Carlotta: Coffret Kijû Yoshida & Eros + Massacre

[Steven H]

The bravura sequence comes near the end, after Shizuo’s car accident, in the form of his eerie, slow-motion death-haunted dream. There’s a particularly amazing ‘shot’ in which Yumiko (his wife) and Shizuko (his mother) pass in single file before his eyes again and again and again. But the final sequence, one of Yoshida’s highly charged little-boat-in-big-water scenes (we’d seen rehearsals for this in End of a Sweet Night and 18 Who Stir Up a Storm), is probably even better, particularly the way in which it and the film just end, with the sun’s reflected glare annihilating the characters.

The more of these films I see, the harder it is to believe that at least some of them won’t be picked up by a bold English language company.
How can you see this film and not be impressed?

Excellent notes, zedz! I had a hard time controlling two things about my reaction to this film. One, was I tried not to *constantly* talk about it on this message board (mostly because I hadn't seen it with subs, and even seeing something a dozen or more times without, you're going to misspeak.) Two, is that this film immediately shot up into the top five or ten films for me, period... though I did a poor job of controlling my utterly gobby jaw dropping Shreckness over it (and it's a good thing about the second one).

The drama connects, the mystery connects, the modernism, acting, pacing, sound design (BRILLIANT and frankly Bresson like scene transitions), blocking etc etc, it just all works for me. It's like the drama I wish I could make albeit in the 60s and with a drop dead gorgeous wife/CINEMA SUPERSTAR willing to do some crazy arty incest flick. I realize I'm doing it no favors in the "hype" department, but I don't really see that being an issue since it's hard to find anyway.

I also like how it looks forward to Eros Plus Massacre in it's ability to travel back and forth in time, though clearly not to the level the later film explored (I'm still getting my head around it years after seeing it.) Story Written With Water is just damn good at playing with flashbacks. Speaking of which, when he's remembering his father in the hotbath and the cancer... striking bit of filmmaking, that and so beautifully rendered in widescreen black and white.

I agree with you about 18 Youths. And I'll need to sit down with Escape From Japan, which I enjoyed, but found maybe a tad too sedate for what the director was going for (great ending, though.)

[zedz]

Thanks Steven. At least there are two of us cheerleaders now, hairy legs and all. For me, there was much more going on in Story than I could pick up unsubbed (even with Desser's thorough synopsis), so the film was a much richer experience this time around.

The Lake

Or The Lake of Women, or Woman of the Lake. The Lake was the name of the novel it adapts. No lakes in the film anyway, so I don’t know that it matters.

This film seems to be more of a mood piece than A Story Written with Water, and it’s a complete triumph in that respect, a deeply mysterious film, though not a mystery film. Like some Lynch, it’s a case of atmosphere trumping everything else, and, also like Lynch, it’s a film where non-naturalistic sound design carries a huge burden of the drama. Yoshida makes brilliant use of unnerving silence, close-miked dialogue (with a lack of verisimilitude in terms of background noise) and the quizzical interlocking motifs of the score.

The story is basic – an infidelity is exposed when the woman’s handbag, containing compromising photos, is stolen. The thief lures her to the seaside, where they become involved. It’s brought alive, however, by consistently amazing lighting and photography. The theft is represented by Mariko Okada, dressed in white, on a dark street, lit from behind by a huge spotlight, so she’s reduced to a white figure in an expanse of darkness, or, when the camera shifts to the front, to a backlit halo. There’s Yoshida’s trademark masking and blocking, of course, as well as a disorienting, expressive use of long lenses and, towards the end, amazing coastal landscapes, including a photogenic shipwreck (shades of Through a Glass Darkly). That setting produces an exemplary composition, where the half-destroyed hull provides a mask for either side of the screen as a procession of people pass along the beach in the distance, framed in the central panel. All but invisible (an artful stray beam of light picking out their silhouettes), a man and a woman lurk in medium closeup in the darkness on either side of the frame. If I could do some framegrabs, I could pick out half a dozen incredible shots that would get everyone banging on Criterion’s door about this film.

