Tag: Kiju Yoshida

Escape from Japan (日本脱出, Kiju Yoshida, 1964)

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Like many directors of his generation, Kiju (Yoshishige) Yoshida began his career at Shochiku working on the studio’s characteristically inoffensive fare before being promoted as one of their youth voices through which they hoped to capture a similar audience to that attracted by Nikkatsu’s Sun Tribe movies. Yoshida’s films may have spoken to youth but they were perhaps not quite what the studio was looking for nor the kinds of projects that he really wanted to work on, which is one reason why 1964’s Escape from Japan (日本脱出, Nihon Dasshutsu), an anarchic B-movie crime thriller of intense paranoia all maddening angles and claustrophobic composition, was his last for Shochiku, the final straw being their decision to change the ending without telling him and release the film while he was away on honeymoon. 

Set very much in the present, the film opens with a young man miming to American jazz which turns out to be part of the floor show being performed by the band on the stage below for whom he is a reluctant roadie. Tatsuo (Yasushi Suzuki) dreams of going to America to rediscover “real jazz” and subsequently bring it back to Japan. He has the strange idea that America is a true meritocracy where his talent will be recognised, unlike Japan where it is impossible for him to succeed because he is not particularly good looking or possessed of “star quality”. Feeling himself indebted to the band’s drug-addled drummer Takashi (Kyosuke Machida) for helping him get the roadie gig with the false promise of becoming a singer, Tatsuo agrees to help him commit an elaborate robbery of the “turkish bath” (low level sex services and precursor to the modern “soaplands”) where his girlfriend Yasue (Miyuki Kuwano) works. Only it all goes wrong. The guys kill a policeman during the escape, and the other hotheaded member of the gang becomes convinced that Yasue may talk now that they’ve got involved with murder so they should finish her off too by forcing her to take an overdose of sleeping pills. 

Absolutely everyone is desperate to escape Japan for various different reasons. Tatsuo because of his obsession with American jazz and the freedom it represents to him coupled with the sense of impotence he feels in an oppressive society which refuses to recognise his talent because he doesn’t look the part. He jokes with his next-door neighbour, a sex worker who has redecorated her apartment in anticipation of impressing the tourists arriving for the Olympics, that he envies women and wishes he could find a “sponsor” to take him to the States, but later can offer only the explanation that Japan doesn’t interest him when probed over why he was so desperate to leave. 

“Korea or anywhere else, it’s better than Japan” Yasue later adds, consoling Tatsuo as she informs him that their escape plan won’t work because all of the US military planes are being diverted to Korea to bring in extra help for the Olympics. Bundled into a van filled with chicken carcases as a potential stowaway, he discovers another escapee – a Korean trying to go “home”, or rather to the North (presumably having missed out on the post-war “repatriation” programs) where he claims there are lots of opportunities for young people only to lose his temper when Tatsuo explains that he wants to become a jazz singer. He doesn’t want decadent wastrels in his communist paradise and would rather Tatsuo not mess up his country. Yet they are each already dependent on the Americans even for their escape, making use of military corruption networks and getting Yasue’s friend’s GI squeeze into trouble through exposing his black-marketeering. 

Tatsuo and Yasue find they have more in common than they first thought, both “deceived” by those like Takashi who turned out to be a feckless married man and father-to-be risking not only his own future but that of his unborn child solely to fuel his escapist drug habit (which was perhaps the reason for the lengthy hospital stay from which he had just returned). Yasue was just trying to save up enough money to open a hairdresser’s in her hometown, but Takashi told her he was a “famous jazz drummer” and presumably sold her the same kind of empty dreams as he did Tatsuo. Giving up on her own future, realising that even in America the sex trade is all that’s waiting for her, Yasue tries to engineer Tatsuo’s escape but he, traumatised by his crimes, descends further into crazed paranoia, eventually finding himself right in the middle of the Olympics opening ceremony. This is event is supposed to put Japan back on the map as a rehabilitated modern nation, but perhaps all it’s doing is creating an elaborate smokescreen to disguise all the reasons a man like Tatsuo and a woman like Yasue might want to be just about anywhere else. Yoshida seems unimpressed with the modern nation and its awkward relationship with the Americans, perhaps a controversial point in the immediate run up to the games. Shochiku neutered his attempt to depict a man driven to madness by the impossibilities of his times, but a sense of that madness remains as Tatsuo finds himself on the run and eventually suspended neither here nor there, trapped in a perpetual limbo of frustration and futility.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Wuthering Heights (嵐が丘, Kiju Yoshida, 1988)

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Wuthering Heights poster“In this decadent age, who believes in the gods’ anger?” asks a cynical priest, willingly inviting evil into his home in the hope of brokering a change in his constraining circumstances. A key figure of the avant garde, Kiju (Yoshishige) Yoshida, like many of his contemporaries, struggled in the heavily commercialised cinema industry of the 1970s and beyond, finding the international arena more receptive to his arthouse concerns. 1988’s Wuthering Heights (嵐が丘, Arashi ga Oka), a distinctly Japanese take on Emily Brontë’s classic novel, found funding in France where it perhaps neatly sits alongside superficially similar efforts from his similarly constrained contemporaries, but as always Yoshida’s vision is darker, more disturbing than that of the big budget epics which aimed to recapture golden age glories.

