How Long Can a Director's Creative Life Last? Seijun Suzuki Died at 93, but His Ideas Are Still Showing in Theaters

The hit film La La Land has shots that pay homage to Seijun Suzuki's way of making movies.

The Japanese director Seijun Suzuki died of lung disease in Tokyo on February 13, at the age of 93.

To most Chinese viewers, Seijun Suzuki is probably an unfamiliar name. Even film buffs who love art-house cinema, asked about the history of Japanese film, tend to reach first for a "national cinema" figure like Yasujiro Ozu, or for Akira Kurosawa and his immersion in "samurai culture."

The label Suzuki is best known for, in fact, is the niche, avant-garde "heterodox" — an early Chinese rendering of the term "cult film."

Through the 1950s and 60s, the age of the big Japanese studios, he turned out B-grade gangster pictures in bulk; his real artistic peak would not arrive until the 1980s. He had a "Seijun aesthetic" all his own: a taste for intense lyrical imagery and for depicting sex and violence without cover. He never made it big commercially, but by endlessly reworking film form he won a following abroad.

Damien Chazelle, the director of La La Land, is one of them. La La Land has passages that imitate and salute classic musicals such as Singin' in the Rain and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. At a promotional event in Japan, Chazelle said: "Those are passages Director Suzuki paid tribute to in Tokyo Drifter. We built those elements in from the storyboard stage. Adding pop-art color combinations to the location shooting — that comes from Director Suzuki too."

Seijun Suzuki was born in 1923 in Nihonbashi, Tokyo. Both his early life and the crooked path of his career were full of dramatic turns.

His first profession was soldier. In high school, knowing nothing about the war, he read "national-policy books" — political propaganda literature — on a roommate's recommendation, and was soon drafted as a student soldier, serving on the Philippine and Taiwanese fronts of World War II.

The war left a mark on him that never faded. One profile described his posting in Taiwan: Suzuki and 12 other soldiers were stationed at an airfield at the foot of a remote mountain. To keep the men from turning on their officers, the military supplied them not only with food and clothing but, "out of strategic necessity," with three army "comfort women." Suzuki sank into a maze of women's bodies and alcohol, and when the war ended and he landed at Tanabe Port in Japan, he had nothing. Later, as a film director, violence, sex and drunken frenzy would become the most expressive subjects in his work.

World War II ended in Japan's defeat. Suzuki went home to finish his schooling, entering the film department of Kamakura Academia. In the 1950s he joined one of the largest studios of the day, the Nippon Katsudo Shashin Company — Nikkatsu.

Those were the boom years of the Japanese film industry. Even before the war, Japan had set up a string of large state-run studios for propaganda purposes, shooting films on the Hollywood model. In the postwar economic expansion, five studios — Shochiku, Toho, Nikkatsu, Toei and Daiei (later Kadokawa) — monopolized production and distribution across the whole market.

In the studio era, Japanese cinema began by imitating Hollywood and grew a mature system of genre pictures. Ozu's studio, Shochiku, specialized in "tatami" films, descended from the Hollywood domestic melodrama. Nikkatsu's specialty was the yakuza film, the Japanese gangster picture.

The green Seijun Suzuki became, "naturally," a maker of B-grade gangster films. In the late 1950s Nikkatsu led the way in a run of "youth films" adapted from Shintaro Ishihara's bestselling novels, all sex and violence among the young. These gangster stories ran on formula: the gang vendetta, the hero and the beauty, thrills and exaggeration. Suzuki's job was to supply this crude product fast, on an assembly line.

He made nearly 40 of them.

Whether he liked the work is hard to say. When he finally left Nikkatsu, Suzuki said: "I often told my wife that making films was painful. I'd meant to quit four or five years earlier. I told her I hated this stupid, painful process."

He realized he wanted an expression that broke the formula: "Every company's scripts were extremely similar. If I could find even one original line of dialogue, I could make something fresh out of it. Since every director was shooting the same thing, finding a different way to shoot it mattered."

Suzuki made his own attempt. He pulled the heroes of his gangster films out of the bloodless, stock mold and turned them into men with human texture.

The protagonist of 1963's Youth of the Beast is a policeman jailed for embezzlement and illegal investigation. After his release he learns that Takeshita, an old friend who once helped him, has been murdered along with a prostitute. Bent on avenging Takeshita, he infiltrates a gang. He does every vile thing there is to do, never forgets the revenge he came for, and in the end digs out the real killer.

John Woo is a fan of the film. He once told reporters he was preparing a remake of Youth of the Beast, and said The Killer took its inspiration from the gangster films of Suzuki and others — the chase scenes, and the mutual regard between detective and assassin.

1966's Tokyo Drifter is the model new-wave gangster picture. Suzuki's aesthetic comes further into view here: thick, vivid color, sets built like a theater stage, an atmosphere so gorgeous it stops being real — precisely the place, as noted above, where La La Land found something to borrow.

The film's male lead is a young man whose "loyalty" to his boss is absurd. The story also holds characters who would not feel dated today: the lovesick bar singer; the secretary who spends her days giggling over comics and dies under gangster gunfire.

Violence is the sharpest element in a gangster film. Suzuki gave it no elaborate wrapping. He cared more about what violence actually is: boredom and farce showing through vulgarity. Donald Richie's Japanese Cinema judged him this way: "In films like Tokyo Drifter and Fighting Elegy, he is able to show, within a modern setting, a very fundamental Japanese vulgarity."

A year later Suzuki made something even more "extreme," Branded to Kill. The story follows the top-ranked assassins of a killers' organization called Gurodo as they slaughter one another. The film has almost no fast-paced narrative. Suzuki wrote his characters dialogue and gestures out of a stream-of-consciousness novel. A woman complains about her husband: "I hate his quirk. He's always on about the smell of rice cooking." The next shot is the husband lifting the lid off the rice pot, greedily sniffing the steam.

