EROS PLUS MASSACRE (1969)

Sakae Osugi and Noe Ito could be called the Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg of Japan: leftists murdered by military thugs not long after World War I. Rather than Marxists, Osugi and Ito were anarchists, which might make them more the Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman of Japan. Like Goldman's anarchism, theirs was laced with once-scandalous "free love" ideas. In particular, Osugi developed into an individualist anarchist influenced by Max Stirner, the author of The Ego and Its Own and an arch-enemy of Marx. It's impossible for me to say how large these martyrs loomed in Japanese leftist culture in the late 1960s, but for Yoshishige (Kiju) Yoshida they were painfully relevant. It was not just for budgetary reasons that he shot many of the scenes of their story in the modern streets of Japan. They are with us today, he seems to say. To illustrate the point, not only does he have two self-dramatizing modern students making a film (or preparing some sort of project) about them; he has his modern young woman attempt to interview an uncooperative Ito. At the end of the picture, the modern couple gather the cast of Osugi and Ito's story for a commemorative photo, and the assumption is that these are the historical people, not actors (played by actors) playing those people. Eros Plus Massacre is the reverse of the nearly contemporary Goodbye Uncle Tom, the historical persons haunting the present rather than the filmmakers invading the past. The effect is theoretically similar to but far less comical than Marco Ferreri's staging of the Custer massacre in 1970s Paris in Don't Touch the White Woman. It's meant to be problematic if not traumatic. Why should it all end with a film director (I presume) making a noose of celluloid, climbing onto a pile of film cans and hanging himself? It's a powerful set of images, but did what we've seen justify it? I sense some sincere new-wave anxiety on Yoshida's part over whether he has done justice to history, to ideas, to human relationships. I can't help thinking of Jean-Luc Godard's struggles to express ideas, though in particulars E+M reminds me more specifically of Alan Resnais' La Guerre est Finie, another juggling act involving political commitment and sexual yearning. If one thing is clear after three and a half hours, it's that the political is the personal -- or that the one is inseparable from the other. How free can we be when needs drive us together but can't hold us together? For Yoshida, it seems like the personal conflicts that led one of Osugi's lovers to stab him are a greater tragedy than the political conflicts and confusions that led to Osugi's death.

Eros Plus Massacre is a deliberately difficult film, but it's also the work of a pictorial genius. Nearly every frame is an impeccable composition incorporating meticulous set design. Even if the ideas elude you and the actors don't earn your empathy, the picture is thrilling to look at. Working with cinematographer Motokichi Hasegawa, Yoshida films in an often deliberately washed-out monochrome evocative of faded photographs, giving an impression of pastness even while filming on modern locations. He plays freely with space and proportion, often placing the actors far left or right of center, or near the bottom of the screen, daring emptiness to dominate the frame. He also films action brilliantly, from a surreal rugby game with an urn of Osugi's ashes as the ball to the labyrinthine tracking shots as Osugi's attacker stalks him through a house whose walls eventually collapse in all directions.

 

 

Toshi Ichiyanagi's score perfectly expresses the film's juxtaposition of romanticism and moder discordance. The cast, led as usual by Yoshida's wife Mariko Okada as Noe Ito, is solid. The film's too long for me to go on synopsizing it, and to be honest, I don't feel that I got all of what Yoshida meant to say. But I feel confident that there's more to get, and that Eros Plus Massacre is a film that will reward multiple viewings both visually and intellectually.

FAREWELL TO THE SUMMER LIGHT (1968)

Among those who know the work of director Yoshishige (Kiju) Yoshida, Farewell to the Summer Light is a divisive film. Some viewers rank it among his greatest films, while some consider it one of his worst. I can see how it might annoy people. Filmed in Europe, it's not about Europe. Conspicuously dated "1968" at the end, it has nothing to say about the upheavals of that year.

Mariko Okada and Tadashi Yokouchi: Are they game pieces on a map of fate, or is Europe (and Rome specifically, below) their personal game board?

