Born in Tokyo in 1923 and died in 2017, Seijun Suzuki spent years at the Nikkatsu studio turning out low-budget gangster films, and slowly made them stranger and more stylised. Tokyo Drifter (1966) and Branded to Kill (1967) pushed the genre into pop-art abstraction, and Nikkatsu fired him, saying his films made no sense. He sued the studio and was blacklisted, but a loyal following kept his work alive, and he returned in the 1980s with Zigeunerweisen (1980), a ghostly period drama.
Filmography
- Youth of the Beast (1963)
- Gate of Flesh (1964)
- Tokyo Drifter (1966)
- Fighting Elegy (1966)
- Branded to Kill (1967)
- Zigeunerweisen (1980)
- Kagero-za (1981)
- Yumeji (1991)
- Pistol Opera (2001)