Later filmmakers borrowed many of the film's visual ideas. Jim Jarmusch reproduced the trick of shooting a man through a washbasin drain in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai; Wong Kar-wai lifted the image of the spinning birdcage.

Tokyo Drifter gave off, successfully, the "nothingness" of a boom economy. Many critics praised it lavishly; its heresy also enraged the executives at Nikkatsu, who wanted commercial genre pictures and nothing else. Branded to Kill did worse still — being "incomprehensible," it died at the box office.

In 1967, Nikkatsu's president Kyusaku Hori fired Suzuki: "Any film with a 60-million-yen budget loses money the moment Seijun Suzuki directs it. From now on he will absolutely never be allowed to direct a Japanese film again. Let him go do whatever it is he does."

Hori's clampdown on personal style set off fierce resistance from the filmmakers of the Japanese New Wave, then in full growth. In the 1960s, under the influence of the European New Wave, young Japanese directors rebelled against elder masters such as Yasujiro Ozu, Akira Kurosawa and Keisuke Kinoshita, opposed the studios' grip on genre, and made films in a new style more interested in "telling right from wrong in reality, and examining the human spirit and the Japanese national character."

An organization called the Seijun Suzuki Problem Joint Struggle Committee appeared. Its members included New Wave figures such as Nagisa Oshima (Cruel Story of Youth) and Masahiro Shinoda (Childhood Days, Sharaku), along with other independent filmmakers and critics. They even took to the streets, demonstrating as though this were an academic movement.

That sharp standoff between filmmakers and Nikkatsu became a famous episode in Japanese film history. It cleared the way for the rise of independent production after the 1980s and the end of the big studios' monopoly. The new-wave filmmakers went on to found ATG Films — ATG for Art Theatre Guild.

But Suzuki, who had set it all off, was pushed further out by the film companies, and for ten years made nothing. His life grew straitened; he lived on the support of his wife and his admirers.

Hardship did not keep him down forever. In 1980, backed by ATG Films, Suzuki made one of the most important works of his directing career, Zigeunerweisen. That year Zigeunerweisen beat Kurosawa's Kagemusha to first place in the annual Kinema Junpo rankings. Abroad, it took the Special Jury Prize at that year's Berlin International Film Festival, and from then on the international film world began to watch him.

When Kinema Junpo chose the ten best directors of the 1980s, Suzuki came first. Working freely as an independent director, he lost every trace of the gangster genre and the B-grade action picture, and could climb to a new height.

Zigeunerweisen, Kagero-za and Yumeji make up the "Taisho Roman Trilogy," the three films most widely credited with Suzuki's artistic value. All are set around Japan's Taisho era — the years 1912 to 1926, when Emperor Taisho reigned and Japan, after the Meiji Restoration, entered a relatively stable, intellectually modern prosperity.

Zigeunerweisen tells a tangled story of desire among several people: Aochi, a German teacher at an army school, and the drifter Nakasago each have a wife, but after meeting the geisha Koine the two men fall into a long, strange entanglement.

The model for the protagonist of Yumeji is the painter and poet Takehisa Yumeji, called "the byword for Taisho romanticism." He was a "wandering lyrical painter," and his subjects were journeys, women and the Bible.

Kagero-za is adapted from a short story by Kyoka Izumi, the aestheticist writer and playwright. All three films carry on the style that fuses Izumi's literature with Japanese shinpa theater.

Suzuki called this merger of film and stage aesthetics "cinematic kabuki." Kabuki is a theatrical form unique to Japan, more than 400 years old, known for fine sets, intricate stage machinery and lavish costume and makeup — and Suzuki put all of it into his films.

Zigeunerweisen keeps returning to three blind beggar-musicians who live off one another: an experienced old man leading the way, a young woman playing an instrument behind him, a man singing at the rear. When they come across a household they stop and sing mournful, bawdy tunes.

The three films are dense with metaphors drawn from traditional Japanese and romantic-era culture, and use sound and image to build figures of life, death and illusion.

Viewers still find him "hard to understand." From the "Taisho Trilogy" on, Suzuki threw out conventional narrative altogether and went after music, color, set design and camera movement to the last degree. Film as an art can deliver both dramatic narrative and lyrical expression, and there have always been directors who follow their own path of form. It is exactly this choice that lifted Suzuki, in his admirers' eyes, to the rank of "cult master."

The trilogy is the golden age of Suzuki's cinema. After the 1990s he stepped away from directing for a time. Past 70, he entered a new phase of life: he began appearing often on Japanese TV variety shows and took cameo roles in popular work such as Tales of the Unusual, which made him better known to ordinary audiences.

In 2005 Suzuki made his last large gesture, directing the fantasy romance Princess Raccoon, starring Zhang Ziyi and Joe Odagiri. Worth noting: that same year Zhang Ziyi starred in another Hollywood film set against Japanese geisha culture, Memoirs of a Geisha. Princess Raccoon took the form of a "film opera," building its images with CG. Suzuki was still pushing on form, but this time the verdict was split.

The fair assessment of the film may be: "The art direction is the star."

Illness troubled Suzuki in his last years. In 2011, at 88, he married a woman 48 years younger, an editor at a film company, and the Japanese public was scandalized. Asked about it by reporters, he said: "This is a private matter, so I don't want to say much."

Now that Suzuki is dead, his work will draw viewers' eyes again. One thing should be added: during the years the studios shut him out, Suzuki also went off to direct the TV anime Lupin III Part II. That series, written by Hayao Miyazaki, is now the most easily understood work he left behind.

Images from film stills and posters.