Seijun Suzuki's Taisho Trilogy

Not Coming to a Theater Near You... Seijun Suzuki's Taisho Trilogy. "...Suzuki was a contract director on an industrial production line, who took the time-honoured route of serving first as an assistant director before Nikkatsu promoted him to fully-fledged director in 1956. From then, he churned out a stream of genre films (in 1961 he made seven), mostly yakuza flicks, although Gate of Flesh, Story of a Prostitute, and Fighting Elegy represent his own way of reflecting upon Japanese history. But whatever the genre, Suzuki’s films display a consistent and ever-expanding play with the films’ form: composition, lighting, colour, editing, and so on. The more conventionally-pulp yakuza pictures (conventional, before things blasted off into the stratosphere with Branded to Kill) in particular seem as if they’re exploded from within through Suzuki’s stylistic tics."