Fighting Elegy

High schooler Kiroku Nanbu yearns for the prim, Catholic Michiko, but her only desire is to reform Kiroku's sinful tendencies. Hormones raging, Kiroku channels his unsatisfied lust into the only outlet available: savage, crazed violence. Fighting Elegy (Kenka Erejii) is a unique masterpiece in the diverse career of Seijun Suzuki, combining the director’s signature bravura visual style with a brilliantly focused satire of machismo and fascism.

Japan
1966
86 minutes
Black & White
2.35:1
Japanese
Spine #269

Special Features

High-definition digital transfer
Original theatrical trailer
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: A new essay by renowned critic and historian Tony Rayns

New cover by Lucien S. Y. Yang

DVD 1 Disc $20.96 SRP: $29.95

Special Features

High-definition digital transfer
Original theatrical trailer
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: A new essay by renowned critic and historian Tony Rayns

New cover by Lucien S. Y. Yang

Cast & Credits

Cast

Hideki Takahashi: Kiroku Nanbu
Junko Asano: Michiko
Yusuke Kawazu: Turtle
Mitsuo Kataoka: Takuan
Isao Tamagawa: Principal of Kitakata J.H.S.
Keisuke Noro: Kaneda
Hiroshi Midorigawa: Ikki Kita
Seijiro Onda: Kiroku’s father
Chikako Miyagi: Yoshino Nanbu

Credits

Director: Seijun Suzuki
Art direction: Takeo Kimura
Cinematography: Kenji Hagiwara
Screenplay: Kaneto Shindo
Based on a novel by: Takashi Suzuki
Editing: Mutsuo Tanji
Music: Naozumi Yamamoto
Producer: Kazu Otsuka

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Current

A Salute to Seijun Suzuki

Cinema lost one of its most venerated maestros of excess last week with the passing of director Seijun Suzuki, whose signature films from the 1960s exploded the conventions of the Japanese studio system. While honing his craft in dozens of films cran…

Short Takes — Feb 24, 2017

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Seijun Suzuki

Director

According to critic Manohla Dargis, “To experience a film by Japanese B-movie visionary Seijun Suzuki is to experience Japanese cinema in all its frenzied, voluptuous excess.” Suzuki played chaos like jazz in his movies, from the anything-goes yakuza thrillers Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill to the daring postwar dramas of human frailty Gate of Flesh and Story of a Prostitute to the twisted coming-of-age story Fighting Elegy; he never concerned himself with moderation, cramming boundless invention into his beautifully composed frames, both color and black-and-white. Suzuki first pursued film after returning home to Tokyo from service in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II and failing university entrance exams. Following an unsatisfying stint as an assistant director at Shochiku, Suzuki was lured in 1954 to the recently reopened Nikkatsu studio, which was hiring fresh talent to appeal to a new kind of youth audience. He flourished there for years, with such films as Take Aim at the Police Van and especially Youth of the Beast, a commercial breakthrough for him. Yet his bosses became more and more opposed to his increasingly surreal visual stylings and lack of attention to narrative coherence, and after he made Branded to Kill, which a superior deemed “incomprehensible,” they unceremoniously (and illegally) revoked his contract. Of course, as any true Suzuki fan (and they are legion) knows, the incomprehensibility is part of the fun, and today his sixties works are considered some of the most essential of the Japanese New Wave.