Yoshida swaps the desolate Yorkshire moors for a smokey hellscape settled in ash on the side of an unpredictable volcano. The Yamabes are a priestly family in charge of conducting various rituals to keep the serpent god happy, preventing an eruption and ensuring good rains. The house is spilt in two with a feud underway between the East mansion and the West. The East mansion is where we lay our scene as old Yamabe returns from an extended sojourn in the city, bringing back with him a feral child he found starving under a bridge and later names “Onimaru” (Yûsaku Matsuda) in honour of his “demonic” appearance.

“Demonic” maybe an unkind word to use about any child and primed to become a self-fulling prophecy, but as someone later puts it Onimaru “does not belong to this world”. He is “an evil man” whose “cruelty knows no limits”, yet two women are drawn into his orbit and find themselves unable to break free of his passionate intensity. His step-sister, Kinu (Yuko Tanaka), our Cathy stand-in, bonds with him in childhood feeling a kind of elemental connection perhaps forbidden to her as a woman of feudal Japan subject to the whims of male society. Yet she alone sees through him to humanity buried below, “your curse is the proof you will never stop loving me” she offers darkly while seducing him the night before her marriage to another man (Tatsuo Nadaka). Later that man’s sister (Eri Ishida), positioning herself as potential bride, cites the fact that he is “consumed by jealousy” as further proof that he is more man than demon, but Onimaru himself seems uncertain so deep is he in rage and resentment.

That resentment is perhaps as much about class as about anything else. A feral child, living like an animal on the streets of an unforgiving city, he’s an ill fit for the rarefied mansion of a local lord with a spiritual mission, albeit one which imprisons him in his home and forbids him from associating with the world below. Yamabe took him in for his “boldness”, actively seeking his demonic dynamism while his own son, Hidemaru (Nagare Hagiwara), remains disappointingly conservative and wedded to his old-fashioned elite entitlement. Hidemaru’s resentment of Onimaru is not so much born of parental rejection in his father’s abrupt decision to go out and find a more satisfactory son than the one dutifully waiting at home, but irritation in Onimaru’s irregular status. He resents that a mere “peasant”, a man who should be among the servants, is permitted to share his space, and it seems, has usurped his position in his father’s eyes to be groomed as an heir to the illustrious Yamabe name.

Hidemaru eventually leaves in disgust, setting off to make a conventionally successful life for himself in the city, latterly returning with a wife and son to claim his birthright only after his father’s death. Yet Hidemaru suffers too. His wife is raped and murdered by bandits, agents of chaos and yet a product of the system he was so keen to uphold, leaving him a drunken, dissolute figure unable to fulfil his obligations to the god of fire while Onimaru prospers in a violent world and is eventually gifted that which he most wanted – stewardship of the Yamabe clan.

Even so, he cannot fully possess Kinu who remains lost to him, ruined by her own internal conflict between individualism and obedience. After coming of age, her father tells her women of the Yamabe clan must leave the mountain to serve as priestesses in the shrine, but Kinu wants to “live as a true woman”. She cannot have Onimaru, but does not want to leave him so she engineers a marriage with the rival West mansion and the kindly Mitsuhiko who brands his house as one of light as opposed to the gloomy shadows of the East. Kinu has attempted to seize her own future, at least in part, but finds herself conflicted, torn between her affection for Mitsuhiko who is gentleness personified and her need for Onimaru’s brooding intensity.

Yet Yoshida’s Wuthering Heights is less a story of forbidden, transgressive loves than it is of elemental destruction, the anger of the gods manifested as imploded repression and its fiery aftermath. Yamabe, the father figure, brings “evil” into his home, infecting it with dark desire and deep resentments seemingly in the knowledge it will burn it to the ground. The third generation, orphaned and finally independent, are left to make what restitution they can and so the tale begins to reset and repeat with cousins, Hidemaru’s grown and now subjugated son Yoshimaru (Masato Furuoya), and Kinu’s fiesty daughter (Tomoko Takabe), returning their ire to the force of their oppression – Onimaru, still fearsome and implacable though ageing and maddened by his unanswerable love for a dead woman whose corpse he has begun to covet.

Kinu, on her deathbed, promised to drag Onimaru to hell (assuming they weren’t already there) if only to protect her new family and finally does just that as he finds himself expelled by the next generation, dragging a coffin off into the fiery distance. “In every way, our world is accursed” insists an exasperated retainer. Everything here is corrupt, rotten, suppurating under the weight of oppressive traditions which restrict freedom and insist on order at the price of humanity. Yoshida’s noh-inspired aesthetics add to the atmosphere of fable as his embattled protagonists attempt to reconcile their natures with their civility but find there is no answer for repressed desire other than destruction and eventual rebirth.

Blood is Dry (血は渇いてる, Kiju Yoshida, 1960)

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Blood is dry DVD coverIn the new post-war economy, everything is for sale including you! Kiju (Yoshishige) Yoshida’s second feature Blood is Dry (血は渇いてる, Chi wa Kawaiteru) takes its cues from Yasuzo Masumura’s earlier Technicolor corporate satire Giants and Toys, and Frank Capra’s 1941 comedy Meet John Doe in taking a faceless corporate drone and giving him a sense of self only through its own negation. The little guy is at the mercy not only of irresponsible capitalist fat cats, but of his own imagination and the machinations of mass media who are only too keen to sell him impossible dreams of individual happiness.

