- Source: Takahisa Zeze
- 64: Part II
- The Chrysanthemum and the Guillotine
- 64: Part I
- Tomorrow's Dinner Table
- The 8-Year Engagement
- Shugo Oshinari
- Shigeo Tokuda
- Maria Ozawa
- Meguri
- Hana Haruna
- Takahisa Zeze
- Pink film
- Zeze
- Kokkuri-san (film)
- Kanichiro (actor)
- Takahisa
- The 8-Year Engagement
- The Chrysanthemum and the Guillotine
- Hisayasu Satō
- Strayer's Chronicle
Takahisa Zeze (瀬々敬久, Zeze Takahisa, born 24 May 1960) is a Japanese film director and screenwriter first known for his soft-core pornographic pink films of the 1990s. Along with fellow directors, Kazuhiro Sano, Toshiki Satō, and Hisayasu Sato, he is known as one of the "Four Heavenly Kings of Pink" (ピンク四天王, pinku shitennō). In recent years, he has directed such major commercial hits as 64: Part I, 64: Part II, and The 8-Year Engagement, while continuing to make independent art films like Heaven's Story and The Chrysanthemum and the Guillotine.
Life and career
Takahisa Zeze was born in 1960 and graduated from Kyoto University in 1986. While attending this prestigious university, Zeze began making experimental films. He began his career in the film industry working for Shishi Productions as a screenwriter and assistant director for various pink film directors, including Hisayasu Satō.
Zeze usually writes the scripts for his films, which often contain examinations of social concerns not usually found in the pink film genre. His style is much less violent than Sato's, and rarely includes rape, one of the traditional thematic staples of the pink film from earliest times. Zeze also engages in more satire and self-conscious humor than is typical in the genre. He has the habit of giving his films eccentric titles during their production which the studios replace with a more commercially exploitable name before release. For example, Zeze's title My Existence Is a Phenomenon Based on the Hypothesis of Blue Light Generated by Organic Currency was changed to Amazon Garden: Uniform Lesbians. He sometimes uses whimsical pseudonyms in his directorial credit, such as "Jean-Luc Zeze" or "South Pole #1". After a decade of making pink films, Zeze turned to mainstream releases in 1997 with Kokkuri. While continuing to work in the pink film genre, he has since directed several mainstream successes such as Rush!, Hysteric and Dog Star. In 2002 Zeze was honored with a career retrospective at Italy's Far East Film Festival.
He often works with the cinematographer Kōichi Saitō.
Partial filmography
References
"Takahisa Zeze interview". Midnight Eye. Retrieved 4 October 2007.
"Takahisa Zeze". Allmovie. Archived from the original on 26 April 2006. Retrieved 4 October 2007.
"Takahisa Zeze". The Complete Index to World Film. Retrieved 1 July 2007.
Takahisa Zeze at IMDb
"瀬々敬久 (Takahisa Zeze)" (in Japanese). Japanese Movie Database. Retrieved 1 July 2007.
Toda, Miho (4 March 2003). "Takahisa Zeze Interview" (in Japanese). channel.slowtrain.org. Retrieved 23 July 2009.
Weisser, Thomas; Yuko Mihara Weisser (1998). "Spotlight: Four Kings of Pink (Takahisa Zeze)". Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: The Sex Films. Miami: Vital Books : Asian Cult Cinema Publications. pp. 487–492. ISBN 1-889288-52-7.
External links
Takahisa Zeze at IMDb