Seijun Suzuki's Fighting Elegy

Relying on the aesthetic and the political role of Seijun Suzuki's film Branded to Kill, the final film of the director's early genre phase (1957-67), as well as on the entire life and work of this cult director, the author analyses the film Fighting Elegy (1966), Suzuki's metaphor of Japan's militarism and colonialism. With its open structure and unusual combinations of genre motifs (Suzuki uses the motifs typical of comedy, grotesque, melodrama, teenage drama, martial arts film, and political film), the film possesses an important rhetoric potential. Furthermore, the author explains the meaning and the manner of presenting Suzuki's meta elements in the film.