Some other noteworthy parts of the film: the credit sequence, interspersed with very brief flash / fade to black glimpses of the nude shots that form the MacGuffin of the film (Texas Chainsaw Massacre did pretty much the same thing, but who knows whether Hooper would have seen this film); the clifftop climax, in which Okada’s implacable advance is assembled from highly-charged fragments like something from early Eisenstein; and another great ending, which is as abruptly swallowed in blackness as Story Written with Water was in whiteness.

[Perkins Cobb]

I've only been able to see Love Affair at Akitsu Springs (on a bleary-eyed Sunday morning at the Walter Reade) but I thought it was terrific. Somebody fan-sub these babies and I'll join the cheerleaders.

[sidehacker]

Wannabe cheerleader here as well. I've only seen Yoshida's The Affair but it was really fantastic. Top 50 material in my book. Thankfully, it looks like some folks at ADC are working on custom English subtitles for the non-French speakers.

[zedz]

Wannabe cheerleader here as well. I've only seen Yoshida's The Affair but it was really fantastic. Top 50 material in my book.

My favourite of his 60s stuff, and next up in viewing order, if I've got it right. The Lynch analogies are probably even more apropos in this case.

[yoshimori]

Some images almost randomly snapped from a vlc player.

Story Written with Water

spies
photo op
beads
are you even a man
hospital
railing
white head
eye
car shot 1
car shot 2
boybath
mommy
high mommy
dress

Farewell Summer Light
(Yoshida's Mon amour derniere a la guerre Hiroshimabad est finie)

greenery
traffic
bullfight
tie
xws
lamp
two-shot
subtitles
coffee
gate 5
JAL

[zedz]

Great caps yoshimori. Farewell Summer Light looks particularly mouth-watering - hopefully the next Carlotta box(es) won't be far away.

The Affair

My favourite going in, and probably still is (though A Story Written with Water is tough competition). The Affair is less purely atmospheric than The Lake, but it has that same Lynchian air of mystery, that sense that a bad relationship generates its own waking nightmares.

Several of the film’s key scenes seem to me like they could be inserted quite happily into Inland Empire (though for me Yoshida’s visual and audio sense is much more compelling). Unhappy, but faithful, wife Oriko accompanies her wild sister-in-law Yuko on a late-night drive with several wild young men to the beach. The women are left in the car while the guys frolic in the surf. Suddenly, Yuko gets up and walks off into the woods. Oriko remains in the car, but soon feels self-conscious and follows after her sister-in-law. Walking through the dark trees and undergrowth, she comes upon a run-down beach-house. She goes inside and sees, in another room, Yuko being sexually assaulted by a stranger. She watches, then retreats. The next day, she reports the assault, but Yuko claims it was consensual and the charges are dropped. On another night, Oriko returns to the beachhouse, finds the man, and is herself assaulted (she too submits to his brutal embrace). In the daylight, she returns for a third time, but finds instead a ballet school.

That gives you an idea of the eerie, hallucinatory content of the film, but it gives no sense of how brilliantly and hair-raisingly it’s presented. Yoshida’s nights are inky black and threatening, the beachhouse is grimy and unkempt (so the assault is viewed through dusty windows), compositions are unbalanced and constantly surprising / disorienting, and the sound design is intense and completely non-naturalistic. Much of the film is silent (in the sense that in the middle of a scene, between lines, there are no background noises): ambient noise (such as the surf) is mixed in and out quite deliberately, and the score is little more than ominous or bizarre chords punctuating the ideal silence. Yuko’s assault, though quite violent, makes no sound as Oriko views it from an adjacent room, but the soundtrack is filled with muffled sirens. Oriko’s own assault, also viewed from another room, starts out completely silent, with the exception of the exaggerated sound of a bottle they knock over, until we enter the same room as them and a whistling wind comes up.

Yoshida’s sound work in this film may be his most ambitious and creative (of the films I’ve seen). The climactic line in Oriko’s last meeting with Mitsuhuru, viewed from outside the window of his room, is rendered mute. A scene of a poetry reading flashback begins with wild sound of cicadas, which is slowly mixed into an electronic chirping noise, then mixed back to the real sound as the scene concludes. I presume that composer Sei Ikeno was a close collaborator with Yoshida on the sound of the film. Apart from a lush, Delerue-like theme that plays on the radio, the score is very much of a piece with the angular, minimalist vibe. Sei also scored The Lake and Masumura’s tough Red Angel.

