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Topic: Suzuki Seijun

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	Chicago Reader Movie Review
		Suzuki, who turned 80 last May, directed at least 40 quickie features at the Nikkatsu studio between 1956 and 1967 -- practically all of them B films in the original sense of that term, meaning features designed to accompany A pictures.
		A Suzuki support group was duly formed, and Suzuki sued the studio, as he later put it, "to protect my dignity." A full decade would pass before he directed another theatrical feature, and he never returned to Nikkatsu.
		Suzuki's protracted hiatus from filmmaking may be partly responsible for the sense of manic overdrive.
	www.chicagoreader.com /movies/archives/2003/0803/030822.html (1083 words)

	Seijun Suzuki: Authority in Minority
		A filmography of Seijun Suzuki is included at the end of this essay.
		On a micro level, Suzuki invites his audience to view his movies in apparently unstructured blocks or collages, but on a macro level, his pictures are fulfilments, epiphanies, and yes, prophecies of a kind.
		Suzuki's sense of humour seeps through his use of music in the pop-ballad style, as with the irresistable "Ballad of the Tokyo Drifter", Tetsu's theme song that he himself sings in the snow before springing into action.
	www.sensesofcinema.com /contents/festivals/00/8/miff/suzuki.html (3842 words)

	Gapers Block, Chicago, IL - Airbags: Seijun Suzuki (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-19)
		Seijun Suzuki worked as a director in the Japanese studio system from 1956 to 1967, until, after filming Branded to Kill, he was fired for making an "incomprehensible" film, and, after having seen four of his films, it's pretty hard to argue that claim.
		Seijun Suzuki's films are shockingly innovative on a visual level, and his characteristic narrative tangles have been a huge influence on modern-day filmmakers from Wong Kar Wai to Quentin Tarantino.
		Suzuki's use of color and the film's picture perfect shot framing make Kanto Wanderer a must-see for any cinema buff, and, devoid of "weird for weird's sake" moments, the story is more immediately accessible than his later work and less inconsequential as his earlier work.
	www.gapersblock.com /airbags/archives/seijun_suzuki (1180 words)

	Suzuki Seijun
		Suzuki's works have been frequently referred to as radical (in both the good and bad sense of the word!); and radical they most definitely are.
		After completing a course at Tokyo Trade School, in 1941, Suzuki attempted to enter the College of the Ministry of Agriculture; but, he failed the entrance exam because he was weak in physics and chemistry.
		Suzuki quickly became a skilled master of studio-dictated, production line features; however, with each new film assignment he seemed to try a little harder to entertain the audience in a new way and make tired ideas seem fresh.
	shishido0.tripod.com /suzuki.html (1478 words)

	23ª Mostra - Seijun Suzuki Restropective
		Suzuki is one of the exponents of the Japanese Nouvelle Vague, a trend in the sixties under the spell of the original French movement with Godard, Truffaut, and those close to them.
		Seijun Suzuki, especially, was artful in his process of film making.
		The 23rd Mostra, with the contribution of the Japan Foundation, the enthusiasm of Carlos Reichenbach, and the indispensable assistance of Lúcia Nagib, is privileged to present a retrospective of the controversial films by Seijun Suzuki.
	www.mostra.org /23/english/retrospectiva/seijun.htm (506 words)

	Boxoffice Magazine [Fighting Elegy] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-19)
		It's been over four years since Criterion released Seijun Suzuki's "Branded to Kill" and "Tokyo Drifter," two of the Japanese hipster auteur's most popular '60s efforts, helping further interest in the once ignored world of '60s era Japanese cult and exploitation cinema.
		Unfortunately, the rest of the Suzuki catalog was slow to seep out since that time, with only Home Vision adding a trio of noteworthy '50s and '60s titles in January of 2004.
		Even without color, Suzuki's palette is rich as he throws bombs at Japanese youth culture, Japanese military tendencies and the odd and awkward ways in which postwar Japan embraced aspects of American culture.
	www.boxoff.com /scripts/dvd.asp?where=ID&terms=6140 (409 words)

	Tokyo Drifter
		Suzuki jumps from scene to scene, often ignoring any kind of transition or reference from one moment to another.
		What this sequence does is illustrate a viewpoint held by Suzuki and his peers: the need to create a new Japanese cinema while not discrediting the work of the masters.
		Suzuki claims that the only objective behind Tokyo Drifter was to create entertainment and the film is an outright success in that respect.
	www.angelfire.com /biz3/notorious1/tokyodrifter.html (919 words)

