Seijun Suzuki, Director Who Inspired Tarantino and Jarmusch, Dies at 93
Mr. Suzuki was an important member of the Japanese New Wave, the generation of iconoclasts who defined themselves in opposition to older masters like Yasujiro Ozu
and Kenji Mizoguchi, and whose films challenged the conventions of both Japanese aesthetics and Japanese society.
Mr. Suzuki, who directed his first few films under his real name, was assigned an average of three or four movies a year, most of them crime films aimed at the youth market with committee-hatched plots
and catchy titles like "Satan’s Town" (1956), "Nude Girl With a Gun" (1957) and "Take Aim at the Police Van" (1960).
Born Seitaro Suzuki in Tokyo on May 24, 1923, Mr. Suzuki studied at a trade school before being recruited into the Japanese Army during World War II.
22, 2017
Seijun Suzuki, a Japanese filmmaker who enlivened his low-budget genre movies with pop-art flair
and avant-garde theatrics, inspiring American directors like Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch, died on Feb. 13 in Tokyo.
He directed nearly 50 films over five decades, but 40 of them came in the first 12
years of his career, when he was under contract at the Japanese studio Nikkatsu.
Nikkatsu dismissed Mr. Suzuki in April 1968, nearly a year after the commercial failure of "Branded to Kill." The studio’s president, Kyusaku Hori, also withdrew prints of Mr. Suzuki’s movies from circulation, claiming
that they would harm the company’s image if seen widely.
The proportions of CinemaScope, the wide-screen format
that Mr. Suzuki often used, resemble the long rectangle of the kabuki stage, and the brazen theatricality of his films — the intense colors, artificial lighting and heightened acting — are suggestive of kabuki techniques.