Carlotta: Coffret Kijû Yoshida & Eros + Massacre

[amil]

More Japanese New Wave titles announced for March 2009 (Yoshida & Oshima!!).

8-)

[Steven H]

Some great titles there, thanks for the heads up! Oshima's Three Resurrected Drunkards and Yoshida's Coup de'tat are at least two amazing films on that list among greats. I love Carlotta and 2009 is shaping up to be an extraordinary year for Japanese film fans (as if 2008 wasn't).

[amil]

Yoshida's Coup d'etat are at least two amazing films on that list among greats.

The covers (Yoshida only)! =P~

[Yojimbo]

Yoshida's Coup d'etat are at least two amazing films on that list among greats.

The covers (Yoshida only)! =P~

Great: two of them are double-sets: will help me in my credit crunch!

[amil]

And now, the Oshima's Covers!

(Onimaru cover, which wasn't yet available)

[Awesome Welles]

I didn't know where to put these, as Yoshida doesn't seem to have his own thread.

Yoshida discussing Good for Nothing
More Yoshida videos

I haven't seen any of these yet (no speakers at work). Are these taken from the Carlotta discs does anyone know?

[amil]

Are these taken from the Carlotta discs does anyone know?

Yes

[zedz]

Are these taken from the Carlotta discs does anyone know?

Yes

But with the addition of English subs! Thanks, whoever!

EDIT: And for anybody who can't decide whether or not they need this set, check out the trailer for A Story Written with Water, which will give you a small hint (maybe 15%) of the sensory experience that awaits.

[subliminac]

I know this question has been asked before, but I have yet to see any definitive response to it. Are there English subtitles available anywhere on the web that can be synched to these movies? I'm dying to see them but I'm afraid what little French I retained from college will not be enough to adequately follow along. If you can offer any suggestions please send me a pm. Thanks.

These sets would make for an incredible Masters of Cinema box. Would love for them to pick up some prime Oshimas too while they're at it, although for now I can get along fine with my Japanesenewwave boots.

[jguitar]

I just went to Amazon.fr to check on the Yoshida prices--am I misremembering something, or are these going for about 10 euros cheaper than they had been? They also appear to be out of stock. Anyone else remember what the price had been?

[tenia]

I just went to Amazon.fr to check on the Yoshida prices--am I misremembering something, or are these going for about 10 euros cheaper than they had been? They also appear to be out of stock. Anyone else remember what the price had been?

They are cheaper because of a special sale. If you can, order before June 14th, with this page

You will get -25% (deduced just before paying), up to 5 products (if you want more, just split the order I think). You can have nice deals with the Antonioni or Ozu boxsets, which are usually very expensive.

[jguitar]

Thanks! I just got the two box sets, Aveux theories actrices, Heroic Purgatory/Coup d'etat, and Eros Plus Massacre for the same price that I would have paid for the two box sets previously, i.e. for 100 euros. I thought those prices would never come down.

[tenia]

Thanks! I just got the two box sets, Aveux theories actrices, Heroic Purgatory/Coup d'etat, and Eros Plus Massacre for the same price that I would have paid for the two box sets previously, i.e. for 100 euros. I thought those prices would never come down.

Yeah, they do a great job, but their boxsets are really expensive. The Ozu and the Yoshida are nice deals as they still are composed by 5 movies at least, but the Mizoguchi and the Antonioni are just too expensive.

[Yojimbo]

I just went to Amazon.fr to check on the Yoshida prices--am I misremembering something, or are these going for about 10 euros cheaper than they had been? They also appear to be out of stock. Anyone else remember what the price had been?

They are cheaper because of a special sale. If you can, order before June 14th, with this page

You will get -25% (deduced just before paying), up to 5 products (if you want more, just split the order I think). You can have nice deals with the Antonioni or Ozu boxsets, which are usually very expensive.

Thanks
I see there's a few Oshimas I want to get, plus the remaining two Yoshidas I need to complete my collection, although I don't hold out too high hopes for 'La Promesse'

[zedz]

I've started making my way through the fabulous second batch of Yoshidas, so here are some comments. Great as these discs are, it would be a godsend if somebody ported these over and added English subtitles (MoC and SecondRun, are you listening?)

Farewell to the Summer Light

What I knew about this film suggested that it really belonged in the second of Carlotta’s Yoshida box sets, Contre le melodrame, a sense reinforced by it being the only pre-Eros Plus Massacre title released in their second batch. Although it has a lot in common with those films, it’s sort of out on its own, in terms of production, style and content.

