Suzuki Seijun and postwar Japanese cinema

Summary/Review: "In 1968, Seijun Suzuki, a low-budget genre Japanese filmmaker and director of such films as Branded to Kill, Tokyo Drifter, and Gate of Flesh, was suddenly fired from Nikkatsu Studios. His dismissal, soon to be known as the "Seijun Suzuki Incident," became a cause for student protesters and a burgeoning group of cinephiles to rally around. Following the firing, his films emerged as central to questions of politics and aesthetics in Japanese cinema. Since then, Seijun's idiosyncratic style and films have won over a cult audience around the world and has influenced directors such as John Woo, Jim Jarmusch, and Quentin Tarantino. In A Flatness That Expands Towards Infinity: The Films of Suzuki Seijun, William Carroll analyzes Seijun's films in relation to Japanese politics, industrial practices, and film theory from the period. Carroll places his work between two factions that claimed him as one of their own after 1968: the politicized theoretical practice of the New Left on the one hand and the apparently apolitical formalist cinephile criticism on the other. He describes how Seijun navigated the demands of the Japanese studio system as he created a body of work that both worked within and challenged genre, narrative, and audience expectations"--