protest (128).

Keywords

• suzuki seijun
• japanese cinema
• japanese new wave
• film theory