In a career spanning nearly five decades, Seijun Suzuki amassed a body of work ranging from B-movie potboilers to beguiling metaphysical mysteries. An extremely inventive filmmaker, Suzuki utilized a wide range of film stocks, angles, jump cuts, impressionistic sets, driving jazz soundtracks, and unhinged actors pushed to their limits—and was thus at the vanguard of a new, radical Japanese cinema which flowered in the late 1950s and 1960s, one which continues to hold sway with a new generation of filmmakers who continue to push the boundaries of the medium. “To experience a film by Japanese B-movie visionary Seijun Suzuki is to experience Japanese cinema in all its frenzied, voluptuous excess.”—Manohla Dargis.

Program notes by Tom Vick, Curator of Film at the Smithsonian’s Freer | Sackler Museums of Asian Art and author of Time and Space are Nonsense: The Films of Seijun Suzuki (2015).

Action, Anarchy, and Audacity is co-organized and co-presented by the Japan Foundation.