Visually, Yoshida is starting in this film to play around more with the vertical axis of the frame, but in general this film is not as constantly visually remarkable as The Lake – though still hypnotically arresting. Yoshida’s big visual coups are concentrated into specific sequences, such as the beach house interludes, or the unexplained op-art inserts in the credit sequence. When Oriko visits her mother’s former lover in a quarry, there’s the surreal detail of the hillsides exploding in slow-motion in the far distance as she makes her way towards him (Yoshida thus joining Gremillon and Antonioni in the exclusive Poetic Brotherhood of the Exploding Hillside). When she confronts her husband’s shopgirl lover, their continuous conversation is spread across a series of glaring discontinuous set-ups / tableaux.

The film’s signature sequence, one of my favourites in 60s cinema, is Oriko’s recurring silent vision of her mother’s death. It’s not a flashback (and the film is as deft and profligate with actual flashbacks as A Story Written with Water), since Oriko did not observe this event, so the vision changes as her understanding of the circumstances and their implications evolve. Yoshida makes brilliant use of an extreme long lens to completely flatten perspective, turning the killing into a kind of mirage. The mother appears, in the far distance, on the right hand edge of the frame, a jump cut brings her closer and shifts her to the centre, another jump cut places her in the middle distance, on the left, with an enormous truck bearing down on her. The landscape and action are as abstracted as a nightmare: truck and woman are not on a road, so their intersection (and the flattening lens) gives the sense of an unavoidable fate rather than an actual traffic accident; the mother turns to look her death in the eye (and silently screams), but the truck has no driver. The second iteration adds her shadowy companion and a group of workers; the third puts Oriko in her mother’s place, setting us up for a tragic conclusion to her story.

Thematically, this is another eccentrically feminist outing – with Oriko’s ‘self-defilement’ seen as a pointed ‘screw you’ to her husband’s proprietary attitude. There aren’t many other male directors of the 60s who were so engaged with emerging feminist politics (who else would have built their magnum opus around the history and politics of the early 20th century feminist movement?), and surely Okada had a role to play in this. It’s notable that Yoshida’s most distinctive and idiosyncratic works thus far, and the ones that best illustrate that feminist impulse (Akitsu Hot Springs, Story Written with Water, The Lake, The Affair) are all Okada vehicles and all literary adaptations, and we know, at least, that the first of these properties was selected by Okada. More information on their working dynamic would be great to have.

[zedz]

Flame and Woman / Impasse

A further intensification of the Yoshida / Okada collaboration. These last three films seem to form a unit distinct from A Story Written with Water: they’re exploring ideas of women’s freedom, and the films orbit around Mariko Okada as an alienated wife. Story was less intently focussed on Okada, she was a mother rather than a wife, and the issues treated were different.

The relationship of this film to The Affair seems to be particularly close. It’s the director’s first original screenplay for a while, but it is built on ideas, images and settings from the previous film. When the couple share confessional flashbacks, his (an encounter with a dead child) uses similar compositions, similar blocking, silence and the same lens as the visions of the mother’s death in The Affair; hers (a sexual assault by a rough labourer) mimicks the sexual assault in the earlier film, and is incongruously accompanied by the sounds of the sea (surf, seagulls) that Yoshida removed from the parallel scene in The Affair. It’s almost as if the past of this couple is the past of Yoshida’s cinema. There are other matched scenes as well (e.g. Okada hiding in the bathroom from an intruder).

The new element here is artificial insemination and anxiety / uncertainty over paternity. It’s almost as if Yoshida decided to explore those ideas (and the ways in which new reproductive technologies impacted on women’s freedom) by simply adding this element to a pre-exisiting set of variables (characters, milieu, settings, style).

Yoshida’s style continues to evolve. We’re now seeing him use large foreground objects to block off our view of characters or interrupt tableaux. There’s also extensive use in this film of prowling, circling handheld camera, which counterpoints the asymmetrical (or, in some cases, oppressively symmetrical, with central vanishing points) static compositions elsewhere.

