Seijun Suzuki

Seijun Suzuki
Seitaro Suzuki circa 1962
Born	Seitaro Suzuki (1923-05-24)24 May 1923 Nihonbashi, Tokyo, Japan
Died	13 February 2017(2017-02-13) (aged 93) Tokyo, Japan
Occupation(s)	Film and television director, actor, writer
Years active	1956–2007

Seijun Suzuki (鈴木 清順, Suzuki Seijun), born Seitaro Suzuki (鈴木 清太郎, Suzuki Seitarō) (24 May 1923 – 13 February 2017),^[1] was a Japanese filmmaker, actor, and screenwriter. His films are known for their jarring visual style, irreverent humour, and entertainment-over-logic sensibility.^[2] He made 40 predominately B-movies for the Nikkatsu Company between 1956 and 1967, working most prolifically in the yakuza genre. His increasingly surreal style began to draw the ire of the studio in 1963 and culminated in his ultimate dismissal for what is now regarded as his magnum opus, Branded to Kill (1967), starring notable collaborator Joe Shishido. Suzuki successfully sued the studio for wrongful dismissal, but he was blacklisted for 10 years after that. As an independent filmmaker, he won critical acclaim and a Japanese Academy Award for his Taishō trilogy, Zigeunerweisen (1980), Kagero-za (1981) and Yumeji (1991).

His films remained widely unknown outside Japan until a series of theatrical retrospectives beginning in the mid-1980s, home video releases of key films such as Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter in the late 1990s and tributes by such acclaimed filmmakers as Jim Jarmusch, Takeshi Kitano, Wong Kar-wai and Quentin Tarantino signaled his international discovery. Suzuki continued making films, albeit sporadically, until the early 2000s.