Production-wise, it’s Yoshida’s ‘European’ film, and it has strong similarities to various European directors’ ‘American’ films of the late sixties (specifically Zabriskie Point and Model Shop), including, unfortunately, bad English language performances. I can understand non-English speaking directors not being able to see / hear how stiff and unidiomatic dialogue delivery might be, but why nobody drew their attention to this, or why their casting directors couldn’t find anybody better is a mystery. Like Zabriskie Point in particular, it’s visually ravishing, offering a glorious ‘alien’ vision of its newly discovered landscapes. Yoshida shot the film in seven European nations with a tiny Japanese crew (augmented by locals), improvising scenes around a loose structure in response to the surroundings, but it looks magnificent and has an elegant, satisfying structure and flow.

The look of the film is much more conventional than the films that came before and after: there’s even rigorous symmetry in several of the compositions. This is all relative, however, and the film’s look is anything but ordinary. The two protagonists are often presented in extreme long shot, or EXTREME long shot – e.g. two ant-like specks in an expanse of sand – and shots and actions are ritualistically repeated, as when the woman walks past the man and he turns and follows (one bravura sequence of this type begins as different points of view on the same action in the same park, but then transposes the action to different settings, transporting us through space while maintaining the impression of a loop in time).

The ‘summer light’ of the title is an important visual component, and Yoshida uses colour here with extraordinary subtlety. Okada’s clothes are often keyed to the location (e.g. a delicate apple green against the whitewashed walls of Lisbon) and in several scenes he shoots into the sun to beautiful effect: the couple silhouetted and framed by the edge of a forest, a massive backlit church on an island, stranded at low tide in a desert of sand on the Normandy coast (stills from the sequence could sell the film to anybody with eyes). There’s also an artful play with reflections throughout the film, and the use of rack focus to transition from a foreground object to the background couple as a means of visually punctuating their conversation, leaving the out-of-focus object obscuring part of the image.

Yoshida might be the Japanese New Wave director closest to the Nouvelle Vague, and this is his most European film in more ways than one. Having concluded his debut with a nod to Breathless, he now comes up with a film that, conceptually at least, seems pretty clearly an answer film to Hiroshima, mon amour (in a much more direct way than Night and Fog in Japan could ever be considered a response to Nuit et brouillard). Nagasaki stands in for Hiroshima (and Nevers), and the film hypnotically tracks the cryptic encounters of an alienated (from their past, from their homeland, from their formal relationships) prospective couple to the accompaniment of voice-over confessional narration. Resnais is also evoked in a few characteristic forward tracks, but this is no slavish copy, nor a Japanese riposte, and it’s much more like the idiosyncratic species of film Yoshida had forged over the previous few years than it is like anybody else’s work.

The film has a fascinating soundtrack. The credited composer is Sei Ichiyanagi, but there are swathes of Debussy in there and much of Sei’s contribution takes the form of evocative electronic textures: distant swarms, church bells folded in on themselves in a echo chamber. These combine with the dry intimacy of the voiceover to create a weird, suspended ambience for the film.

This film is relatively obscure even within Yoshida’s oeuvre, but few films of the time were so exquisitely composed, and while I was watching it I couldn’t help thinking that if it appeared today out of nowhere we’d all be hailing a major new filmmaking talent. So let’s hail a major old filmmaking talent instead.

Heroic Purgatory

The straighter, more subdued (but still spectacular) visuals of Farewell to the Summer Light are out and the utterly idiosyncratic compositions are back with a vengeance in Yoshida’s first post-Eros film.

I can imagine that the look of Farewell was partly determined by Yoshida’s acknowledgement that communicating his normal vision to casual local technicians whose language he didn’t speak would be just way too hard (“But Mr Yoshida! There’s a wall in front of her face! You’ve installed the tracks on the ceiling! They’re both squished into the corner of the frame! Don’t worry, I’ll fix it for you!”) Heroic Purgatory pushes the decentred aesthetic about as far as it can go, to the extent that there are only a handful of shots in the entire film that would even be conceivable in somebody else’s (unless that somebody was a disciple like Akio Jissoji).