His use of sound is even more outré, though perhaps not as eerie, as in The Affair: incongruous sound effects in the place of naturalistic sound are the order of the day, including the repeated use of an abrasive noise like something being rubbed against the mike, or a particularly nasty old-vinyl crackle. In a shocking vision in which Ritsuko smothers her own baby, the action is accompanied by the flapping and cawing of birds. Another sequence is accompanied by what sounds a bit like somebody in an iron lung playing Pong. The score (Teizo Matsumura, this time, not a name I’m familiar with) is an odd, Liska-esque wordless vocal one that functions as another layer of disjunctive sound.

The flashback structure in Flame and Woman is even denser and less overtly signalled than in the foregoing films, and it required greater attention to follow the back-and-forth shuttling of the narrative (particularly as the scenes also included projections and memories extrinsic to the main story and a couple of baby-POV sequences). An audacious, provocative film that’s gagging for another viewing.

Also on this disc is a substantial retrospective documentary that goes through Yoshida’s life and work at a fair clip, functioning as an extended ad for the sets in Carlotta’s ‘Complete Works’ series (it’s broken up into segments that relate to the different box sets). On the basis of how this is divided up, we can expect the three seventies features plus Farewell to the Summer Light (and maybe one version of Eros + Massacre) in the next box. The Beauty of Beauty TV series might also get in there, but that would be about 9 hours. His three 80s/90s/00s features would make up the last box, probably along with his Ozu and Dream of Cinema docs. Actually, if we’re assuming two more four-disc boxes, I don’t see how Beauty of Beauty could fit – unless, of course, Carlotta are planning a fifth box dedicated to his television / documentary work.

Affair in the Snow

This 1968 film is quite distinct from the sort-of trilogy that preceded it. For one (big) thing, it’s quite linear. It also has a more classical visual syntax and more naturalistic sound, and score: the film relies heavily on its whimsical theme tune. There are some typical tropes: the threatening lake, the fateful train (also a key site / motif in The Lake, The Affair and Flame and Woman), the bad but inescapable marital relationship. But in most respects this is a companion piece to Akitsu Hot Springs: a comparatively straightforward romantic melodrama that gives the traditional form a couple of crucial twists (extremely deep and dark obsession, the plot device of impotence).

It’s kind of a surprise to see Yoshida return to his earlier success, but it affords a kind of liberation. How much further could he have gone with the concerns of the previous three films without repeating himself? In many repects his later films, specifically Eros Plus Massacre, are more extreme stylistically, but they also head in quite different directions.

The film is made compelling by Yoshida’s brilliant eye. The dramatic encounters unfold in a series of amazing shots in amazing landscapes: a lake dominated by a mountain; a foundry; a snowbound resort; the stark mountain slopes. Although the narrative has the same three-way character structure as the three previous films (Mariko Okada, her husband, and the Other Man), the roles here are more balanced and there’s less a sense of seeing the world of the film through Okada’s character, so the film’s dynamic is quite different.

Eros + Massacre

I actually watched this a while back, in preparation for the 70s list, but I should add a few comments here for completion’s sake. It’s a tough, dense, powerful film, and it’s now available in its elusive original cut. These discs are probably the current frontrunner for single-film release of the year.

The two versions are much more different than I’d imagined. Because the excised material all relates to a particular character, its reinstatement radically alters the balance and structure of the finished film. In the shorter cut, the modern and historical aspects of the film are more evenly matched: in the full-length version, the modern scenes read much more as a frame or commentary. They’re more subordinate, but in a way that actually draws greater attention to their function in relation to the historical material.

Similarly, the historical material in the short version is strongly focussed on Noe Ito, with Osugi’s wife Yasuko and lover Itsuko as secondary figures; in the long version, Noe is balanced by Itsuko. Consequently, the early feminist angle is much more thoroughly explored, and the character dynamics more fully expressed, as opposed to the women’s relationships being mediated through Osugi.

[Yojimbo]

I've just received my two Carlotta box-sets, and the two-disc set of 'Eros + Massacre', which I blind bought 'en masse'
(a measure of how much I trust the people at Carlotta)

Just watched the first 'Good-for-Nothing', and was amazed at its all-round technical excellence, particularly for a 26 year old first-time director
(although admittedly I suspect he was a most attentive pupil). Very mature script also.