The action opens with a grandstanding rooftop speech from a former CEO to his distressed workforce informing them that because of “indifferent capitalism” this small business is going bust and everyone’s out of a job. Then, dramatically, our hero Kiguchi (Keiji Sada), steps out with a pistol and threatens to shoot himself, proclaiming that he no longer cares for his own life but doesn’t want anyone else to lose their job. Another worker, Kanai (Masao Oda), tackles Kiguchi and the gun goes off. Thankfully, he is only mildly wounded but Kiguchi’s case reaches the papers who make it into a human interest issue exemplifying the precarious economic conditions of the modern society. While he’s still somewhat current, an enterprising advertising executive hits on the idea of getting Kiguchi to act as the face of their campaign, bizarrely attempting to sell life insurance with the image of a man putting a gun to his head while proclaiming that “it’s high time everyone is happy”.

When we first meet him, Kiguchi is indeed a faceless, broken man at the end of his tether. His noble sacrifice is interpreted as an act of war on an unfair capitalist society, but as he later affirms in exasperation, Kiguchi had no political intent and never considered himself as acting with a greater purpose, he was simply terrified at the prospect of losing his job which is, in a sense, also his entire identity. Shy and mild-mannered, he stammers through speeches and curls himself into a hostile ball of awkwardness in front of the camera but ad exec Nonaka (Mari Yoshimura) is sure that only makes him a better sell for being “real” and relatable. Like the hero of Meet John Doe, however, Kiguchi starts to buy into his own hype. He fully embraces his role as the embodiment of the everyman, at once gaining and losing an identity as he basks in the unexpected faith of his adoring populace.

Kiguchi’s conversion wasn’t something Nonaka had in mind and it frightens her to realise she has lost control of her creation. Meanwhile, Nonaka’s ex, a paparazzo with a penchant for setting up celebrities in compromising situations in order to blackmail them, has it in for Kiguchi as the personification of his own dark profession. He resents the idea of using “suicide” as a marketing tool and the cynical attempt to sell the idea of happiness through the security of life insurance which, it has to be said, is a peculiarly ironic development.

Kiguchi’s liberal message of happiness and solidarity does not go down well with all – he’s eventually attacked in a taxicab by a right-wing nationalist posing as a reporter who accuses him of being a traitor to Japan, and it’s certainly not one which appeals to the forces which created him. Nevertheless, he does begin to capture something of the spirit of the man in the street who just wants to be “happy” only to have his message crushed when his image is tarnished by tabloid shenanigans and left wondering if the only way to reclaim his “artificial” identity is to once again destroy himself in sacrifice to his new ideal.

Yet Kiguchi’s motivation is both collectivist and individual as he claims and abandons his identity in insisting that he belongs to the people. His confidence is born only of their belief in him and without it he ceases to exist. Kiguchi’s entire identity has been an artificial creation with an uncertain expiry date and his attempts to buy it authenticity only damn him further while his actions are once again co-opted by outside forces for their own aims. The little guy has achieved his apotheosis into a corporate commodity leaving the everyman firmly at the mercy of his capitalist overlords, dreaming their dreams of consumerist paradise while shedding their own sense of self in service of an illusionary conception of “happiness”.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Good-for-Nothing (ろくでなし, Kiju Yoshida, 1960)

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Good for nothing dvd coverIn the mid-1950s, Nikkatsu had accidentally provoked social outrage with a series of films later known as “taiyozoku” or Sun Tribe movies which revolved around aimless post-war youth who largely rejected the strident ambition of their parents for lives of dissipated abandonment. While the original author of the book that kickstarted it all fully intended to create moral panic, Nikkatsu perhaps hoped to capitalise on the inherent cool of adolescent rebellion and did it seems find an audience they hoped to continue courting with their youth movies even after the forced end of the taiyozoku movement. Shochiku, the home of polite melodrama, was a world away from Nikkatsu’s brand of angry young man but declining receipts encouraged them to get in on the action and so they began giving some of their younger ADs a chance to direct features in the hope of finding bold new voices who could speak to youth (a demographic their usual fare was not perhaps reaching).

Among these directors, Kiju (Yoshishige) Yoshida would go on to greater heights of avant-garde cinema but his Shochiku debut is perhaps more or less the kind of thing the studio was looking for. Released in the same year as Koreyoshi Kurahara’s The Warped Ones, Good-for-Nothing (ろくでなし, Rokudenashi) is another tale of youth gone wild only one with a much deeper sense of self pitying futility which casts its ill-fated hero as a noble soul left without purpose in the rapidly stratifying society of post-war Japan.

Against a heady yet whimsical jazz score (composed by Shochiku stalwart Chuji Kinoshita, brother of Keisuke), the action opens with a gang of petty delinquents kidnapping the secretary of one of their fathers, Hisako (Kakuko Chino), as she leaves the local bank. Toshio (Yusuke Kawazu) is in many ways the typical taiyozoku hero in that he is extremely rich and therefore filled with ennui because his life has no real purpose. He is not, however, the hero of Yoshida’s film. Gradually, our focus shifts to the intense figure of university student Jun (Masahiko Tsugawa) who, unlike the other members of the gang, remains internally conflicted as to the forward direction of his life and his complicated relationship with Toshio.

