The Taisho Trilogy: watch order

The movies in the series, sorted by release date. Total runtime: 6 h 52 min. 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). Rarely seen 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.

1. 
   Movie 1

   Zigeunerweisen (1980)

   2 h 24 min · ★ 6.5

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

2. 
   Movie 2

   Kagero-za (1981)

   2 h 20 min · ★ 6.6

   A 1920s playwright meets a beautiful woman who may be the ghost of his patron's deceased wife.

3. 
   Movie 3

   Yumeji (1991)

   2 h 8 min · ★ 6.4

   Following the life of Japanese artist and poet Yumeji Takehisa through the imagining of an encounter with a beautiful widow with a dark past.