In 1968, Suzuki Seijun—a low-budget genre filmmaker known for stylistically adventurous gangster movies like Tokyo Drifter—was unceremoniously fired by Nikkatsu Studios in what soon became known as the “Suzuki Seijun Incident,” uniting cinephiles and student protestors behind the filmmaker. Since then, his stature as a cult figure has grown internationally, and his admirers include John Woo, Johnnie To, Wong Kar-wai, Jim Jarmusch, and Quentin Tarantino. This retrospective highlights great and rare films from Suzuki’s fifty-year career, from his earliest crime films to his late art house films, all in glorious 35mm.

 

About the programmer:
William Carroll is the author of Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema, and recently joined the University of Alberta as Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies. He researches and teaches about contemporary Japan, particularly film, animation, and other media. He is now working on his second book, which is about Japanese cinephile culture and its relationship to film production in the horror, gangster, and art house genres in contemporary Japan.