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E-book Negative, Nonsensical, and Non-Conformist : The Films of Suzuki Seijun

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Penilaian

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In 1958, Suzuki Seitar? was a 35-year-old, lower-ranking, critically unrec-ognized contract director at Nikkatsu studios, despite the fact that he had already made fifteen feature-length program pictures. When he changed his professional name from “Suzuki Seitar?,” his birth name, to the more flamboyant “Suzuki Seijun,” no one in the press or film industry seems to have taken notice. They ought to have. Forty-five years later, in 2003, the octogenarian Suzuki was still directing films, long after the economic collapse of the Japanese studio system; he had won every major Japa-nese film award and significant international awards, including a lifetime achievement award at the 1991 São Paulo International Film Festival. The most prominent directors of the 1990s throughout Japan, East Asia, and the English-speaking world were citing him as an important influence, including Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Miike Takashi, Aoyama Shinji, John Woo, Wong Kar-wai, Quentin Tarantino, Baz Luhrmann, and Jim Jarmusch, who actively sought the master’s stamp of approval on his work of hard-boiled homage,Ghost Dog (1999). We may add to the list, of late, the director of La La Land, Damien Chazelle, who toured Japan and announced his indebted-ness to the 93-year old director just one month before Suzuki passed away, in February 2017, from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.1I do not relate these facts in order to extol a clichéd narrative of an art-ist’s slow rise from derision to fame and unmitigated triumph. Such judg-ments are relative. As a filmmaker, Suzuki never attained the same respect nor the degree of centrality to Japanese media discourses as many others (Kurosawa and ?shima Nagisa, for example). Even in his 70s, he struggled to finance his films. His narrative is, however, about the cultural endurance of a notably distinct film practice against remarkable adversity. How did the career of this director, who was fired from his studio and quietly black-listed by the entire studio system in the late 1960s, outlast by decades the careers of major contemporaries at Nikkatsu and other studios? How did his influence on filmmaking practice arguably come to be more signifi-cant and widespread (especially internationally) than that of the younger, more fashionable, and highly publicized directors of the nuberu bagu (Jap-anese New Wave) such as ?shima and Yoshida Yoshishige? Why did it take Japanese film criticism so long to recognize this powerful strain of influence, and why does it remain so underrepresented in academic film studies today?The extraordinary circumstances of Suzuki’s rise to artistic promi-nence is self-evidently a worthy subject of historical scholarship, revealing as it does the upheavals of the Japanese film industry since 1960 and the rise of trans-cultural media networks of producers, distributors, critics, and fans through which Japanese studio genre films (and the cult of genre auteurism) took on a virtual life. This book, however, is neither a biography nor an industrial history of a studio or genre, though aspects of all these will come into play. It is an interpretative and cultural study that canvasses the entirety of Suzuki’s cinematic corpus and asks a range of questions about its significance—questions which rise up from the surface of these extraordinary filmic texts themselves and demand attention. What makes Suzuki’s films so different from those of his contemporaries—including his top-ranking Nikkatsu rival Imamura Sh?hei, his own mentor Noguchi Hiroshi, and his many successful apprentices such as Hasebe Yasuharu—that they have wielded such an influence and given rise to notorious cul-tural scandal? And what, in the history of narrative film, is the conceptual significance of a director who gaily asserted that “time and space are non-sense in my films”.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

791.4375 YAC n

Penerbit

USA : University of Michigan Press., 2023

Deskripsi Fisik

417 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780472903474

Klasifikasi

791.4375

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Film Reviews

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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