And I haven't read any other posts on here but I really am intrigued by the similarities with a key scene in "Breathless". Great soundtrack, too.

[Scharphedin2]

Eros + MassacreThe two versions are much more different than I’d imagined. Because the excised material all relates to a particular character, its reinstatement radically alters the balance and structure of the finished film. In the shorter cut, the modern and historical aspects of the film are more evenly matched: in the full-length version, the modern scenes read much more as a frame or commentary. They’re more subordinate, but in a way that actually draws greater attention to their function in relation to the historical material.

Thank you for this excellent running commentary on these films, zedz. How wonderful it will be, once they somehow surface in an English-friendly release.

With respect to the two versions of Eros + Massacre, would you say that the long version is preferable? And, do you know what the background is for creating the shorter edit? Is the longer edit Yoshishige's own favorite?

[Steven H]

*interjects* He fought lawsuits to get the original edit of the film, so I would assume that was his preferred version.

[zedz]

No need to interject, Steven, this is your party as much as anybody's!

The integral Eros, I understand, is Yoshida's film as conceived and preferred. The only reason for the shorter edit is that one of the women depicted in the film (by that time an important political figure in Japan) brought an injunction / threatened a lawsuit unless the material relating to her was removed, so most of it was. (Better informed members can clarify this). This clearly wreaks havoc on the intended balance and structure of the film, as the full version reveals her to be basically the third lead.

However, the film is so magnificent, ambitious and unconventionally structured that the shorter version - the only version viewable for almost all of its critical life - remains a masterpiece and is entirely responsible for the film's enviable reputation.

The longer version is, in my opinion, better and more persuasive, and also much easier to follow (though familiarity with this tiger-by-the-tail film surely helps in that respect, so this could be an illusion). I'm tempted to suggest watching the shorter version first. You'll need to watch the film more than once and it's revealing to see both versions, and that order should aid clarification of plot and structural points (the other way round, the second viewing will provide less information, not more).

[Michael Kerpan]

So -- who was it that caused problems?

[Yojimbo]

Fantastic sets: great transfers of every film with useful intros by the filmmaker. French subs only, but I can make do. I doubt any UK or US label is going to port them (though this would be an excellent opportunity for Facets to redeem themselves). I’m working through these chronologically at the moment. So here are my first impressions.

Good-for-Nothing

Like Oshima’s early films, this follows the youth film / Sun Tribe model but pushes it to extremes. Yoshida’s visual style is compositionally straight, even classical (great B&W widescreen), though he gets some superb, distinctive compositions with the wide frame, especially in the central beach scenes. The most interesting thing stylistically is the camera movement and dynamic cuts. All of these early films have headlong storytelling, and the pulpy storylines give up, without much prodding, a huge flood of inter-generational resentment (something the French New Wave took most of the sixties to build up to). There’s also a telling sidelong glance at the AMPO protests, something Oshima also couldn’t ignore. The end of the film seems like a very pointed nod to that of Breathless, but that would mean Yoshida was working at a furious pace. This film premiered at the beginning of July 1960 and Godard’s (if IMDB is to be believed) was first screened in Japan at the very end of March (and in Paris the same month).

zedz I really am intrigued by the 'Breathless' comparisons.
I wonder was this some kind of homage?

It was clear from the whole look of the film that there's a distinct French feel to the film: Melville and Godard/Truffaut, certainly, and I suspect also early Chabrol and even Malle. And the talk about the young people in the bars was all French icons: Juliette Greco and Yves Montand.
I'd be interested to find out.

Wonderful cool jazz soundtrack, too!

Also I detect a certain Antonioni influence here , also

[Steven H]

So -- who was it that caused problems?

The film is based loosely on real events and people, and one of the main characters, Osugi Sakae, is stabbed in the film (as in real life) by his mistress Kamichika Ichiko, who was a well known politician when the film was released.

