William Carroll Publishes New Book: Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema

Published on March 8, 2022 

EALC alum, William Carroll, offers a new account of Seijun Suzuki's career that highlights the intersections of film theory, film production, cinephile culture, and politics in 1960s Japan in, "Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema."

In 1968, Suzuki Seijun—a low-budget genre filmmaker known for movies including Branded to Kill, Tokyo Drifter, and Youth of the Beast—was unceremoniously fired by Nikkatsu Studios. Soon to be known as the “Suzuki Seijun Incident,” his dismissal became a cause for leftist student protestors and a burgeoning group of cinephiles to rally around. His films rapidly emerged as central to debates over politics and aesthetics in Japanese cinema.  William Carroll places Suzuki’s work between two factions that claimed him as one of their own after 1968: the New Left and its politicized theoretical practice on one hand, and the apparently apolitical cinephiles and their formalist criticism on the other. He considers how both of these strands of film theory shed light on the distinctive qualities of Suzuki’s films, and he explores how both Suzuki’s works and unheralded Japanese film theorists offer new ways of understanding world cinema.

William Carroll completed his PhD in 2019 with the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations.  His dissertation was entitled, "The Depths of Flatness and the Voice of Silence: Suzuki Seijun and 1960s Japanese Film Theory."  He is currently a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University.