Whereas the taiyozoku films most often focussed on the bright young things of the new era – the children of those who had become rich in the post-war economy but had few values and were content to bury themselves in imported hedonistic pleasures, the “heroes” of Good-For-Nothing are the collaborators. If the taiyozoku were despised by the older generation as parasites living off inherited wealth and contributing nothing to society, then the guys like Jun are the parasites on the parasites. This is perhaps a view Jun holds of himself, wilfully embracing the “rokudenashi” label as expression of his intense self-loathing and acting in accordance with its values as an act almost of self-harm.

Toshio rebels against his sense of powerlessness in the darkest of ways – by setting his sights on taking his father’s “haughty” secretary down a peg or two. He may not like her confidence, self possession, and earnest determination towards honest industry but it is exactly these qualities which begin to attract Jun as representative of the society he has rejected but secretly longs to belong to. A poor student, he’s tried doing things the “right” way – part-time jobs, hard work etc, but has little interest in the student movement and views himself as “weak” for allowing himself to be swayed by the easy life of those like Toshio even in the full knowledge that he cannot live that way forever and his time at the beach will be as short as a summer vacation.

Hisako sees the conflict in Jun and tries to pull him towards a more positive path but is also attracted to him because of his darkness and nihilistic ennui. She too is unhappy with the status quo, living with her brother and his wife who quarrel about money and the disappointments of the salaryman dream while the office playboy hassles her at work and is only spurred on by her constant rejections. Hisako knows getting involved with Jun is playing with fire, especially if it keeps her in the orbit of the continually declining Toshio whose worrying behaviour is perhaps enabled by his well meaning liberal (though arch capitalist) father who is hoping his son will find his own way through hitting rock bottom, but salvation is a temptation it’s difficult to resist.

The heroes of the taiyozoku movies are aimless because they have no economic imperatives towards individual progress, but those like Jun or indeed like those of The Warped Ones are aimless because they see no sense of purpose in an intensely class bound society in which, paradoxically, all the cards are held by men like Toshio. Some, like Jun’s gang mate, decide the best way forward is to become a willing underling living off Toshio’s largesse who is, in his own way, intensely lonely and filling the friendship void with minions. Others, like Hisako, decide to plug on anyway despite the disappointments of socially conservative success. For men like Jun, however, the prognosis is as grim as in much of Yoshida’s later work, suggesting his nihilism is justified because there is no hope for men without means lost in the widening gulf of post-war inequality where any attempt at moral righteousness is likely to be rewarded only with further suffering.

Original trailer (Japanese with French/Traditional Chinese subtitles)

Affair in the Snow (樹氷のよろめき, Kiju Yoshida, 1968)

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affair in the snow posterKiju (Yoshishige) Yoshida, along with his wife – the actress Mariko Okada, was responsible for some of the most arresting films of the late ’60s avant-garde art scene. So called “anti-melodramas”, many of Yoshida’s films from this era took what could have been a typical melodrama narrative and filmed it in an alienated, almost emotionless manner somehow reaching a deeper level of an often superficial and overwrought genre. Affair in the Snow (樹氷のよろめき, Juhyo no Yoromeki) is, in essence, the familiar story of an unreasonable love triangle but in Yoshida’s hands it becomes a melancholy yet penetrating examination of love, sex, and transience as the central trio attempt to resolve their ongoing romantic difficulties.

Yuriko (Mariko Okada) works in an upscale beauty salon in Sapporo and is in a relationship with a moody professor, Akira (Yukio Ninagawa), which seems to have run its course. The couple decide to take a trip to figure things out but it all goes wrong when the car breaks down and they’re marooned together in an unfamiliar environment. Akira’s mood swings and jealousy seem to be the main motivators for Yuriko’s dissatisfaction along with his desire for rough and ready sex over genial romance. Fearing she may be pregnant, Yuriko is not sure what to do – especially given that Akira is not particularly supportive.

Running from Akira, Yuriko gets back in touch with an old friend and former lover, Kazuo (Isao Kimura), who she feels can be relied upon to help her whatever she decides to do in this admittedly difficult situation. Yuriko and Kazuo were together for a short while and still share a deep emotional connection but their relationship was eventually frustrated due to Kazuo’s physical impotence. Eventually Akira catches up with the pair and tries to win Yuriko back as the three work through their various problems in the snow covered mountains of Hokkaido.

For Yuriko the two men represent very different pulls – towards the spiritual and the physical. Her relationship with Akira has obviously long gone sour, the two aren’t suited or happy in each other’s company. All they have is the physical though, it seems, this is not enough for Yuriko. Yuriko and Kazuo, by contrast, work well together, complement each other and only exert positive energy but their inability to enjoy a full relationship (which it seems they would both like) is the reason their previous affair failed.

Yuriko needs, in a sense, both men though for the present time her desire is to be rid of Akira with his emotional volatility, cruelty, and possessiveness. Though the relationship may be been on its way out, Akira’s jealousy is inflamed by the deep connection Kazuo shares with Yuriko – bringing home the the fact that his relationship with her is firmly based in the physical. As Yuriko and Kazuo grow closer, Akira becomes increasingly unhinged as it’s he who’s now rendered “impotent” in the quest to win back his former love. Cavorting with the young hippies at the ski lodge, Akira tries to make Yuriko jealous and Kazuo irritated but only succeeds in making himself look ridiculous. Eventually, Yuriko is goaded into admitting that all Akira has ever known of her is superficial, whereas Kazuo has known her soul. Yet even so the love she shares with Kazuo seems doomed to fail, tinged with death as she finds herself blinded and obscured by snow filled fog, screaming into a void.

