violence, played for humor or for style (using strobe effects and glass floors to break down perspective expectations during one notable scene). Beginning with this film, and continuing through Fighting Elegy and Tokyo Drifter (both from 1966) an accelerating move away from narrative, and towards greater spontaneity, enhanced with occasional Brechtian touches, became evident in Suzuki's work, though such elements were used in ways quite different from other filmmakers of the New Wave. This hit a pinnacle with 1967's Branded to Kill, an elliptical, fragmented dive into allegory, satire and stylishness, built around a yakuza with a boiled rice fetish. The film was regarded as "incomprehensible" by Nikkatsu, who sacked him (he didn't complete another feature for 9 years), but the largely non-narrative film plays like a compendium of global New Wave styles, absent the politics in most ways, though Suzuki's irreverence towards social convention is very clear, and the film's cult status grew at home and (ultimately) internationally. Hiroshi Teshigahara Other filmmakers – notably Hiroshi Teshigahara – favored more experimental or allegorical terrain. Alongside Hani, Teshigahara worked as an independent (excepting The Man Without a Map), apart from the studio system entirely. Teshigahara – who was the son of a famed ikebana master (Sofu Teshigahara), began his career with a number of avant-garde shorts, including Hokusai (1953), Ikebana (1956), Inochi (1958), Tokyo 1958 and José Torres (part 1) (1959); he had studied art at the Tokyo Art Institute. He launched his feature career a few years later, frequently collaborating with avant-garde novelist Kōbō Abe, making a name for himself with the self-financed independent Pitfall (1962), which he described as a "documentary fantasy", and subsequently winning the jury prize at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival for Woman in the Dunes. Both films, along with the subsequent The Face of Another (1966) and The Man Without a Map (1968) were co-scripted with Abe; in all four the search for self-definition in personal identity and for one's purpose in life is the driving theme, albeit related in allegorical fashion. In 1971, Teshigahara completed an additional feature, Summer Soldiers, which was scripted by John Nathan (translator for Yukio Mishima and Kenzaburō Ōe), and focused on two American soldiers AWOL from the Vietnam War, and their attempt to hide in Japan. Teshigahara would later retreat from filmmaking; after the retirement and death of his father he would take over his father's school, eventually becoming