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Retrospective

Tokyo Drifter

FromSeijun Suzuki

WithTetsuya Watari, Chieko Matsubara, Hideaki Nitani

Year1966

Duration86min.

LanguageJapanese

Tokyo Drifter is perhaps the most famous and certainly the most colourful film by the flamboyant genre stylist Suzuki, who was soon fired by his studio for refusing to stage the ‘routine work’ assigned to him as anything other than an idiosyncratic, subversive, surreal ballet. The gangster story of the singing Tokyo Drifter, a yakuza dropout who is chased across wintry Japan, serves as the template for a cubist cinema that constantly threatens to disintegrate into delirious details (glowing splashes of colour, brutal perspectives, jazzy syncopations), only to reassemble itself in an astonishing way before the eyes of the viewer. An iconic work of the sixties. The stylised pop-noir delirium of Tokyo Drifter celebrates the film's dreamlike potential in an accomplished and utterly idiosyncratic way. (C.H.)

Introduction Christoph Huber on 14.5.2025

Picture: Austrian Film Museum