Abstract

RACHEL DINITTO
Translating Prewar Culture into Film:
The Double Vision of Suzuki Seijun's Zigeunerweisen

Stylistically breaking from his 1960s Nikkatsu films, cult director Suzuki Seijun entered Japan’s pre-World War II era with Zigeunerweisen (1980).  Suzuki forgoes conventional narrative to set up a world of random associations and misleading mismatches and recreates the unevenness and double life of the culturally shifting prewar era.  From his position in late postwar Japan, he questions the nature of representation and the discourse of authenticity surrounding history and culture in the 1920s and 1930s.  His deliberateness in this comments on the process of representation, the function of nostalgia, and the definition of modernity itself, as Suzuki translates prewar culture into film.

Volume 30, Number 1 (Winter 2004)
© 2004 Society for Japanese Studies