	Gate of Flesh (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-19)
		Suzuki had a knack for taking subjects that are normally whispered and talked about in dark dank alleys and turned them into full blown melodrama’s that were near impossible to look away from.
		Suzuki is very good at picking his spots for social commentary as a director and even when he was given material that wasn’t up to par he would work with it elevating to a level unimaginable when looked at in its raw form.
		Suzuki adds a touch of surrealism in e few scenes with his bold use of color and his deliberate positioning of iconic religious imagery.
	10kbullets.com /reviews/gateofflesh.htm (958 words)

	"Branded to Kill" Movie Review -- AIR MASSIVE - Global Pop Culture Media Weblog: Movie Review
		Released in 1967 and directed by Seijun Suzuki, "Branded to Kill" ("Koroshi no Rakuin" in Japanese) is the story of a yakuza hitman and his battle to stay alive after he botches a job and finds himself in the cross hairs of another hitman's rifle.
		Suzuki's aesthetic in "Branded" most closely echoes the noir of Godard's "Alphaville." There's also a subtle sense of humor to the film in the way it mocks and hyper-emphasizes the sillier conventions of the B-movie gangster genre.
		(Suzuki is now in his eighties.) Despite his advanced age, the director is spry, lucid and engaging as he gives a first-hand backgrounder on his filmmaking years and the making of "Branded to Kill." It's must-see viewing for cineastes.
	www.airmassive.com /amblog_022504.html (1253 words)

	riverfronttimes.com \| Calendar \| ND \| Suzuki Savage \| 2001-01-24 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-19)
		Unlike their counterparts in France and Eastern Europe, for whom "new wave" was synonymous with hand-held cameras, 16mm film and fl-and-white photography, some directors of the Japanese New Wave of the early 1960s worked fully within the confines of the established film studios, taking advantage of the technical resources while paying heed to commercial demands.
		Suzuki stirred up complaints at home as well, though not because his films were too lowbrow.
		Suzuki's 1963 film Youth of the Beast (the word "youth" was used indiscriminately in Japanese film titles of the period as a kind of catch-all signal of hard-edged action dramas) is a good place to start, the beginning of the adventurous path that led to his eventual unemployment.
	www.riverfronttimes.com /issues/2001-01-24/calendar/nd.html (414 words)

	[KFCC] Princess Raccoon Review
		Seijun Suzuki uses the Japanese myth of the tanuki to tell a fairytale of PRINCESS RACCOON (Operetta Tanuki Goten), about a tanuki (Zhang Ziyi) that has transformed itself into human form.
		Suzuki's eye for color is still evident, from the costumes to the colorful backdrops used to transport the characters from scene to scene.
		And the biggest pleasure is that this Seijun Suzuki work isn't hard to follow isn't veiled with cryptic messages and it isn't made for snobby aesthetes.
	www.kfccinema.com /reviews/drama/princessraccoon/princessraccoon.html (845 words)

	VH1.com : Movies : Person : Seijun Suzuki : Biography
		Suzuki soon proved himself adept at cranking out studio-scripted quickies, and he ultimately churned out some 40 films for Nikkatsu during the fifteen years he worked for them.
		With his 1958 film Beauty of the Underworld, he first signed his name "Suzuki Seijun," and in 1963, bored with production-line genre material, he began to assert his own voice in Youth of the Beast.
		In 1980, Suzuki, now without the constraints of Nikkatsu, released Zigeunerweisen, the first of his "Taisho Trilogy," a haunting, grotesque film about identity in the 1920s, when Japan first began to adopt Western culture.
	www.vh1.com /movies/person/105337/bio.jhtml (646 words)

	11th Brisbane International Film Festival (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-19)
		Just as Suzuki Seijun's career might be thought to have ended (it's been eight years since his last film), the grandest of Japanese masters returns for yet another variation on the hitman thrillers that brought him a lasting reputation.
		In that period, Suzuki attacked the thrillers and melodramas that his studio assigned to him, subverting the generic conventions and injecting elements of parody and playfulness.
		Here Suzuki plays with gender as well, for his hero is now a hitwoman, Miyuki, the Stray Cat, number three on the list of top hired killers and engaged in a bitter brawl among all the other hired killers to attain number one status.
	www.pftc.com.au /biff_2002/programme/film_review.asp?flmID=147 (378 words)

	dark discussion - The Official Seijun Suzuki Thread (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-19)
		Seijun Suzuki is one of Japans great auteur directors whose work is just know getting the recognition it deserves.
		Suzuki's cinema, like that of Leone or Argento, uses an unrealistic cinematic genre to redefine and remind us of what's real and what makes us who we are.
		Suzuki has been recognised in the West but he seems to be cast in the role of someone who influenced those who came after him.
	www.darkdreams.org /vbulletin/printthread.php?t=7243 (1352 words)

