Outdoor Cinema: Tokyo Drifter 60th anniversary screening

In the 1950s and early 60s, Seijun Suzuki was a workhouse director for Nikkatsu studios, pumping out cheap B-movies from assigned scripts, and getting bored of the same old plots. Necessity is one mother of invention, boredom is another – so he did what the best directors can and transformed the words on the page with his visual sensibility, creating something newer, stranger and more vital.

His style favoured artificial sets, primary colours, disorienting editing, and nonsensical jokes – which grated the risk-averse studio heads at the time. Suzuki’s increasingly esoteric style would eventually get him blacklisted from the industry following the release of his jagged, narratively baffling, feverish nightmare Branded to Kill (1967).

But it’s Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter (1966) which may be the apotheosis of his career as a populist experimental filmmaker. Rarely has a director so seamlessly merged the thrills of a classic (read: enjoyably hacky) crime movie plot with such a spectacular sense of play.

This movie has a dark heart, but watching it is an absolute joy.

– Felix Hubble and Kai Perrignon, Static Vision

Static Vision is an Australia-based distribution company and film collective. Since launching in 2018, Static Vision have been presenting screenings of important and rare international films across festivals and one-off screening events. Aiming to do their part to broaden the current range of material on offer in Australia’s independent film exhibition landscape, the collective’s slate of recent acquisitions include Sean Price Williams’ The Sweet East, Kristoffer Borgli’s dark-comedy Sick of Myself and MIFF Bright Horizons inaugural award-winner Neptune Frost.