It’s a post-Eros film thematically as well. Again, we’re addressing the issue of political activism through the vehicle of domestic melodrama, and there’s a temporal slippage between the present of radical waif Ayu and the past of assimilated sleeper Shoda. Yoshida goes even further by slipping into the future as well (1980), and much of the film seems to take place in a subjunctive mode (it’s one of the toughest films to keep up with through French subtitles so far – not because the language or concepts are especially complex, as is the case with Eros, but because the status of what we’re watching is constantly changing, and the subtleties of communication – tenses, for one thing - become increasingly significant the knottier it gets).

There’s also a hearty dollop of Death by Hanging, with several ritualistic show trials targeting a slippery range of victims, but ever circling back to Shoda. Getting a grip on all of this was a challenge, particularly when you’re being continually distracted by the audacious visuals and the insinuating sound design (Ichiyanagi again, but slightly more traditionally score-like, including some superb Liska-like choral arrangements).

[Yojimbo]

Wonderfully 'groovy' and kitschy spoof spy/sci-fi/youth revolution pic which, though identifiably 1960's, specifically post-68 Student radical idealism/chic, is just so much fun that it transcends all that description entails.

With a preponderance of youthful radical idealist protagonists whose main concerns are the length of their hemlines and mascara thickness (mostly the girls), the cut of their radical chic denims, and the degree of impenetrability of their shades (mostly the boys), you'll understand why the often convoluted, cliched and meaningless plot doesn't matter much, other than to mention that it includes blackmailing of an idealist scientist; assassinations by various means; meetings, inquiries, press conferences, grillings and inquisitions.
And much loud running through noisy corridors/car parks/designer warehouses


And its even got a bleached-blond Nipponese version of Andy Warhol, albeit sans shades, and far less publicity-hungry

Filmed in a similarly bleached monochrome as 'Eros Plus Massacre', its also brimful of weird and wonderful camera angles, futuristic Antonioni-esque framings, Mies Van De Rohe architeticture styles, and fabulous soundscapes.

The performers don't really matter as most of them are posers, rather than actors as we know them, Jim, but Yoshida's most vital contributors are his cinematographer, production designer, sound-supervisor,...and choreographer, who are all at the top of their game


Apparently it was filmed in response to the then prevalent separation of Japanese political classes between the Communists and the US-centric capitalists, it was intentionally filmed as spoof rather than displaying any bias on Yoshida's part
(although given the way it lampoons the student radicals, particularly, one has to think they weren't best pleased).

Fans of Alphaville/Cul De sac/Branded To Kill/60's Pop Art kitsch will love it.

The rest of you can make your own mind up!

[Yojimbo]

(actually written some months ago

Yoshida doesn't even hint at it, but I have to believe that this film is some kind of homage to Resnais' 'Hiroshima Mon Amour'.
Albeit, in contrast to the monochrome bleakness and gloom of the Resnais Masterpiece, this film is almost entirely filmed in the brightest and sunniest of colour schemes.
And, rather than employing flashbacks, or other trademark Resnais techniques, it more closely resembles an Antonioni movie, notably 'L'Avventura', in the way the characters are framed; in the shots; how they are backgrounded against impressive structures, and locations of great natural beauty.

And how, despite being apparently motivated by serious intentions, too often their conversations consist of repetitive, banal declarations.
(in this regard, also, I was struck by how much the statements and the intonations of the Parisian, English-speaking couple sounded almost robotic, so emotionless did they sound, in a style not dissimilar to Dreyer's masterpiece, 'Gertrud').

She is so determined to blot out the memory of the Nagasaki bombing that decimated her parent's family that she has travelled to Europe where she hopes to engulf herself in her career, and, whenever, however accidentally, she is reminded of Nagasaki, she will move on.
He is travelling throughout Europe in the hope of finding the original model for a cathedral he greatly loves and admires.

They find themselves travelling together through seven countries, in the hope, perhaps, of jointly satisfying their respective quests.

The film is stunningly beautiful to look at, largely and most memorably, filmed in long shots.
Lisbon, especially, looked absolutely ravishing in its pristine whiteness which served, again, to make me determined to seek out Tanner's 'In The White City', although, given that this film is more than 40 years old I can't be sure that the city still looks this good.

Yoshida's use of sound and music is exemplary
Coming as it did, immediately after 'Affair in the Snow', and immediately before 'Eros Plus Massacre', it might have been seen as a logical progression from the former, even if still considerably different, but it certainly wouldn't have prepared the unsuspecting viewer for 'Eros'
(its almost as if Godard had followed up 'Bande A Part' with 'Weekend').

It might be best described as a 'tone poem': undoubtedly the bombing of Nagasaki, and, indeed, Hiroshima, still resonates for Yoshida.
Perhaps this film was akin to his 'dipping his toe in the water'.

