Description
Book SynopsisWilliam Carroll offers a new account of Suzuki Seijun’s career that highlights the intersections of film theory, film production, cinephile culture, and politics in 1960s Japan. This book presents both a major reinterpretation of Suzuki’s work and a new lens on postwar Japanese film culture and industry.
Trade ReviewA filmography with several unreleased titles, including those for television, contributes to the richness of this work. -- Stephen Sarrazin * East Asia *
You’ll learn a lot from
Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema, and not just about the subject: this scholarly work tells the inspiring story of an artist with a distinct vision that neither time nor studio interference could ever truly tame. -- Pat Padua * Spectrum Culture *
Ever engaging, ever challenging,
Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema by William Carroll is an utter marvel. To those who have loved Suzuki Seijun as much as I have, you shall find so much to love in this comprehensive work and to those that adore Japanese cinema, this text manages to illuminate so much that it demands reading and should be in every cinephiles library.
Highly Recommended!!! -- Ruben Rosario * FilmMonthly *
[A] meticulous analysis of the filmmaker’s output throughout the years. -- Dr. A. Ebert * PopCultureShelf.com *
Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema is a thoughtful, stimulating, and rigorous study of a neglected Japanese filmmaker. It makes a major contribution to our understanding of critical discourses circulating in Japan and the situation of the domestic film industry during the protracted decline of the studio system. -- Isolde Standish, author of
Politics, Porn, and Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in the 1960s and 1970sThis groundbreaking book shows that Suzuki, far from being “incomprehensible,” was actually understood by—and deeply entwined with—competing theoretical schools in Japan. Carroll’s study offers not only illuminating analyses of Suzuki’s cinema of deviation within its historical context but also compelling expositions on what it means for cinema then and today. -- Aaron Gerow, Yale University
By lucidly setting out the cultural, political, technological, and studio contexts in which Suzuki operated, Carroll goes beyond the prevailing notions of the director as a maverick, iconoclast, and pop-cultural curio who dismissed his own works as ‘nonsense.’ This book presents a convincing argument as to what makes his films so eminently watchable to this day. -- Jasper Sharp, author of
Historical Dictionary of Japanese CinemaTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Note on Names, Images, and Translations
Introduction: Why Suzuki Seijun?
1. 1968 and the Suzuki Seijun Incident
2. Suzuki Seijun and the Impossibility of Cinema
3. Postwar Japanese Genre Filmmaking and the Nikkatsu Action Sylistic Idiom
4. The Emergence of the Seijunesque
5. The Authorial Voice of Suzuki Seijun
Coda
Appendix 1. Filmography
Appendix 2. Unfilmed Projects
Appendix 3. Guryū Hachirō Extended Filmography
Appendix 4. Suzuki Seijun as Assistant Director
Appendix 5. Commercials Directed by Suzuki Seijun
Appendix 6. Books Written by Suzuki Seijun
Notes
Bibliography
Index
