web - (HERO) Branded to Kill 1
"Appetite for Deconstruction": Seijun Suzuki - Wed 16 Jul - Wed 30 Jul 2025

The Melbourne Cinémathèque & ACMI present

Appetite for Deconstruction: Seijun Suzuki

Film program

When

Wed 16 Jul - Wed 30 Jul 2025

See below for additional related events

Seijun Suzuki (1923–2017) is one of the key directors of post-war Japanese cinema and his dynamic, spectacularly composed and propulsive work has gained an increasing reputation and cult following outside of Japan from the early 1990s onwards.

Suzuki arrived at Nikkatsu studios in 1954. After a brief period apprenticed to other filmmakers like So Yamamura, he directed his first film in 1956, before going on to complete another 40 over the next 11 years. In the last few years of his tenure at Nikkatsu, Suzuki pushed the boundaries of what was permissible within the generic forms – yakuza films, singing cowboys and boxers, off-kilter literary adaptations, youth dramas, corporate shenanigans – and often shoestring budgets he worked with, before being sacked after making Branded to Kill (1967), the film that studio bosses thought “incomprehensible” and many now think his masterpiece.

Suzuki’s best films are wonders of impurity, presenting seemingly disparate tones, styles, sensibilities, worlds and traditions side by side. As Philip Brophy has suggested: “Suzuki’s films mix sex, violence, humour, pathos, critique and irony in a non-totalistic way…. You have to shift gears with the seemingly amoral narratives as they spin, lurch, and turn along a foreign road.” Brophy also argues that “to best understand Suzuki and what he represents, one needs to understand the explosive culture of postwar Japan”.

Suzuki’s films vacillate between the genre cinema and iconography of Japan and the West, between tradition and modernity, and between the worlds of pre-war imperialism and post-war US Occupation and capitalism. Although Suzuki would go on to have a subsequent 40-year career in independent art cinema, his lasting reputation largely lies with the extraordinary body of work he completed at Nikkatsu.

This imported season brings together a rich potpourri of Suzuki’s cinema during the ten years from 1958 – marked by his first ’Scope film, Underworld Beauty – to Branded to Kill. It highlights several less widely seen but central works within the yakuza genre – such as Our Blood Will Not Forgive (1964) – as well as the first film in his celebrated “flesh trilogy”, Gate of Flesh (1964).

Where

Cinema 1, Level 2
ACMI, Fed Square

Plan your visit

Membership options

Mini membership
(3 consecutive weeks)
$30.5–36

Annual memberships
$174–325

SEE FULL OPTIONS

Films in this program

There are no upcoming related events at this time.

About Melbourne Cinémathèque

Australia's longest-running film society, Melbourne Cinémathèque screens significant works of international cinema in the medium they were created, the way they would have originally screened.

Melbourne Cinémathèque is self-administered, volunteer-run, not-for-profit and membership-driven. 

Learn more | View the 2025 program | See membership options

Melbourne Cinémathèque - Dirk Bogarde in a still from Victim

Join our newsletter

Get updates on the latest news, exhibitions, programs, special offers and more.

You might also like