Seijun Suzuki Goes to the Movies!

Japanese auteur Seijun Suzuki was very nearly consigned to the scrap heap of history thanks to the sheer, unwavering strength of his own vision. Hugely prolific throughout the fifties and sixties Suzuki turned out strictly controlled product for the tightly wound Japanese studio system - a system that didn't exactly encourage experimentation - fast and cheap for over a decade before gradually settling into a unique style built around shocking use of color and staging techniques more at home in experimental theater than on the big screen. Suzuki ramped up his experimentation slowly, trying out techniques unnoticed at first, but his stylistic excesses soon began hurting his box office take and he was finally, famously, fired from the studio essentially for being too damn strange and saddled with a reputation for being difficult that restricted him to making only six feature films in the seventies and eighties combined as opposed to the forty one he produced in the fifties, sixties and seventies.

Now in his eighties and in failing health Suzuki has experienced a late life revival that has seen his body of work embraced by international festivals and art house DVD labels around the globe. We collect a number of Suzuki trailers below, ranging from his latest - and likely final - effort, the musical Tanuki Goten, to his better known classic titles such as Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter plus some less known work below but when dealing with someone as prolific as Suzuki, much of whose work has still never been seen outside of Japan, there are some major gaps. Any help tracking down trailers from more of his films would be greatly appreciated.