All Slights Deserved

During a short interview that's included as an extra on the dvd of Pistol Opera , director Seijun Suzuki is asked what the film means to him as a director. "Such a stupid question," he retorts. "What does making this interview mean to you?" It was the influential French film journal Cahiers du Cinema that first popularised the notion a film's director should be credited as its primary creative influence in the mid fifties. Although applicable to all cinema, some of the most enthusiastic writing on the auteur theory concerned directors who had worked within an integrated studio system, in particular that of classical Hollywood. While Francois Truffaut and his Cahiers cohorts were extolling the virtues of Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, at the Nikkatsu Company in Japan a young director was just beginning his career. Within a decade Seijun Suzuki had taken the helm of more than thirty B-movies for the studio, demonstrating a particular aptitude for ga...