Seijun Suzuki’s THE TAISHO TRILOGY Available on Blu-ray August 8th from Arrow Academy

”HAUNTING, HYPNOTIC, FLAMBOYANT, EROTIC, BIZARRE… SUZUKI!”

THE TAISHO TRILOGY from director Seijun Suzuki  will be available from Arrow Academy on August 8th

After over a decade in the wilderness following his firing from Nikkatsu for Branded to Kill (1967), maverick director Seijun Suzuki returned with a vengeance with his critically-praised tryptic of cryptic supernatural dramas set during the liberal enlightenment of Japan s Taisho Era (1912-26).

In the multiple Japanese Academy Award-winning Zigeunerweisen (1980), two intellectuals and former colleagues from military academy involve their wives in a series of dangerous sexual games. In Kageroza (1981), a playwright is drawn like a moth to a flame to a mysterious beauty who might be a ghost, while Yumeji (1991) imagines the real-life painter-poet Takehisa Yumeji s encounter with a beautiful widow with a dark past.

Presented together on Blu-ray for the first time outside of Japan, the films in the Taisho Trilogy are considered Suzuki s masterpieces in his homeland. Presenting a dramatic turn from more his familiar tales of cops, gangsters and unruly youth, these surrealistic psychological puzzles drip with a lush exoticism, distinctively capturing the pandemonium of a bygone age of decadence and excess, when Western ideas, fashions, technologies and art fused into everyday aspect of Japanese life.

ZIGEUNERWEISEN (1980) A surreal period film following an university professor and his eerie nomad friend as they go through loose romantic triangles and face death in peculiar ways.

KAGEROZA (1981) A 1920s playwright meets a beautiful woman who may be the ghost of his patron’s deceased wife.

YUMEJI (1991) Painter and poet Yumeji Takehisa (1884-1934) gets involved with a beautiful widow, becoming a rival of her dead husband’s ghost and the jealous lover who murdered him.

LIMITED EDITION CONTENTS

• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentations of all 3 films
• Original stereo audio (uncompressed on the Blu-ray)
• Optional English subtitles
• New introductions to each film by critic Tony Rayns
• Making-of featurette
• Vintage interview with Seijun Suzuki
• More to be announced…
• FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Booklet featuring writing on the films by critic Jasper Sharp and more.