The continent forms a pretty backdrop for an on-off affair between Makoto, a visiting Japanese scholar (Tadashi Yokouchi) and Naoko, an expatriate Japanese purchaser for an import-export firm (Mariko Okada, aka Mrs. Yoshida). Naoko is in Europe but not of it, married not to a European but to another expatriate, an American who, in one of the film's few humorous touches, harangues Makoto on existentialism and the culture of the copy. Naoko says it's an honor for her husband to address Makoto thus.

Okada and Helene Soubielle: A Japanese playing the part of a fake European and a European serving Yoshida as a fake American.

The scene adds another level of alienation for American viewers: the American, Robert, and his sister are played by French actors. Paul Beauvais had previously acted in Jean-Luc Godard's Petit Soldat while Farewell was Helene Soubielle's second film role in a short career. Yoshida dubs them into stilted English (Okada and Yokouchi presumably speak their own English lines, phonetically or otherwise), but his Japanese audience is going to read the subtitles on the right side of the screen, while an American viewer gets hit with a simultaneous alternate rendering of the English dialogue via the subtitles on the bottom of the screen translating the Japanese dialogue. In any event, the "Americans" are cyphers. I was expecting the sister to attempt an affair with Makoto, but it never happens. The visiting scholar is wrapped up in several levels of preoccupation, and that's the actual subject of the film.

Makoto is interested in finding the cathedral that inspired the first Christian church built in Nagasaki by Portuguese missionaries. On a deeper level, he's in Europe looking for some revelation about Japan, or about himself. Naoko is a Nagasaki native herself, but lost her mother and brother in the 1945 atom bombing. She's lived in self-imposed exile from Japan for years, unable to accept the scarred, altered country as her home. As lovers and traveling companions, Naoko and Makoto look to each other as representations of Japan, of Nagasaki, or simply "home." Makoto criticizes Naoko's apparent rootlessness and urges her to return to Japan. Finally, he identifies her with the cathedral of his quest. However, she points him toward the actual, historical cathedral, but claims that it is "hers" in some profound way because it reminds her of Nagasaki before the bomb. Europe, it seems, is where people go to create personal landscapes of meaning -- which is arguably what Yoshida did for this film.

Working in color for the first time in five years, since Escape From Japan, Yoshida swings for the seats with almost every shot of Farewell. Landscape and architecture provide ample temptation for self-consciously artful compositions all over the continent. Here Yoshida bids to be recognized as the most "European" Japanese director the way Akira Kurosawa is often deemed the most "American." He indulges in Antonioni-style displays of signage and finds a similar paradoxical beauty in rampant commercialism. He indulges further in Godard-style fantasy, following a mondo-esque visit to a bullfight with a vision of Naoko killing herself with a toreador's sword in the middle of the ring, with Makoto the only spectator.

Ai no corrida?

In the battle of style against subject, style would seem to have won in a Napoleonic rout -- except that there is substance here. Naoko and Makoto's neglect of the reality of Europe and their failed attempt to construct a shared realm of meaning there or anywhere is a tale worth telling, and it could just as well be told with American or African or Chinese actors -- or Europeans. Alienation is Yoshida's subject, and his conclusion is the opposite of Donne's and Hemingway's. In Farewell, every man and woman is an island; Naoko expressly identifies herself with a coastal castle that is separated from shore by the night tide. It isn't exactly an inspiring or uplifting thesis, but on the other hand you have some of the most dazzling camera compositions of the Sixties, and they do express something profound, whether we like it or not.

FLAME AND WOMEN (1967)

In Yoshishige (Kiju) Yoshida's previous film, The Affair, the dominant visual motif was women wandering in traffic, automotive or locomotive, representing the risky waywardness of passion. The heroine's mother had been hit by a truck, for instance, and was revealed to be having an affair, while the heroine herself has some threatening encounters with trains. For Flame and Women (also known in English as Impasse) the not-so-symbolic theme is child endangerment. Several times over, infants are shown in peril, or dead.