	Tokyo Drifter Movie Review at Hollywood Video
		Specifically, turn to Seijun Suzuki's over-the-top yakuza saga, Tokyo Drifter, one of Criterion's latest DVD releases.
		Suzuki says in the interview included with the DVD that the studio charged him with making the pouty Tetsuya Watari a star.
		Suzuki responded by turning Tetsuya into a cross between James Dean and Viva Las Vegas-era Elvis Presley, a true rebel without a clue.
	www.hollywoodvideo.com /movies/movie.aspx?MID=40856 (657 words)

	Box Office Prophets: Seijun Suzuki
		This is where Suzuki’s innovative artistic sense truly came to the fore; while his films have been dismissed by his critics as incoherent and not at all comprehensible, the surreal nature first born in these poverty row pictures are what help mark the director as a true innovator.
		Fans of Seijun Suzuki have often learned the hard way, however, that critical assessment of the director’s celluloid product has a tendency to be woefully out of tune with its reality.
		In any case, the immense vision of Seijun Suzuki and his devotion to finding his own personal style have allowed the filmmaker to continue to create cinematic works of flair and vitality even as he now passes the cusp of eight decades on the planet.
	www.boxofficeprophets.com /hyde/suzuki.asp (1118 words)

	24fps \| Climbing Mt. Suzuki, Section One
		Although Suzuki predates the Nouvelle Vague, his opposition to militarism, his espousal of frankly depicting sexual behavior, and his critique of women’s exploitation in society all served to associate him with the movements led by 1960s rebels like Godard and Fassbinder and Pasolini.
		This association with European models helped to stimulate interest in Suzuki’s works during the decades of eclipse when he was denied work in the studio system, leading to international retrospectives that have now circled the globe and raised him to cult stardom.
		Peppering a basic philosophical detachment with some of the tabloid insolence of Samuel Fuller, Suzuki constructs a recognizable universe— predictably violent, especially for the exploited, including women and the underclass who must labor for others—that is also historically informed.
	www.24fpsmagazine.com /Suzuki1.html (1422 words)

	McGeek > Branded to Kill by Seijun Suzuki (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-19)
		Seijun Suzuki worked in the fast-paced commercial film industry of Japan of the 50's and 60's.
		Suzuki, without being able to reference everything the Americans and the French were doing stylistically at the time, came up with his own kind of 'New Wave' -- all the while having to also be profitable for the studio.
		What he produced, though, was something akin to what we now see as purely contemporary: a lot of fast cuts, to only linger on more composed frames for pacing and effect, defining a character through idiosyncrasies rather than building character through experience, and a lack of concern with narrative cohesiveness.
	www.mcgeek.com /mainsite/media/60,37.html (697 words)

	Images - Films of Seijun Suzuki
		Following his firing, Suzuki worked mainly in television, though he did return to theatrical filmmaking in 2001 with Pistol Opera, a static and disappointing remake of Branded to Kill with a female assassin standing in for the unforgettable chipmunk-faced Joe Shishido from the original.
		But the roots of Suzuki's prankishness and love of surrealism can easily be found in many of his earlier films, and it would be a shame for the viewer who perhaps knows only Suzuki's most notorious offerings to bypass what could unfortunately be perceived as his safer, tamer productions.
		Kanto Wanderer was the first of Suzuki's films to move away drastically from naturalism to embrace a highly stylized aesthetic that bordered on surrealism while at the same time never abandoning the Kabuki tradition it was actually derived from.
	www.imagesjournal.com /2004/reviews/suzuki/text.htm (1143 words)