For Yoshida all love fails, as Kazuo says – no love can last. The central trio are lost and purposeless yet seeking a connection they never seem to find. Yoshida’s beautiful cinematography captures their emotional blankness through the freezing cold snow-covered landscape and infinite expanses of emptiness in which no one can reconcile everything that they want with everything that they are. Death lurks everywhere as skiers pulls bodies past romantic walks and would-be-lovers collapse in exhaustion as if trying to cross the artic plains in search of a lost friend.

Shooting through mirrors Yoshida shows us a collection of people unwilling to look directly either at themselves or at others, missing the final climactic event in their fierce determination not to engage. Lost in a fog, nothing is clear as the lovelorn and lonely seek direction only to remain locked inside themselves unable to find the true and complete connection they each seek.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Affair (情炎, Kiju Yoshida, 1967)

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the affair 1967After leaving Shochiku and forming an independent production company with his actress wife Mariko Okada, Kiju (Yoshishige) Yoshida continued in the Shochiku vein, after a fashion, through crafting what came to be known as “anti-melodramas”. Taking the familiar melodrama a studio like Shochiku was well known for, Yoshida transformed the material through radical cinematography designed to alienate and drain the overwrought drama of its empty emotion in order to drive to something deeper. The Affair (情炎, Jouen), released in 1967, is just such an experiment as it paints the cold and repressed world of its heroine in steely black and white, imprisoning her within its widescreen frame, and setting her at odds with the younger, more liberated generation who get their kicks through groovy beatnik jazz and an eternal party.

Oriko (Mariko Okada) is a married, middle-aged woman who has never been able to find fulfilment with her successful executive husband Takashi (Tadahiko Sugano). The marriage has long been cold and Oriko has discovered that her husband has a younger mistress leading her to seek a divorce but Takashi will not give her one. Her one confidant is a poet and sculptor whom she first met as her mother’s lover – something she tried to put a stop to. Oriko’s mother died a year ago in a traffic accident though she’d long been a heavy drinker and Oriko is convinced her mother was probably drunk at the time of her death. Aside from a drink and poetry habit, Oriko’s mother also had a taste for love – Mitsuharu (Isao Kimura), now an odd kind of friend, was merely one of her many lovers. Oriko’s intense disgust of her mother’s “decadent” lifestyle has left her with a deep seated repression, unable to allow herself to experience any kind of pleasure in case she too succumbs to a life of base desire.

Yoshida imbues Oriko’s life with a kind of dread and stillness, defined by its emptiness and sterility. At odds with her mother while she was alive, Oriko cannot let her go even in death. Yet she is not ready to break through to the new post-war world inhabited by her hippyish sister-in-law Yuko (Shigako Shimegi) and her well to do friends. Oriko dresses in western style for her office job but sticks to kimono at home and on the move, hers is an old fashioned world of propriety and elegance but the gesture is less conformist than rebellious – she is in revolt against herself as she represses and refuses her desires.

Despite her inability to adapt to married life with her husband, Oriko is eventually awakened by witnessing her sister-in-law’s quasi-rape by a local labourer. Originally reluctant, Yuko eventually gives in and allows the labourer to have his wicked way with her while, unbeknownst to her, Oriko watches through a frosted window. Later she finds herself setting off through the dark and mysterious night to the shack where the labourer takes refuge to warn him off trying anything with Yuko again only to find herself succumbing to his “charms”.

The encounter is a shocking one which ultimately destabilises Oriko’s entire personality. Having spent so long repressing herself, Oriko is not sure what to do – only that she still doesn’t want her husband and may be in love with an equally problematic suitor in the man who had been a lover of the very woman she was so desperate not to become. Yet Oriko must finally accept that she is not so different from the mother she despised, feeling the same desire and the same need even if her deepening self loathing makes pleasure a knife which wounds.

Mitsuharu has long been in love with Oriko but unable to express himself firstly through the taboo of having been intimate with her mother and then because of her marriage. The two have become awkward friends as Mitsuharu tries to help Oriko navigate her marital problems only daring to hint at his true feelings as Oriko details her frustrations with her husband. A sculptor by trade and a poet in soul, Mitsuharu chips away at Oriko’s reserve like one of his sculptures, literally opening her up and exposing her true form to the air. Eventually crushed by his own desire, Mitsuharu may be robbed of a direct connection to the very force which has come to define this recent stage of Oriko’s life but this only reinforces her devotion to him. Leaving a final poem for her unpoetical husband, Oriko writes the words “this flower, still vital, resigns herself to her fate” as she acknowledges her desires but subsumes them into her love for Mitsuharu rather than repressing them into herself.

Yoshida’s camerawork is once again astounding, marooning his disparate cast inside their own individual space, unable to connect with each other or the outside world. Framed in mirrors and windows, caught alone among a crowd of indifferent passengers on a bus, separated by shoji, Yoshida’s characters are endlessly divided but the prisons are all of their own making.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese subtitles only)

Akitsu Springs (秋津温泉, Kiju Yoshida, 1962)

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akitsu springsKiju (Yoshishige) Yoshida is best remembered for his extraordinary run of avant-garde masterpieces in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but even he had to cut his teeth on Shochiku’s speciality genre – the romantic melodrama. Adapted from a best selling novel, Akitsu Springs (秋津温泉, Akitsu Onsen) is hardly an original tale in its doom laden reflection of the hopelessness and inertia of the post-war world as depicted in the frustrated love story of a self sacrificing woman and self destructive man, but Yoshida elevates the material through his characteristically beautiful compositions and full use of the particularly lush colour palate.