The real threats to Japan's children, Yoshida tells us this time, are alienation within the nuclear family and the reduction of children themselves to commodities and status symbols. His story makes the point by showing us the fraught interrelationship of two couples. Ibuki and Ritsuko (Mariko Okada, Yoshida's wife and star) have a toddler son, Takashi. Ibuki is sterile, "a man but not a father," but to prove himself a man he must become a father. He arranges for Ritsuko to receive artificial insemination from his gynaecologist friend Sakaguchi, whose marriage to Shina (Mayumi Ogawa) is childless so far; she, too, seems to be sterile. Ritsuko resists the procedure, disliking the idea of bearing (the English subtitles unfortunately say "wearing") another man's child. But Ibuki insists that it'll be his child as long as she's his wife. She's unconvinced, and would rather believe that a tractor driver she seduced (or was raped by) out in the country is the real father. At the same time, Sakaguchi envies the children he shepherds into life, and struggles with an emotional attachment to Takashi and his mother, while Shina, usually preoccupied with birdwatching, picks the little boy up off the street and takes him on an outing without asking permission. Despite that episode, Ritsuko comes to feel as if Sakaguchi is the true father of her child, while Ibuki insists on his essential paternity no matter what....

Mariko Okada hides (not so sincerely) from a hunky tractor driver, while Mayumi Ogawa takes Baby Takashi for a worrisome walk across a bridge.

Flame and Women portrays a society in dysfunction in which families go through the motions of reproduction and science enables them to do without the emotional ties upon which children depend. Yoshida raises the question of what the children will think in a prologue and epilogue, the first showing a baby's eye view of adults speculating on the impressions the infant will form, the latter a long shot of parents laughingly teaching a child to distinguish his parents from trees, rocks and leaves. After sitting through the grim narrative, you're meant to ask how, exactly, any child can identify his true parents, biological or not. Artificial insemination complicates the question, but the troubles men and women have connecting beg the question in the first place.

Along with his visions of infanticide, Yoshida achieves some beautiful black and white landscapes in his forest location with the help of first-time cinematographer Yuji Okumura. The monochrome keeps the imagery austere but preserves the splendor of nature nearly as well as the color cinematography of Yoshida's Akitsu Springs. As for the actors, Mariko Okada is as good as ever, but Mayumi Ogawa steals the show as the dangerously flighty Shina. Flame and Women finds Yoshida still working out relationship issues, intellectually at least, with a sharp cinematic imagination that makes his relative critical neglect among Americans a bigger mystery with each of his films that I watch.

WOMAN OF THE LAKE (1966)

The surprising thing about this thought-provoking bit of intellectual sleaze from Japanese New Wave director Yoshishige (Kiju) Yoshida is that it's a literary adaptation, taken from a novel (known in English as The Lake) by Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata. That's surprising in retrospect because the story, as reimagined by Yoshida, is so essentially cinematic. Here's the difference: the Kawabata novel, I've learned, is about a guy who steals a woman's purse and finds a bunch of money inside. His theft of the money is compromising to the woman, Miyako, because it was her earnings as the kept woman of an old lecher. In the movie, the compromising item the thief finds in the purse is film.

In Yoshida's version of the story, Miyako is married to a dull older man but having an affair with a younger man, Kitano, who is also a bit of a stiff. Nothing seems to hold Miyako and Kitano together but their regular trysts in a hotel room, and you can see that Miyako's starting to get bored with him. His odd manner of addressing her as "Ma'am" or "Lady" has got to be off-putting. Sensing that the end is near himself, Kitano wants something to remember her by: nude pictures. Miyako consents reluctantly, realizing that photos could get her in trouble down the line. Kitano gets the pictures developed but doesn't have prints made. Seeing this, Miyako puts the film in her own purse, which is how the thief gets it after accosting her at night. He seems to have blackmail in mind at first, but he grows obsessed with Miyako, telling her that he's fallen in love with the woman in the photos. She responds to his interest as Kitano becomes more defensive and belligerent. She still wants the photos back, however, even though destroying those links to her could be a metaphorical murder of the new man in her life....

