don't agree specifically with any of his positions, but I agree with his general attitude in confronting political themes seriously in film. Oshima varied his style dramatically to serve the needs of specific films – long takes in Night and Fog in Japan (1960), a blizzard of quick jump cuts in Violence at Noon (1966), nearly neo-realistic in Boy (Shonen, 1969), or a raw exploration of American b-movie sensibilities in Cruel Story of Youth. Again and again, Oshima introduced a critical stance that would transgress social norms by exploring why certain dysfunctions are tolerated – witness the familial dysfunctions of Boy and 1971's The Ceremony or the examinations of racism in Death by Hanging and Three Resurrected Drunkards (both 1968), and why some are not, at least openly – the entanglements of sex, power and violence explicitly depicted in In the Realm of the Senses (1976), or gay undercurrents located within samurai culture (a well-documented subject in publications, but not in film) in 1999's otherwise atypically serene Taboo (Gohatto). Seijun Suzuki Seijun Suzuki's connections with the Japanese New Wave were more by association than by any actual endorsement of the term. Suzuki had begun his career as a mainstream director of low-budget genre films like Underworld Beauty and Kanto Wanderer for Nikkatsu studios. As noted by Japanese film critic Tadao Sato, Suzuki also represented a certain tradition in Japanese film: energizing normally conventional or even traditional styles with discreet infusions of unorthodox irreverence. In Sato's assessment, Suzuki's precursors in some ways were Sadao Yamanaka and Mansaku Itami, whose unconventional humor reinvented period film during the 1930s. Suzuki's stature as an influence upon the New Wave was cemented with two developments: the desire to enliven the formulaic screenplays he was given by Nikkatsu (a deliberately overripe pop-art stylishness introduced in 1963's Youth of the Beast and Kanto Wanderer, both key, transitional films for Suzuki), and his 1968 dismissal from Nikkatsu. In the wake of Kanto Wanderer, Suzuki's developing sense of style grew ever more surreal: What is standing there isn't really there. It's just something reflected in our eyes. When it is demolished, the consciousness that it is, or was, first begins to form. This made clear Suzuki's anarchic approach to cinema, which coincided nicely with other developments during the 1960s. 1965's Tattooed Life took Yakuza formulas to comic-book extremes, with a deliberate and unreal heightening of melodrama and wildly anti-realistic