At the very end of the war, consumptive student Shusaku (Hiroyuki Nagato) finds his aunt’s house destroyed by aerial bombing. Attempting to find her but proving too ill to go on, Shusaku is taken to a nearby inn by a good samaritan where he first encounters the innkeeper’s daughter, Shinko (Mariko Okada). Despite her mother’s protestations, Shinko takes a shine to Shusaku and is determined to nurse him back to health. Shusaku, however, is a gloomy sort of boy and, ironically, longs only for death. Though the pair fall in love their youthful romance is forever tinged with darkness as Shusaku declares his love not with a ring but with a rope – he asks Shinko for that most classically theatrical of unions in proposing a double suicide.

Shinko agrees, but is not quite ready to die. In another dose of irony, Shinko’s tears of fear and despair on hearing the Emperor’s final wartime broadcast confirming his surrender inspire Shusaku to want to live but the pair are eventually separated. Reuniting and parting over and over again, their complicated love story repeats itself over a period of seventeen years but the painful spectre of the past refuses to allow either of them the freedom to move beyond Akitsu Springs.

Mariko Okada was only 29 in 1962, but she’d already worked with some of the best directors of the age including Ozu whose An Autumn Afternoon was released the same year, and Naruse in Floating Clouds which has something of a narrative similarity to Akitsu Springs. This prestige picture was her 100th screen appearance for which she also took a producer credit. Despite the obvious importance attached to both of these elements, the studio took a chance on a rookie director with only three films under his belt. Two years later Okada would become Yoshida’s wife and go on to star in some of his most important pictures including Eros + Massacre and Heroic Purgatory. At first glance her role here is a conventional one – a love lorn, melancholy woman unable to let the ghost of a failed romance die, but Okada’s work is extraordinary as Shinko travels from flighty teen to rueful middle aged woman, hollowed out and robbed of any sense of hope.

At Akitsu Springs time passes and it doesn’t all at once. Yoshida refuses to give us concrete demarcations, preferring to simply show a child being born and growing older or someone remarking on having been away. The inn becomes a kind of bubble with Shinko trapped inside, but Shusaku comes to regard the place as a temporary haven rather than a permanent home or place to make a life. For her everything real is at the spring, but for him everything at the spring is unreal – an unattainable paradise. She cannot leave, he cannot stay. Only for short periods are they able to indulge their romance, but the time always comes at which they must part again often swearing it will be for the last time, never knowing if it will.

Yoshida neatly bookends the relationship with announcements over loudspeakers as Shinko originally fails to understand the Emperor’s speech in which he remarks on enduring the unendurable, only to be prompted into later action by the banal drone of a train station tannoy. It’s almost as if their lives are being entirely dictated by outside forces, powerless drifters in the post-war world, condemned to a perpetual waiting sustained only by hopelessness.

Shinko may have convinced Shusaku to live but his growing successes only seem to deplete her. Wasting away at an inn she always claimed to hate, Shinko grows old while Shusaku grows bitter yet successful in the city. They move past and through each other, unable to connect or disconnect, yearning for the completion of something which consistently eludes them. Yoshida films the standard melodrama with appropriate theatricality but also with his beautifully composed framing as the lovers are divided by screen doors or captured in mirrors. Okada glows in the light of falling cherry blossoms, acknowledging the tragic and transitory character of love, but her final action is one which echoes the beginning of her suffering and finally declares an ending to an unendurable romance.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Kiju Yoshida: Love + Anarchism

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133365_frontGeneral review of Arrow’s Kiju Yoshida: Love + Anarchism box set up at UK Anime Network.

Kiju (also known as Yoshishige) Yoshida is one of the primary names in Japan’s 1960s art movie boom though he’s comparatively unknown and, in fact, little seen outside of Japan. Though some of this is down to Yoshida’s fierce self ownership of his own back catalogue, this new HD blu-ray box set from Arrow Films is the first time any of his films will be readily available with English subtitles. Titled Love + Anarchy, the box set includes both the original director’s cut of Yoshida’s magnum opus Eros + Massacre as well as the shortened theatrical cut of the film, his examination of ’60s radical leftist politics in Heroic Purgatory and his look at a failed ‘30s rightist insurrection in Coup d’Etat.

Eros + Massacre is the film Yoshida has become best known for and the one with which he is most closely associated. The film tells two parallel stories beginning with the 1960s students Eiko and Wada who are running an extra curricular research project into the lives of a group of Taisho era anarchists including feminist Ito Noe and poet Osugi Sakae who was an early exponent of free love which is something that particularly interests Eiko. The Taisho era scenes are less a historical examination than they are the results of the research project conducted by Eiko and Wada and so are a sum of their refracted perceptions. The film is full of surrealistic touches like the Taisho characters suddenly turning up in modern day Tokyo or unexpected scenes of expressionism breaking in without warning. A fantastic example of ‘60s avant-garde cinema, Eros + Massacre is a film which should have been more widely seen and now hopefully will be.