Woman of the Lake lets us see Mariko Okada from multiple angles.

Yoshida has transformed a literary episode into a story designed for cinema. His larger subject is the way we idealize, eroticize and objectify people through images. He illustrates his theme with a confrontation between Kitano and the would-be blackmailer at a grungy camera club, one of those places where shutterbugs snap shots of nude models, and with an extended visit to the making of some sort of sex film on a beach. Yoshida also tries to demonstrate his premise with a self-consciously fragmentary presentation of Miyako, played by his wife and frequent leading lady, Mariko Okada. As Miyako goes out at night, the director repeatedly cuts back and forth between front and rear views of the actress. Lit from behind, her face becomes a dark void in the close-ups. He sometimes seems as interested in showing us the back of Okada's neck as in showing her pretty face.

At the camera club (above) possession of the anonymous model isn't an issue. It's a different story (below) when the possession of pictures can mean possession of Miyako herself.

With a theme like this, Woman of the Lake is purposefully problematic. Can anyone capture Miyako's essence on film, or do they project their desires on the image? Do they then project the image back on the real woman? For that matter, Yoshida practically begs us to ask, can cinema or any visual medium capture a person's true self or lay down a true reading of even a fictional character? There's an alienating pretentiousness to the whole project, but since it's meant to be that way I still have to respect the director's ambition. As far as I can tell, it's a film that's meant to make you ask questions as much as it is an invitation to empathize with the main characters or leer at nearly naked women. I think it can be enjoyed as a mildly erotic, mildly noirish small-scale thriller, but it may be more likely to stimulate the mind than anything else.

ESCAPE FROM JAPAN (1964)

Yoshishige (Kiju) Yoshida's follow-up (not counting a film not included in my new collection) to Akitsu Springs takes the reputed yet globally neglected Japanese master director into genre territory with satirical intentions. Timed to coincide with the Tokyo Olympiad and released on July 4, Escape From Japan can be safely assumed to have something to say about Japan's place in the world and its relations with the U.S. in particular. It also proves less an imitation than a black-comic send-up of the sort of sordid crime stories that Seijun Suzuki and others specialized in.

A characteristic view from the ceiling, repeated often in Escape From Japan.

Escape chronicles the misadventures of Tatsuo Ihara, a small-time criminal who dreams of seeking his fortune away from Japan. I've seen the type before in some of the "Nikkatsu Noir" films collected in a Criterion Eclipse box set last year. While the Nikkatsu protagonists usually yearned to go to Brazil and make a new start through hard work, Tatsuo wants to become a celebrity entertainer in America. He idolizes the Rat Pack and fancies himself a singer in their style. Yoshida portrays a people enthralled by American pop culture, the probably inevitable result of the American occupation. Later in the film we'll see a Japanese woman with a GI boyfriend cajole a black GI into doing a Harry Belafonte impersonation. At the same time, Japan is celebrating its restoration as a respectable nation by hosting the 1964 Olympics. By doing so, are they reasserting their own autonomous identity or is this another instance of aping the West or angling for its approval? Yoshida doesn't exactly take a stand one way or another, but by having Tatsuo eventually intrude on the Olympic celebrations he does seem to be raising the question.

Tatsuo's initial concern is with helping his cool drummer buddy Takashi rob a Turkish bath in Tokyo's Shinjuku district. It's an inside job; Takashi's girlfriend Yasue works there. They take a tough guy along who proves the only competent member of the gang, since Tatsuo's a nervous novice and Takashi proves a hopeless drug addict who passes out in the middle of blowtorching a safe. They still manage to escape with the swag, but not without taking a cop on an unwanted ride that ends with a bullet.

