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
The Only Son: Japan, 1936
Empire of Passion: Love’s Phantom
Patriotism: The Word Made Flesh
Patriotism, or The Rite of Love and Death, poses an unusual question: what impels a novelist to make a film? Actually, few have ever done so. The number has shot up recently, thanks to a surge in China, but for many years the French had the syndrome
…The Threepenny Opera: Doubles and Duplicities
The Burmese Harp: Unknown Soldiers
The Burmese Harp was the forty-one-year-old Ichikawa Kon’s twenty-seventh feature, and the first real landmark in his career. He had entered the film industry as an animator (his first film was a twenty-minute puppet short), but switched to liv
…Fighting Elegy
In an essay published in 1981 in the Japanese film magazine Art Theater, Suzuki Seijun’s kid brother Kenji offered what still stands as one of the most illuminating comments on his brother’s cinema: “Seijun and I are completely different charac
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