The first question – why two versions? The answer is not the one you’re thinking of. Though the film is undoubtedly long at over 3.5hrs, Yoshida largely financed the film himself and intended to release it in his original version. However, though Ito and Osugi were assassinated along side Osugi’s six year old nephew in the chaos following the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, another of Osugi’s mistresses, Kamichika Ichiko, was still very much alive (though obviously an old woman) and a serving politician. She got wind of the film and after seeing it threatened to sue over her portrayal. Yoshida voluntarily recut the film to minimise her scenes, renamed her character and exhibited the shortened version to great acclaim. Though the director’s cut is truest to Yoshida’s vision, even in the shortened version his artistry shines through.

The second film in Yoshida’s “political trilogy” is the even more avant-garde Heroic Purgatory. Far less accessible than the other two films in the set, Heroic Purgatory spans three distinct time periods from the recent past to the present and the near future and focuses on the current Japanese leftist movement with particular reference to its opposition towards the renewals of the Japanese and American mutual defence treaty. However, what all of this really amounts to is paean to love and marriage. Full of strange and beautiful photography Heroic Purgatory is the iconic avant-garde film. Which is to say it’s undoubtedly difficult, inscrutable and perhaps more experienced than understood.

By contrast Coup d’Etat is the most straightforward of the films presented. Marking the only time in his career where Yoshida was not involved in the screenplay, the film moves across the political divide and examines the final days of right wing intellectual Ikki Kita. Ironically enough, the thrust of the film concerns an attempted political coup by a group of young army officers who disapproved of the government’s treatment of its people and particularly of its failure to properly provide for the poor. Their revolution was in the name of the emperor, they merely wanted to eject the sitting government. Despite his repeated protestations and lack of direct involvement in the planning of the coup, Kita still paid the price as his stature and the influence of his writings were simply too strong making him a dangerous individual and a pretty fitting scapegoat. The last film Yoshida would make with ATG (and in fact the only one which was entirely produced with them), Coup d’Etat retains his characteristically complex imagery even if it ejects his surreal storytelling style. It also loses his wife, Mariko Okada, but gains the towering presence of star character actor Rentaro Mikuni.

Available for the first time with English subtitles and in HD this new box set from Arrow Films is a long overdue opportunity to finally witness the challenging yet hugely important work of this hitherto neglected filmmaker. Yoshida’s work is not easy to digest (it will also help to have a little knowledge of 20th century Japanese history or to make careful use of the excellent essays included with the box set) but is always beautiful. The unseen genius of the ‘60s avant-garde art scene, Yoshida is an uncompromising figure which may be why it’s taken so long for work to reach us, but now that it has, it’s an opportunity that should not be ignored.

Links to individual reviews of each of the films:

 

 

Coup d’Etat (AKA Martial Law, 戒厳令 Kaigenrei, Kiju Yoshida 1973)

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Snapshot-2015-11-18 at 01_34_49 PM-1660087891Having taken avant-garde story telling to its zenith in Heroic Purgatory, Yoshida returns to the realm of politics with a far more accessible effort in Coup d’Etat (AKA Martial Law, 戒厳令 Kaigenrei). Inbetween the two films, Yoshida had made another more mainstream offering, Confessions Among Actresses, which had been moderately successful with both audiences and critics but with Coup d’Etat he came back to the artistic fare he’d been pursuing since leaving Shochiku. Unlike the other two films in Arrow’s Love + Anarchy boxset, Coup ‘Etat deals with a right wing rebellion rather than the communists and anarchists which are more familiar to the post-war world.

The film begins with a nervous young man brutally stabbing an elderly businessman in the street before taking his own life. On claiming his remains, the man’s sister finds a letter addressed to Ikki Kita – a well known right wing intellectual in favour of the institution of martial law. Kita, or more particularly his work, becomes a figurehead for a putative revolution organised by young army officers who have become disillusioned with the elected government, its plans for increasing Westernisation and treatment of the poor. They seek to overthrow parliament and put the Emperor back in charge for a kind of paternalistic socialist state. Kita remains on the fringes of this movement, coming into contact with a young soldier who wants to join the revolution and advising him but repeatedly making it clear that he is not involved with the coup itself. Nevertheless, even if not directly involved, Kita will still pay the price for his radical ideas.

Less an examination of the historical events of the time or the coup itself, Coup d’Etat is a psychological portrait of Kita’s last days. Marking the only time Yoshida was not involved in the screenplay (this time leaving things entirely to playwright Minoru Betsuyaku) the film follows a much more linear structure rather than playing with time in the same way as Eros + Massacre or Heroic Purgatory. Kita had written a hugely influential book which advocated moving to a system of martial law under the paternalistic care of the emperor alongside nationalisation of industries, minimisation of private property and a better welfare state. However, Kita is a public intellectual not an activist. He takes no personal part in the armed struggle (though he is aware of each of the actions and close to the people who facilitated them), yet still he pays the price. Whether this is an indictment of his lack of physical commitment to the ideals that he spoke of, or an indictment of a system which seeks to shoot the messenger is up for debate but in any case Kita is “betrayed” by the very same emperor that he worshipped as a god.

Having said that, it’s Emperor Meiji who hangs on Kita’s wall. What Kita and the officer class wanted was a “Showa Restoration” in line with the “Meiji Restoration” but almost the reverse as they returned to a form of paternalistic government where personal freedoms were restricted but everyone was well cared for. We actually don’t learn a lot about Kita during the film (a strange thing to say about a “biopic” which is often how the film is described) but it seems that he had a strict childhood in which he was prohibited from feeling fear – each time a boy was a afraid, he was supposed to cut himself as a punishment. Yet Kita is afraid and this tension between intellectual thought and irrepressible emotion is one that restricts his physical actions to the point that he remains a solitary figure entrapped by his own ideology. That he is then betrayed by the very figures that he sought to exult is the very highest form of tragedy and it’s difficult not to believe that the real coup d’etat is being perpetrated against Kita himself.