The tough guy thinks that Yasue might squeal now that murder's involved. He wants to kill her by forcing her to OD on sleeping pills, but not without raping her first. While Takashi staggers about Tatsuo screws up the courage to save Yasue by shooting the tough guy. After leaving Takashi to dry out with his share of the loot, Tatsuo, now one of Japan's most wanted, goes on the run with Yasue in search of a way out of the country. She has a friend -- the woman with the GI boyfriend, who occasionally smuggles emigrants onto military planes. Because a lot of Japan-US flights are tied up during the Olympics, the best that can be arranged is a flight to Korea. Tatsuo briefly shares a meat locker with a Korean who wants to go to "the people's republic" -- that's North Korea, folks, -- and doesn't want a thug like Tatsuo defiling any of his sacred soil. Tatsuo luckily wanders away before the MPs raid the locker and hooks up with Yasue again. Before long, she loses the rest of their money somewhere on a golf course and gets arrested trying to retrieve it. Finally, Tatsuo sees no way out, as a fugitive, other than appropriating Japan's most public occasion by hijacking a radio truck covering the Olympic torch run. Before he realizes that the intrepid reporters have kept their mikes running, he tells the world of his motives, sneering that Japan doesn't interest him. Now more of a cop magnet than ever, he has one last run to make to the harbor if he hopes to escape from Japan....

Escape is an anti-crime film, not because Yoshida makes any effort to preach against crime, but because he portrays his criminal characters as anything but cool. Tatsuo is an idiot and a crybaby, delusional about his musical talents and constantly protesting his innocence. There's nothing glamorous about his exploits, including his murder of a yakuza by the exact method from which he saved Yasue: forcing him to chug sleeping pills. Because movies so often (or too often, depending on your attitude) portray criminals as cool rebels, a film that portrays its criminal protagonist as a hysterical wretch can't help but seem like a parody. Whether Yoshida was consciously parodying Nikkatsu noirs or Japanese crime films in general, he clearly did intend to make a kind of comedy. The comedy consists a little too much of people screaming for my taste, but there is a more substantial satire of an inanely Americanized Japan, against which Yoshida contrasts, in bookend sequences, the abstract art of painter Taro Okamoto. Similarly, the score is shared by the banal American-style pop music Tatsuo loves (apparently composed by Masao Yagi) and the astringent, portentiously modernist sounds of Toru Takemitsu. The juxtaposition of musical styles is effective, but the paintings look more like a way to maintain Yoshida's "Japanese New Wave" credentials.

Samples from cinematography by Toichiro Narushima.

I was entertained by the satire and by Yoshida's stylish direction, but I don't think his heart was in this film as much as it was invested in Akitsu Springs. From what I've read, Escape suffered from studio interference that prodded Yoshida toward independence in the future. Looking at the films to come, there are a lot more intense-sounding romances (including a version of Wuthering Heights) and few if any crime films. As a crime film, Escape doesn't surpass the best of the films it satires, but it does build up the case for Yoshida as a director we should know more about.

Maybe you'll get a better idea from this trailer, uploaded to YouTube by TheAsianVisionS:

AKITSU SPRINGS (1962)

When I seek cinema entertainment abroad, Japan is my third-favorite stop on the wild-world-of-cinema map after Italy and France. I know a lot of people in that neighborhood: Kurosawa, of course, but also Kenji Fukasaku and Seijun Suzuki along with the establishment masters like Mizoguchi, Ichikawa, Oshima, etc. Needless to say, there's still a lot of uncharted cinematic territory in the island nation, but the intrepid Alan Fish at the Wonders in the Dark blog recently blazed a trail through the career of a neglected Japanese master. Yoshishige Yoshida (also known as Kiju Yoshida) has directed feature films from the early 1960s into the early 21st century, his last appearing in 2002. Surveying a number of key films from the Sixties through the Eighties, Fish has ventured a case for considering Yoshida among the top rank Japanese directors. Thanks to Fish's colleague at Wonders, Sam Juliano, I now have an opportunity to explore Yoshida's work myself.

