Negative, Nonsensical, and Non-conformist

The Films of Suzuki Seijun

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by Peter A. Yacavone

Type

Film Reviews

Subject

Director > Suzuki Seijun

Keywords

Suzuki Seijun, director, Japan

Publishing date

2023

Publisher

University of Michigan Press

Collection

Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 416 pages
6 x 9 inches (15 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-0-472-05570-8

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Book Presentation:
The definitive study of the pathbreaking and controversial Japanese film director who expanded the form, rhetoric, and philosophy of popular genre movies

In the late 1950s, Suzuki Seijun was an unknown, anxious low-ranking film director churning out so-called program pictures for Japan’s most successful movie studio, Nikkatsu. In the early 1960s, he met with modest success in directing popular movies about yakuza gangsters and mild exploitation films featuring prostitutes and teenage rebels. In this book, Peter A. Yacavone argues that Suzuki became an unlikely cinematic rebel and, with hindsight, one of the most important voices in the global cinema of the 1960s. Working from within the studio system, Suzuki almost single-handedly rejected the restrictive filmmaking norms of the postwar period and expanded the form and language of popular cinema. This artistic rebellion proved costly when Suzuki was fired in 1967 and virtually blacklisted by the studios, but Suzuki returned triumphantly to the scene of world cinema in the 1980s and 1990s with a series of critically celebrated, avant-garde tales of the supernatural and the uncanny. This book provides a well-informed, philosophically oriented analysis of Suzuki’s 49 feature films.

About the Author:
Peter A. Yacavone is Associate Professor of English at Shanghai International Studies University.

See the publisher website: University of Michigan Press

See the complete filmography of Suzuki Seijun on the website: IMDB ...