A film to float indolently on, and let gently and pleasingly caress you, rather than a work of any great profundity

[zedz]

Looks like Yojimbo and me are going to do this tag-team style! According to this site, that makes me, in the blue corner, 'Presidente Verde'!

(And, for the record, Lisbon still looks great in In the White City)

Confessions Among Actresses

Yoshida’s style was going through some interesting permutations between 1969 and 1973, and the five films from that period offer an interesting range of variations on the extremity and scope of Yoshida’s always idiosyncratic vision. After Eros + Massacre and Heroic Purgatory saw his visual style at its most radical, this colour melodrama swings right back towards the classicism of Farewell to the Summer Light. Although it’s regularly punctuated with ‘real’ decentred Yoshida shots, a much greater percentage of the film is traditionally, if artfully, framed, with actors hanging around the centre of the frame rather than clinging to its edges.

The film’s narrative follows three leading actresses, all appearing in the same movie (but not appearing in the same shot until the end of the film), and all undergoing their own personal crises. It’s very formally worked out, through a series of carefully balanced dialogues with confessors, synchronized confrontation scenes, and staggered flashbacks. If Farewell was Yoshida’s self-conscious Resnais tribute, this is him in Bergman mode (Mariko Okada’s story even begins with her experience hysterical mutism, à la Persona), though the finished product is much livelier and more pungent than anything Bergman would have come up with (maybe Zetterling’s The Girls is a more apposite reference point). On another level, it’s also referencing a big old Hollywood melodrama, pastel panoramas in various shades of bitch (there are also nods to All About Eve).

The film is verbally dense, developing its parallel narratives largely through set-piece dialogues, but the contours of each story are traditional enough that it was relatively straightforward to follow the thread in the French subtitles (certainly much easier than Heroic Purgatory). It’s interesting to see Yoshida operate in this mode. In one sense it’s simply an elaboration on / multiplication of his sixties couple-focussed melodramas (and maybe something of a throwback, nestled as it is amongst his more politically explicit works), but in another it’s one of his least typical films, with the artificiality of the filmmaking context heightening everything. The performances are much more florid and ‘actressy’ (well,duh!) than his other films, for instance.

Coup d’Etat

I saw this some time back and commented on it then (70s discussion thread?), so I’ll just briefly reiterate that this is prime Yoshida, and perhaps his most accessible mature film. The style seemed very striking when I first saw it, but in the context of his career to this point, this is some of Yoshida’s more restrained and traditional work (still looks great, however), and his staging of key scenes is smart and very effective, above all the brilliant climax. Another great score from Ichiyanagi, perhaps Yoshida’s most important and flexible collaborator during this period, who I assume is also responsible for the remarkable sound design that gives us the cawing of crows at particularly nasty or ominous moments.

[Yojimbo]

zedz since watching it I've been looking into the possibility of taking a holiday in Lisbon this year: apart from transiting at Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, it would be my first time to set foot on the Continent of Europe.

Although 'Eros Plus Massacre', if for no other reason than its ambition and epic scale, is probably considered Yoshida's Masterpiece, this film might well prove to be his most enduring, or, at least, his most widely-appreciated.

Its particularly ironic, not least given the astonishing series of 'anti-melodrama' films he made during the years 1965 through '68 with his wife, Mariko Okada that, not only does she not star, but she doesn't feature.
Its also somewhat ironic, particularly given Yoshida's mastery of the widescreen aspect that this one was filmed in 4:3 ratio.
Perhaps this was partly due to the extensive time required to be devoted to close ups and claustrophobic internal shots, or some some other reason, but its fair to say that Yoshida proves innovative in the quasi-widescreen aspects of his external shots in the way he films so much motion on the borders of the screen, and what seem to be annoyingly lopped-off images, were more likely deliberately, and effectively, done

Although the film is about a pivotal event in modern Japanese history, the coup of 26 February, 1936, its essentially the story of the coup 'leader', or, perhaps more correctly, the man that was the guiding force and inspiration, Ikki Kita: how he was propelled into the forefront, and how he faced up to the coup failure.

Online sources tend to concentrate on Kita's writings, his various theories and inspirations, and less about the man himself.

When we first meet him, he has just been brought the news that an acolyte had, after carrying out the assassination of an elderly business magnate, immediately thereafter committed suicide; the assassin's sister comes to inform Kita of his inpirational role.