My initial thought was: any director with a picture called Eros Plus Massacre in his filmography will have my attention -- but we'll get to that one later. We start with a project Yoshida undertook for a star actress, hia future wife Mariko Okada, who had taken a hand in the production of her 100th movie. Okada was busy, not old; she was only 29 at the time, but the milestone was a big deal for the publicity department of the Shichoku studio and gets a separate credit even before the studio logo appears. I wasn't familiar with the name or the face at first, but a filmography search revealed that I had seen her in Hiroshi Inagaki's "Samurai" trilogy from the 1950s. I'll be seeing a lot more of her in Yoshida's work, and after Akitsu Springs that sounds like a good thing.

The movie, adapted from a Japanese best-seller, illustrates the attraction-repulsion relationship of Shusaku Kawamoto (Hiroyuki Nagato),an ailing returned soldier and aspiring writer, and Shinko (Okada), the young proprietor of the title resort. The time is the bitter end of World War II, and Shusaku finds his own home a bombed-out wreck. He's in a bad way by the time he reaches Akitsu, and Shinko makes it a project to nurse him back to health and discourage him from killing himself. The benevolence makes her feel good. His will to live is really restored when he feels a great urge to comfort Shinko when she breaks down in tears upon hearing the news of Japan's surrender. But when he hits another trough of frustration later, he invites Shinko to die with him. She laughs at the idea initially, but when he confesses his love she decides to join him.

Shusaku's plan is to tie their bodies together and jump together into the local stream. In an oddly matter-of-fact scene he goes about binding Shinko while she natters on about how her relatives and friends will react to her demise. When he starts to put the rope around her chest, she collapses in a giggling fit; she's very ticklish. The absurdity of the whole episode finally makes him laugh as well, and the suicidal spell is broken. Before long, however, Shusaku quits the Springs and goes to Tokyo, where his brother is a shaming literary success and he himself soon has a wife and a baby. Akitsu becomes a refuge from the frustrations of literary and family life, but he never wants to stay for long. Eventually, Shinko decides that the only way their love will last is if they die as they'd planned long before....

Akitsu Springs is Romantic with the literary capital R, not only in its emotional intensity but in Yoshida's vivid use of expressive landscapes. The location cinematography by Toichiro Narushima is ravishing, and Yoshida's camerawork makes the film a treasure simply as a cinematic travelogue of postwar Japan. Hikaru Hayashi's music sustains the Romantic mood with a main theme that gains tragic resonance as the film goes on.

The story seems to say something about postwar Japan -- why else start in August 1945? -- but the romantic elements of the story really are universal. But I couldn't help noticing a similarity to Nagisa Oshima's Violence at Noon in Akitsu Springs' concern with deferred suicide. Maybe Japanese cinema of the time was coming to critical terms with the romantic ideal of double suicide and its psychological or social implications. Yoshida's approach is more straightforward, as his picture is more melodramatic than Oshima's, more readily pegged as a "women's picture" or a "weepie." But it has an emotional power to which Oshima doesn't aspire, the cumulative effect of Yoshida's pictorial brilliance -- this is a strong Exhibit A in the case for his genius -- and Mariko Okada's riveting performance, ably supported by Nagato. Everything builds to a climax that combines acting, cinematography, landscape and Hayashi's score for an almost operatic effect.

To give you a full sense of the pictorial richness of Akitsu Springs I could take screencaps until I wouldn't know when to stop. The picture's plot might sound conventional or cliched to some, but Yoshida's direction makes it visually compelling from beginning to end. Whether the director lives up to this early triumph remains to be seen -- by me, that is. Expect to see more of him here in the months to come.

For now, check out the original Japanese trailer, uploaded to YouTube by TheAsianVisionS. No subtitles, alas: Akitsu Springs was never released commercially in the U.S., and only had its film festival premiere in 2005! After seeing the film, that fact becomes a mystery.