The Taisho Trilogy
After over a decade in the wilderness following his firing from Nikkatsu for Branded to Kill (1967), maverick director Seijun Suzuki returned with a vengeance with his critically-praised tryptic of cryptic supernatural dramas set during the liberal enlightenment of Japan’s Taisho Era (1912-26). Rarely seen outside of Japan, the films in the Taisho Trilogy are considered Suzuki’s masterpieces in his homeland. Presenting a dramatic turn from more his familiar tales of cops, gangsters and unruly youth, these surrealistic psychological puzzles drip with a lush exoticism, distinctively capturing the pandemonium of a bygone age of decadence and excess, when Western ideas, fashions, technologies and art fused into everyday aspect of Japanese life.
Zigeunerweisen (1980)
01 April, 1980
A surreal period film following a university professor and his eerie nomad friend as they go through loose romantic triangles and face death in peculiar ways.
Kagero-za (1981)
21 August, 1981
A 1920s playwright meets a beautiful woman who may be the ghost of his patron's deceased wife.
Yumeji (1991)
31 May, 1991
Following the life of Japanese artist and poet Yumeji Takehisa through the imagining of an encounter with a beautiful widow with a dark past.