Thereafter we see that, while Itta is buoyed by the notion that the assassin, Asahi, is not alone in wishing to translate his (Itta's) ideas into action, he himself prefers to remain somewhat aloof: being a man of ideas, rather than action, as he patiently explains to another acolyte: the inspirer of great, epoch-changing events, rather than a mere footsoldier, or even field marshal.

Through a carefully-balanced combination of intense closeups, panoramic external shots, claustrophobic internal compositions and dialogue, and artfully placed camera positionings, Yoshida presents Itta as variously arrogant, hubristic, wracked with self-doubt, reluctant leader.

But ultimately defiant, albeit only perhaps because he deemed that should be how history should perceive his exit from his life.

Relatively little screen time is devoted to the actions of the insurgents , themselves.
Although it was suppressed quite quickly, the coup leaders still made their mark, but I suspect Yoshida's intent may have been to display that any coup led or inspired by such a man was doomed to failure

Again sound and music combine to optimum effect with the black and white cinematography.

Rentaro Mikuni gives a powerful, memorable performance as Kita: certainly the finest by a male actor in all of Yoshida cinema and one that compares well with the best of Mariko Okada.
Interestingly enough, with his vaguely (Asian) Indian appearance, I was reminded of the nobleman of Satyajit Ray's 'The Music Room'.

Yoshida was not to make another feature film for another 13 years after this film.

On the evidence of this film,alone, it was cinema's loss.

Looks like Yojimbo and me are going to do this tag-team style! According to this site, that makes me, in the blue corner, 'Presidente Verde'!

(And, for the record, Lisbon still looks great in In the White City)

Confessions Among Actresses

Yoshida’s style was going through some interesting permutations between 1969 and 1973, and the five films from that period offer an interesting range of variations on the extremity and scope of Yoshida’s always idiosyncratic vision. After Eros + Massacre and Heroic Purgatory saw his visual style at its most radical, this colour melodrama swings right back towards the classicism of Farewell to the Summer Light. Although it’s regularly punctuated with ‘real’ decentred Yoshida shots, a much greater percentage of the film is traditionally, if artfully, framed, with actors hanging around the centre of the frame rather than clinging to its edges.

The film’s narrative follows three leading actresses, all appearing in the same movie (but not appearing in the same shot until the end of the film), and all undergoing their own personal crises. It’s very formally worked out, through a series of carefully balanced dialogues with confessors, synchronized confrontation scenes, and staggered flashbacks. If Farewell was Yoshida’s self-conscious Resnais tribute, this is him in Bergman mode (Mariko Okada’s story even begins with her experience hysterical mutism, à la Persona), though the finished product is much livelier and more pungent than anything Bergman would have come up with (maybe Zetterling’s The Girls is a more apposite reference point). On another level, it’s also referencing a big old Hollywood melodrama, pastel panoramas in various shades of bitch (there are also nods to All About Eve).

The film is verbally dense, developing its parallel narratives largely through set-piece dialogues, but the contours of each story are traditional enough that it was relatively straightforward to follow the thread in the French subtitles (certainly much easier than Heroic Purgatory). It’s interesting to see Yoshida operate in this mode. In one sense it’s simply an elaboration on / multiplication of his sixties couple-focussed melodramas (and maybe something of a throwback, nestled as it is amongst his more politically explicit works), but in another it’s one of his least typical films, with the artificiality of the filmmaking context heightening everything. The performances are much more florid and ‘actressy’ (well,duh!) than his other films, for instance.

Coup d’Etat

I saw this some time back and commented on it then (70s discussion thread?), so I’ll just briefly reiterate that this is prime Yoshida, and perhaps his most accessible mature film.

I wrote my review of this one a couple of months ago: whats this they say about 'great minds'?

I'll be watching 'Actresses' tonight: I only received it, and 'La Promesse', yesterday, along with three French-subbed Oshimas I'm eagerly looking forward to watching
(just a pity Carlotta couldn't have got Oshima himself to introduce them, instead of a French critic who I'll probably won't follow as easily as I would a French-subbed interview)

And reading the synopsis on 'Actresses' packaging I immediately thought of 'Persona' when I read about "Mariko Okada’s story even begins with her experience hysterical mutism", but do you think Bergman could have seen 'A Story Written with Water ' as a number of brief scenes looked very much like that famous scene in 'Persona'.
(although I thought he owed a debt or two to 'Wild Strawberries' in that one)

Ever since I read the synopsis of 'Actresses', I thought 'Cries and Whispers'/'Three Sisters'/'Persona', and have been eagerly looking forward to it as a result.