	Intersections: Japanese Cinema at Melbourne International Film Festival 2000">
		Suzuki churned out formula genre pictures for Nikkatsu at a time when the studio turned up the volume of sex and violence in order to tempt young male audiences back into the cinema after the introduction of television had decimated theatre attendances.
		For Australian readers, two of Suzuki's stylish yakuza movies, Branded to Kill (1967) and Tokyo Drifter (1966), are available, on video, from the National Film Library (now housed at Cinemedia in Melbourne).
		In Suzuki's film, the feminist issues tend to be side-stepped in favour of a concentration on the sensational (sado-masochistic sex and violence) and on the romantic tragedy of one young couple caught up in the war.
	wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au /intersections/issue4/freda.html (1513 words)

	Turner Classic Movies - Movie News (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-19)
		Suzuki's free-form, eye-popping movies were almost unknown to American audiences until the mid-1990s touring retrospective Branded to Thrill: The Delirious Cinema of Seijun Suzuki played several big cities, and led to a trickle of his many films coming to video and DVD in the years since.
		Gangsters and prostitutes are mainstays of Suzuki's movies, and through their tales he often casts a sympathetic eye towards society's outsiders.
		And Suzuki twice uses the sort of shot he would again use in later movies, in which a color object (or a distinct set of them) is set off against a monochromatic background.
	www.turnerclassicmovies.com /MovieNews/Index/0,,86115,00.html (968 words)

	Seijun Suzuki Articles - 45. Caliber Samurai
		The Midnight Eye's exclusive QandA with Seijun Suzuki at the Venice Film Festival during the premirer of Pistol Opera.
		Suzuki seems to bridge the kinetic mood of Godard with the more serious tones of Oshima.
		A retrospective salute to ''Japanese Kings of the Bs'' Seijun Suzuki.
	sweetbottom.tripod.com /articles.htm (909 words)

	Pistol Opera (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-19)
		NEW YORK -- Eighty-year-old Japanese director Suzuki Seijun has always been a gifted master stylist, and "Pistol Opera" shows that his unique vision has not dulled with age.
		Once again, Suzuki finds the limitations of reality a burden and ignores them to remake the world as his own cruel dream.
		Suzuki styles every scene as if it were a stand-alone.
	www.hollywoodreporter.com /thr/reviews/review_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1926983 (490 words)

	Asian Film Foundation
		Seijun Suzuki's next-to-the-last film for Nikkatsu is a genre delight filmed in brilliant color.
		Criterion's DVD of this film has a fun interview with Seijun Suzuki on it, in which he delivers great anecdotes about how Tetsuya Watari couldn't remember lines at all, and other such stuff.
		Suzuki responded by filming it all in white, with bright green letters announcing the end of the picture.
	www.asianfilm.org /modules.php?name=Reviews&rop=showcontent&id=124 (405 words)

	ArtForum: Four play - Japanese movie director Seijun Suzuki
		Branded to Kill is the film that got Suzuki fired from Nikkatsu studio on the grounds of being "incomprehensible," no small feat in a film culture where the weird, the perverse, and the obscure have always been staples.
		It is possible to argue that Suzuki represents the last word in Japanese schizo-aesthetics, that idiomatic confusion of high and low, sleazeball content and contemplative form.
		In typical Suzuki fashion, the antihero is suddenly isolated from the noise of the crowded bar, the camera now observing him from a soundproof room behind a two-way mirror, the aquarium effect conveying a barracuda's fishbowl existence.
	www.findarticles.com /p/articles/mi_m0268/is_8_37/ai_54454977 (1415 words)

	Pistol Opera (JAPAN 2001)
		Avant-garde filmmaker Seijun Suzuki remakes his own Branded to Kill with this promising, but ultimately disappointing 2001 update.
		And to Suzuki's credit, his visual flair has actually improved with age instead of dimming over the years.
		Suzuki fans may claim that I am missing the point of the entire movie—that all this craziness is Suzuki's bold attempt to break free from the constraints of reality and therefore, it is the very absurdity of the film that makes Pistol Opera so much fun.
	www.lovehkfilm.com /panasia/pistol_opera.htm (725 words)

	VH1.com : Movies : Movie : Underworld Beauty : Main
		Seijun Suzuki changed his name from "Seitaro Suzuki" with this lurid crime film, one of ov...
		Seijun Suzuki changed his name from "Seitaro Suzuki" with this lurid crime film, one of over two dozen he directed before moving into the big leagues with Kanto Mushuki (...
		Seijun Suzuki changed his name from "Seitaro Suzuki" with this lurid crime film, one of over two dozen he directed before moving into the big leagues with Kanto Mushuki (1963).
	www.vh1.com /movies/movie/107894/moviemain.jhtml (134 words)

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