Anyone who has seen Hong Kong stylist Wong Kar Wai’s 2000 film In the Mood for Love will remember the strains of the Yumeiji’s theme that is repeated eight times in the romance. That track first appeared in Japanese filmmaker’s Seijun Suzuki’s 1990 film Yumeji. Wong was paying homage to a filmmaker who has inspired a generation of film stylists around the globe. Suzuki died at the age of 93 on February 13.
Born in 1923, Suzuki served in the meteorological corps for Japan during World War II before being hired by Nikkatsu Studios as an assistant director in 1954. Over the next two decades, the prolific director made approximately 40 B-movies, culminating with his masterpiece Branded to Kill. While the 1967 film, an absurdist Yakuza film that eschewed conventional rhythms, has inspired the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, Baz Luhrmann and Takeshi Kitano, Nikkatsu fired the director for making an incomprehensible film. A long legal battle followed and he was blacklisted for ten years.
Part of Suzuki’s appeal lay in being able to work within conventions imposed by the studio and yet managing to find a way out of the restrictions. American indie legend Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) was a wholesale reworking of Branded to Kill. Jarmusch even invited Suzuki for a screening to ask him what he thought. Tarantino, who has been influenced by numerous Eastern filmmakers, looked to Suzuki for his Kill Bill films.
“I’m not inspired by his movies as a whole,” Tarantino told a Japanese journalist in a 2006 interview. “But by certain shots and just his willingness to just completely experiment to try and get images that are really cool or psychedelic.”
Among Suzuki’s internationally acclaimed films are Youth of the Beast (1963), Story of a Prostitute (1965) and Tokyo Drifter (1996). His last two films were Pistol Opera, a 2001 sequel to what is now considered his crowning achievement, Branded to Kill, and the oddball opera Princess Raccoon in 2005.