Perhaps because of its relative narrative simplicity, Coup d’Etat is a visual masterpiece taking Yoshida’s especial gifts for composition to new heights of beauty. Once again shot in black and white 4:3 Academy ratio, the film is an unsettling maze of shadows and light coupled with uncomfortable angles and a musical score that’s almost like a science fiction film. Yoshida’s prognosis is indeed bleak – the young soldier for example who’s unable to carry out his part of the mission and eventually falsely confesses to having been a spy simply because he felt insignificant and wanted to be a part of something is symptomatic of the self-centred ineffectuality of the younger generation. Once again, youth has been evaluated and found wanting though age doesn’t fare much better in the end. The filming of Coup d’Etat was delayed for sometime as Yoshida underwent an operation to remove a tumour from his stomach. His ultimate satisfaction with the film and the feeling of having come to the end of a cycle coupled with the need to recuperate more fully kept Yoshida away from the director’s chair until 1986 though he’d never return to it with the same intensity as in his political trilogy.

Available now on blu-ray in the UK as part of Arrow Films’ Kiju Yoshida: Love + Anarchism box set.

Scene from near the end of the film:

Reviews of the other movies in the set:

Heroic Purgatory (煉獄エロイカ, Kiju Yoshida, 1970)

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Heroic Purgatory PosterThe second film contained within Arrow’s Kiju Yoshida boxset is perhaps his least accessible. Ostensibly, Heroic Purgatory (煉獄エロイカ, Rengoku Eroika) is an examination of leftist politics in the years surrounding the renewal of the hugely controversial mutual security pact between Japan and America. However, it quickly disregards any kind of narrative sense as time periods blur so finely as to leave us with no objective “now” to belong to and characters switch identities with no warning or discernible reason. Yoshida is not really after objective truth here – there is no truth in cinema, film lies repeatedly until it finally exposes the truth.

What there is of a plot begins with the scientist Rikiya Shoda who, it seems, may have been a part of a left wing activist group in the ‘50s who were intent on assassinating an ambassador but may or may not have had a mole in their midst. Now, in the contemporary ‘60s era his quiet life is disturbed when his wife, Nanako returns home with a distressed teenage girl who begins insisting Rikiya and Nanako are her parents. Sometime later another man arrives claiming to be Ayu’s father – he’s even installed a spy cam on her because this is apparently something she does quite often. The “father” eventually leaves without Ayu but then we jump back to the ‘50s where Rikiya and the “father” seem to be part of the same left wing cell but for some reason did not recognise each other in the modern part of the film. There are repeated interrogations regarding a spy, confessions, reversals, executions and betrayals but where does it get us in the end?

There’s no making sense of Heroic Purgatory, that’s not really what it’s about. It’s the very essence of avant-garde, gently eschewing literal narrative in favour of a deeper meaning. At the end what we’re left with is a scientist who professes love to be the highest calling and a wife who answers the question “what do you do when your husband’s working?” with “Think about my husband”. This isn’t some kind of anti-feminist statement in so much as a defence of a thirty year marriage which has, apparently, survived all this chaos. What has clearly perished is the left wing student movement which has ultimately failed to instigate any real kind of social change. The film wraps itself around the dates at which Japan’s defence treaty with America was or would be renewed – something to which the leftwing movement was completely opposed to and failed to prevent. Not only did they not succeed in breaking the American security pact in the ‘50s but interest in the protests themselves slowly dwindled. The film ends with a sign reading “Dead End” which you can only read as being in reference to the eventual demise of armed leftwing rebellion in Japan.

Though Heroic Purgatory is in no way Yoshida’s most easily digestible effort, it may be one of the most beautiful. Shot in 4:3 academy ratio and in glorious black and white with Yoshida’s preference for over exposure, every scene of Heroic Purgatory drips with elegance in its exquisite framing. Yoshida pushes focus to the bottom of the frame, rarely having anything other than empty space above the halfway line. Further adding to the sense of pressured claustrophobia and confusion, Yoshida’s gift for strange compositions is the perfect match for his dreamlike, incoherent, floating tale. Pushed to the edges of the frame, the actors are literally left with nowhere to run in Yoshida’s largely industrial wasteland of a stage set.

The film begins with what looks like a suicide, but turns out not to be. Accompanied by violent, stinging music, we’re trained to expect something terrible to have happened though once again Yoshida has fooled us with clever camera trickery. The music throughout is more like something from a horror film, low level thrumming strings and brief breaks of choral singing set us on edge and make us even more uncomfortable than we already were.

Heroic Purgatory is a poem of beautiful incomprehensibility. Strange and elliptical, the film is visual experience which demands emotional over intellectual engagement. Beautiful, fascinating and ultimately inscrutable Heroic Purgatory is a film that haunts with its refusal to explain itself and is likely to reverberate in the mind long after the final credits have rolled.

Available on blu-ray and DVD as part of Arrow Films’ Kiju Yoshida: Love + Anarchism box set.

Original unsubbed Japanese trailer (slightly NSFW – contains nudity)

Reviews of the other movies in the set: