Seijun Suzuki's TAISHŌ TRILOGY: KAGERO-ZA (1981)

SEIJUN SUZUKI’S TAISHŌ TRILOGY (Series Pass Available)

(1980)

3/22 — KAGERO-ZA (1981)

(1991)

7th House is proud to present maverick cinematic alchemist Seijun Suzuki’s extraordinary TAISHŌ TRILOGY across three consecutive Sundays this March—a trio of radically surreal late-career masterworks from one of Japanese cinema’s most singular, shape-shifting figures. Rising through the Nikkatsu studio system in the 1960s, Suzuki became a subversive force within genre filmmaking, transforming crime pictures into detonations of color, rhythm, and avant-garde invention. His now-legendary Branded to K*ll (1967) proved so formally audacious that it led to his dismissal from the studio and a decade-long exile. When he returned in 1980, it was with something altogether stranger: three lavish, visually unbound works set during Japan’s Taishō era (1912–1926), a period of cultural collision and modern awakening.

Across ZIGEUNERWEISEN (1980), KAGERO-ZA (1981), and YUMEJI (1991), Suzuki abandons conventional storytelling for a cinema of atmosphere, sensation, and unstable memory. Scenes unfold like moving paintings; time loops and fractures; sliding doors reveal impossible landscapes; characters drift through dreamlike tableaux where identity and desire blur into apparition. Drawing from silent cinema, theater, Western modernism, and the avant-garde, the trilogy erupts in bold color, theatrical artifice, and sudden ruptures of logic—at once ravishingly composed and gleefully disorienting. Rarely screened in the United States and widely regarded in Japan as the summit of Suzuki’s artistry, these films mark a triumphant rebirth: a lush, sensuous, and experimentally explosive triptych that drifts between dream, memory, and hallucination.

KAGERO-ZA

Suzuki’s dreamlike trilogy wanders further into dream and delirium with KAGERO-ZA (AKA HEAT SHIMMER THEATER, 1981), a feverish phantasmagoria of theatrical illusion and obsessive longing. A playwright mourning the death of his lover becomes captivated by a mysterious woman who may in fact be her spectral double, drawing him into a labyrinth of encounters suspended between carnal desire, haunted memory, and theatrical illusion. What begins as grief soon mutates into fixation as reality slips further from his grasp.

Here Suzuki unleashes a cascade of unforgettable imagery. Rooms transform into stages; color floods the frame in sudden, startling bursts—crimson curtains, electric blues, faces illuminated like figures in a living painting—while characters drift through heightened tableaux suspended between recollection and hallucination. The film moves with the logic of a dream—at once playful, disorienting, and intoxicating—its world thick with yearning, artifice, and memories that refuse to remain buried. If Zigeunerweisen drifts like a sensuous reverie, Kagero-Za erupts in a dazzling spectacle of cinematic illusion.

Dir. Seijun Suzuki, 1981, 139 mins, Japan, Japanese w/ English subtitles, Unrated (Adults Only), Digital.

Special thanks to American Genre Film Archive and Arrow Films.

Please email [email protected] or phone 323-663-2167 with any questions.

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With some exception, The Philosophical Research Society’s 7th House Screenings does not typically provide advisory warnings about potentially upsetting content or subject matter, as sensitivities are particular to each viewer. Please be sure to read event listings, research on the web, or visit Common Sense Media, IMDb, and DoesTheDogDie.com for thorough info on content and age-appropriateness. If you have any specific content advisory questions, please email [email protected].

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The views, opinions, and thoughts expressed within exhibited works are solely those of their creators and may not represent those of the Philosophical Research Society (PRS), its affiliates, or any individuals associated with PRS. Screenings are intended for educational and entertainment purposes.

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