Suzuki Seijun (1923–2017) represents not an inscrutable outlier within Japanese film but a key figure through which to understand and interpret its history. This is one of the central theses of William Carroll's Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema, which provides a refreshing look at the legendary filmmaker and his oeuvre. Responding to interest in Suzuki's work in recent years, Carroll argues that much of this attention misunderstands the filmmaker, as it focuses on only a handful of Suzuki's numerous films, such as the stylistically brash Tokyo Drifter (1966) and the enigmatic Branded to Kill (1967). Carroll contends that this myopic view leads non-Japanese criticism to celebrate Suzuki's work as a “triumph of form over content” (4). A broader view of Suzuki, he posits, demonstrates that the filmmaker's signature approach lay in his play with film's limits, rather than an attempt to overcome them.
Carroll's book will be of...
