Programmed May 2023

Seijun Suzuki: The Chaos of Cool

Featuring a new introduction by author Grady Hendrix Born one hundred years ago this month, Japanese New Wave renegade Seijun Suzuki combined a deliriously inventive approach to filmmaking and a fast-and-loose attitude toward genre expectations to make some of the most thrillingly stylish movies of all time, frequently transcending narrative logic and skyrocketing clear into the realm of total pop-art abstraction. From the anything-goes yakuza thrillers Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill (a masterpiece so narratively fractured it resulted in his unceremonious firing from his longtime home studio of Nikkatsu) to the daring postwar dramas of human frailty Gate of Flesh and Story of a Prostitute to his acclaimed late-career swerve toward surreal period drama in the Taisho Trilogy ( Zigeunerweisen , Kagero-za , Yumeji ), Suzuki played chaos like jazz, cramming boundless visual ideas into his beautifully composed frames.