Looks like Yojimbo and me are going to do this tag-team style! According to this site, that makes me, in the blue corner, 'Presidente Verde'!

La Chupa Misterio shall meet you head on, El Presidente. And just remember: "we don't need no steenking bat-ches!" 8-)

[zedz]

Its particularly ironic, not least given the astonishing series of 'anti-melodrama' films he made during the years 1965 through '68 with his wife, Mariko Okada that, not only does she not star, but she doesn't feature.

She did produce it, however, which offers a nice indication of just how much of a partnership their careers were.

do you think Bergman could have seen 'A Story Written with Water ' as a number of brief scenes looked very much like that famous scene in 'Persona'?

I'd say the chance is remote, as it was my understanding that Yoshida had almost no profile in the west before Eros + Massacre (and bugger all afterwards!), but if you could research Bergman and Yoshida's appearances at various international festivals pre-66 you might find a link. Me, I've always assumed that Bergman in that film was inspired by other Europeans (e.g. Antonioni) and, just possibly, by American experimental psychodrama, which he stood a much better chance of having come in contact with.

[sidehacker]

I've seen Farewell to the Summer Light! I, uh, unfortunately have nothing to say beyond what I posted here. Yoshida's introduction of the film is available on YouTube here.

[Yojimbo]

I've seen Farewell to the Summer Light! I, uh, unfortunately have nothing to say beyond what I posted here. Yoshida's introduction of the film is available on YouTube here.

It seems we three are agreed on the Antonioni and Resnais influences but while there are similarities with 'Marienbad', there's far more of an influence, even homage to 'Hiroshima'. It would be interesting to know the facts regarding the decidely banal dialogue, particularly that spoken by the London-based couple.

I think you're being unfair to 'Escape From Japan', though: I think he said in his filmed introduction that the studio was pushing him into making a (crime) genre film, but he rebelled by defying all the conventions, particularly with his 'anti-heroic' hero.

As with the possibility that Bergman might have seen 'A Story Written With Water', prior to making 'Persona', I similarly wonder did Tarantino somehow manage to see 'Escape', prior to making 'Reservoir Dogs'
I predict that if and when 'Escape From Japan' is released in an English-subbed version, it will garner a sizeable devoted cult following

do you think Bergman could have seen 'A Story Written with Water ' as a number of brief scenes looked very much like that famous scene in 'Persona'?

I'd say the chance is remote, as it was my understanding that Yoshida had almost no profile in the west before Eros + Massacre (and bugger all afterwards!), but if you could research Bergman and Yoshida's appearances at various international festivals pre-66 you might find a link. Me, I've always assumed that Bergman in that film was inspired by other Europeans (e.g. Antonioni) and, just possibly, by American experimental psychodrama, which he stood a much better chance of having come in contact with.

do you recall the scenes of which I speak, though. And there's undoubtedly decided shades of 'Wild Strawberries', and perhaps even 'The Seventh Seal' in 'Water', so Yoshida would certainly have been an admirer of Bergman at least

Just for the record, my five favourite Yoshidas (unranked):

(although theres not much to separate the films in the 'Contre le Melodrame' box-set)

A Story Written with Water
Affair in the Snow
Coup D'État
Bitter End of a Sweet Night
Farewell to the Summer Light

and two films which belong in any self-respecting Cult Movie collection

Heroic Purgatory
Escape from Japan

Looks like Yojimbo and me are going to do this tag-team style! According to this site, that makes me, in the blue corner, 'Presidente Verde'!

Confessions Among Actresses

Yoshida’s style was going through some interesting permutations between 1969 and 1973, and the five films from that period offer an interesting range of variations on the extremity and scope of Yoshida’s always idiosyncratic vision. After Eros + Massacre and Heroic Purgatory saw his visual style at its most radical, this colour melodrama swings right back towards the classicism of Farewell to the Summer Light. Although it’s regularly punctuated with ‘real’ decentred Yoshida shots, a much greater percentage of the film is traditionally, if artfully, framed, with actors hanging around the centre of the frame rather than clinging to its edges.

