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
The idea of making a film about Japan’s most famous sex crime, with a decent budget and in conditions of complete freedom, reawakened Nagisa Oshima’s desire to direct—and the prospect of circumventing Japanese censorship must have made the deci
…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
G. W. Pabst’s adaptation of the play by Bertolt Brecht transforms the original without betraying it, softening its cynicism with humanity and integrating elements of psychoanalysis.
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.