8 Results
Branded to Kill: Reductio Ad Absurdum
Seijun Suzuki’s delirious, absurdist deconstruction of the crime genre is the strangest film the director made at Nikkatsu, Japan’s oldest film company.
There Was a Father: Duty Calls
At the author’s request, Japanese names are given here in their traditional form: surname first.
Ozu Yasujiro’s personal feelings about Japanese militarism in the 1930s and 1940s are not on record. Perhaps, like most people around him, he acce…
The Only Son: Japan, 1936
At the author’s request, Japanese names are given here in their traditional form: surname first.
Nineteen thirty-six was a decisive year for imperial Japan, marked by extreme violence at home and abroad. In the very early morning of February 26,…
Empire of Passion: Love’s Phantom
At the request of the author, Japanese names in this essay are given in their traditional form: surname first.
When Oshima Nagisa began making films for the French producer Anatole Dauman in the mid-1970s, his career as a filmmaker had been on hold f…
Patriotism: The Word Made Flesh
The novelist Mishima Yukio stepped behind the camera to adapt his own short story, which depicts the act of seppuku as a thing of beauty.
The Threepenny Opera: Doubles and Duplicities
Ladies and gentlemen, you will now hear the strange and comical history of how an eighteenth-century English play went through diverse transformations and finally became a hit movie banned by the Nazis . . . The initial impetus came from Jonathan Swi…
The Burmese Harp: Unknown Soldiers
The first of his films to be shown outside Japan, Ichikawa Kon’s twenty-seventh feature dramatically raised the director’s profile.
Fighting Elegy
Seijun Suzuki's penultimate film for Nikkatsu is a subversively funny account of the making of a model fascist.