The film’s narrative follows three leading actresses, all appearing in the same movie (but not appearing in the same shot until the end of the film), and all undergoing their own personal crises. It’s very formally worked out, through a series of carefully balanced dialogues with confessors, synchronized confrontation scenes, and staggered flashbacks. If Farewell was Yoshida’s self-conscious Resnais tribute, this is him in Bergman mode (Mariko Okada’s story even begins with her experience hysterical mutism, à la Persona), though the finished product is much livelier and more pungent than anything Bergman would have come up with (maybe Zetterling’s The Girls is a more apposite reference point). On another level, it’s also referencing a big old Hollywood melodrama, pastel panoramas in various shades of bitch (there are also nods to All About Eve).

The film is verbally dense, developing its parallel narratives largely through set-piece dialogues, but the contours of each story are traditional enough that it was relatively straightforward to follow the thread in the French subtitles (certainly much easier than Heroic Purgatory). It’s interesting to see Yoshida operate in this mode. In one sense it’s simply an elaboration on / multiplication of his sixties couple-focussed melodramas (and maybe something of a throwback, nestled as it is amongst his more politically explicit works), but in another it’s one of his least typical films, with the artificiality of the filmmaking context heightening everything. The performances are much more florid and ‘actressy’ (well,duh!) than his other films, for instance.

Watched it last night and will gather my thoughts more fully shortly, but did you get a sense of a mischievous Yoshida here, in the nature of the three actresses backgrounds, and the relations with their confidants/girl-friends?

I know in his filmed introductions he always looks determinedly morose, so much so that I can't recall him, over the course of the entire series, forcing so much as a 5 second smile from twixt his lips, but, despite the carefully constructed and highly-stylised nature of this whole construct, I'm not convinced it was all done with a straight face (after all, what is our abiding image of Buster Keaton?) and spot on about the 'All About Eve' connection.

And that shot of the two girls ascending towards the professor's house compares well with the best imagery of 'Summer Light.' Although he was a master of the Monochrome image, he proved he was right up there with the best of them in the technicolour stakes, also.

[zedz]

Nearly through the new batch (now if only somebody would come through with his TV work and the Ozu documentary):

A Promise

Now this is going to be difficult. After a 13 year hiatus, Yoshida returns with two films in the 1980s, and stylistically they have little in common with the visually radical works of the late sixties and early seventies. Nevertheless, they’re extremely strong works with a distinctive personality, but the absence of that extraordinary signature style is quite a shock to overcome. Elements of it are still apparent - modest foreground blocking, modest asymmetry (but only on the horizontal axis); long lenses; staging action behind glass – but in general this is his most conventionally staged and shot film to date.

It actually looks somewhat like late Imamura: rock-solid, expressive and fluid mise-en-scene, but nothing florid or ostentatious. There are even some sequences which – very effectively – anticipate the low-key moodiness of some recent Japanese horror (e.g. Kurosawa). One such sequence involves the father stalking around the darkened corridors of a hospital at night, trying to find the source of muffled cackling and tearing. Another occurs when Yoshio returns to his home during a rainstorm: dripping water, prone bodies in dark rooms. Both of these episodes could be dropped into a modern horror movie without causing a ripple.

Although that similarity is no doubt inadvertent (to the best of my knowledge Japanese horror movies in the 80s were quite different), it’s useful to approach A Promise as a horror movie, where the horror is one’s own aging. Formally, it adopts the form of an investigative thriller: an old woman is found dead by her son: was she murdered, and if so whodunit? But Yoshida doesn’t resolve the film in those terms. While we do find out what happened and why (much of the film unfolds in flashback), the issues it grapples with, specifically euthanasia / assisted suicide, and the relationships it explores, turn out to be far more important than the nuts and bolts of the plot.

Those ideas are carefully organised within the dramatic action to exploit all sorts of messy ambiguities (but without appearing unduly schematic): how clearly does the mother express her wish to die? (could she just be parroting the night calls she heard in the hospital?); how does decisive inaction measure up against decisive action?; how much ‘tainting’ with self-interest will invalidate the claim of ‘assistance’?; how much projection is involved in the father’s understanding of his spouse’s wishes?

In his introduction, Yoshida explains his film’s mission, and it’s an ambitious one. He wanted to find out how one could depict the difference between murder and euthanasia – essentially the same act, with different motivations – in purely visual terms, without resorting to explanatory language. This is an extremely valuable insight into the project of the film, and may help to explain the relatively straightforward, unelaborated style he adopts here.

Once you get past its difference from previous works, it’s a powerful, beautifully crafted film. Rentaro Mikuni returns from Coup d’Etat (he’s also in Wuthering Heights, making him sort of a substitute fetish actor for a run of features, in the absence of Mariko Okada). He’s superb, as are the other actors (specifically Imamura alumnus Kawarazaki Choichiro as the blank, bland son).

Wuthering Heights

Another late film; yet another version of Yoshida. This, he announces, is his only period film (the recent history of Eros + Massacre and Coup d’Etat being a different barrel of mackerel) and thus his most expensive production by some distance.

Again, the old Yoshida style is largely suppressed, but instead we get a striking classicism, particularly in the spectacular volcanic exteriors. At first glance, much of the film relies on traditional shot / reverse-shot syntax, based around two character encounters, but look closer and you’ll notice that Yoshida creates that sense of interplay with constantly shifting (but static) set-ups. When he returns to a given shot or reverse-shot, the camera position has shifted, so that one’s sense of space becomes very subtly charged and tweaked. For me, it meant that the settings never became mere background, and the character relationships maintained a potential volatility even when it appeared that their roles were fixed. (Appropriate, given that the film is to some degree concerned with the flexibility and instability of social roles).

There’s plenty of visual spectacle, particularly in the outdoor scenes, but it’s much more in line with the look of contemporary Japanese period films (e.g. Kagemusha and Ran), or, in its deployment of figures in a primal, steaming volcanic landscape, various Pasolini films. One striking image looks down in longshot on the splayed body of an assaulted Shino from a bluff while a seemingly endless stream of birds fly out from beneath our feet (out of the earth, in a sense). As with A Promise, the film is only conventional when viewed from the vantage point of Yoshida’s earlier, more extreme work. Considered objectively, it’s a very impressive accomplishment.

It’s really a lot closer to later Kurosawa than earlier Yoshida, even down to the kabuki-esque performances (though Kurosawa has always had those gurning slapstick peasants) and the slashing violence (complete with arterial geysers – the film’s Heathcliff surrogate, Onimaru, has gained his elevated position by being a super-warrior, and the film’s climax is a duel on the side of the volcano, with Onimaru losing his hand – not your standard Bronte adaptation!)

The relocation of the story to a volcano in medieval Japan works surprisingly well, and in his introduction Yoshida explains that he was not interested in the material as an epic love story, but, under the sign of Georges Bataille (whom he goes so far as to suggest should be considered co-author of the film), as a matrix for exploring his old territory of gender relationships.

[Yojimbo]

Wuthering Heights (Arashi ga oka)

This was only Yoshida's second film after a 13 year 'exile' from cinema, following the release of 'Coup d'Etat'

I'm not sure of the exact reasons for this exile, perhaps it was due to a lack of commercial success, or to a change in critical and commercial opinion against 'The Young Turks'.
And I can't speak for the first film he made after his 'return', 'The Promise', but I suspect that to at least some degree he 'compromised his vision' in order to get to making movies again.

Not that displaying a distinct Kurosawa influence is necessarily a bad thing: far from it, but I feel that, with 'Wuthering Heights' Yoshida went beyond 'influence', and even 'homage',....and stole wholesale from 'The Old Master'.
From the opening scene, which smacks of 'Throne of Blood', much of the best of what is to follow smacks too much of a glorious stew of 'Throne of Blood' spiced up with a healthy dash of 'Ran', and maybe a smattering of 'Rashomon' for good measure.
And it didn't help that the 'Heathcliff' character came across as nothing so much as a deranged, alcoholic Ronaldinho, crossed with an overly camp Pete ('You Spin Me 'Round') Burns.

Allied to the fact that, despite its transposition from 19th century England to medieval Japan, its a far too literal filmed adaptation to be deemed worthy representation of one of the greatest, and most underrated, Japanese filmmaking talents of the past 50 years.

Perhaps I'm being far too critical, and especially with being over-familiar with the Bronte novel, left me particularly impatient, but having marvelled at so many masterly, and original, movies that Yoshida made during his 'Golden Age' of the early 60's, through early 70's, I'm entitled to feel more than a little let-down, even on his behalf.
And maybe I should direct my ire more to those who forced him into exile.

It may well be that the the medieval epic was just not his 'forte', and perhaps, even in his peak, this most coolly calculating, and precise, of filmmakers might have similarly struggled to represent the raw, earthy passion of the original on the screen.

Yes there are some marvellous scenes,...and stunning widescreen external visuals. But I was entitled to expect far more.

File Under: 'Everybody's Got Bills To Pay'

[gelich]

An English-subtitled DVD of the uncut version of Eros + Massacre can be found here.