According to Keiko McDonald in her essay on the film in Cinema East:

When the film was first released in France prior to its release in Japan, it was three and a half hours long. When it was first shown in Japan at the Art Theater, it was presented in a cut version of two hours and forty-five minutes. The deletion was due to the protest made by Ichiko Kamichika, then a member of the Diet, who was supposed to be the model for Itsuko Masaoka, one of Osugi's lovers. As she threatened to sue Yoshida for violation of privacy should the film be released in an unabridged version, Yoshida was forced to cut a number of scenes centered around Itsuko.

[zedz]

zedz I really am intrigued by the 'Breathless' comparisons.
I wonder was this some kind of homage?

The Dancing Kid cleared this up in a response to my first post, but since I know you're trying to avoid spoilers, here it is again:

The way it happened was that the lead actor had seen 'Breathless' on one of his days off from filming and then told Yoshida about it. They decided it would make a good ending to their own film, so they rewrote that scene at the last minute. Yoshida actually wasn't able to see Breathless until he had finished his own debut.

[sidehacker]

Also I detect a certain Antonioni influence here , also

It seems that Yoshida became even more Antonioni-esque as his career progressed. His early films (of which I've managed to see, that is) are decent but nowhere near the greatness of The Affair, a truly post-Antonioni film if there ever was one. While it seems he became a "colder" director in his later years, he also became a much more mature one.

[Yojimbo]

zedz I really am intrigued by the 'Breathless' comparisons.
I wonder was this some kind of homage?

The Dancing Kid cleared this up in a response to my first post, but since I know you're trying to avoid spoilers, here it is again:

The way it happened was that the lead actor had seen 'Breathless' on one of his days off from filming and then told Yoshida about it. They decided it would make a good ending to their own film, so they rewrote that scene at the last minute. Yoshida actually wasn't able to see Breathless until he had finished his own debut.

Yeah, cheers, zedz: he had to at least have been aware of it the similarity would have been too uncanny, otherwise.

Just watched 'Blood Is Dry': he just gets better. I was particularly struck by his use of soundscapes, and the soundtrack music seemed particularly well-chosen. I also thought the script was admirably contained as it was such an easy target it could have degenerated into farce.

Akitsu Hot Springs

A sublime film. It's not surprising that Carlotta / CGP have chosen this as one of the 'showcase' titles for the retro. Good as the previous features were, this is a really major work, and one of those films, like Night and Fog in Japan, that showed early on just how ambitious and wide-ranging the Japanese New Wave would be.

zedz, just watched this film, which truly is a sumptuous visual experience, quite apart from structurally and acting wise. I think its probably the first Yoshida film where the (high) quality of the acting was critical. Obviously it was a tour-de-force by Okada, but Hirayuki's performance can't be understated , given that Okada was playing off his often imperceptible changes of expression.

The score particularly interested me: in the early scenes it reminded me of a particular classic-era Hollywood composer, - I kept thinking Victor Young, for some reason,...but then for the latter half of the film he kept using this musical 'refrain' which nagged me, as I'm sure its based on music by a Western classical composer (can't quite pin it down). Little if any Japanese, or Oriental music used in the score.

Much wonderful Mizoguchi-like panning shots.

Interesting to hear Okada compare and contrast Yoshida's camera placements with that of Ozu. (funnily enough those various train station scenes had reminded me of Ozu)

[zedz]

That Okada interview is a great extra. Yoshida's use of music gets more and more interesting through the 60s, and he works with several key Japanese film composers of the day, so I'm looking forward to seeing what you think of the later soundtracks.

[Yojimbo]

That Okada interview is a great extra. Yoshida's use of music gets more and more interesting through the 60s, and he works with several key Japanese film composers of the day, so I'm looking forward to seeing what you think of the later soundtracks.

Not only had I not known that they were married, I hadn't known the background as to how the film came to be made, and that she had chosen him. So very worthwhile interview all round.

Interesting Yoshida interview here (pdf)

That Okada interview is a great extra. Yoshida's use of music gets more and more interesting through the 60s, and he works with several key Japanese film composers of the day, so I'm looking forward to seeing what you think of the later soundtracks.

Just finished the final film of the first set: with regards to '18 Who Stir Up a Storm' which, along with 'Good For Nothing', is probably my least favourite of the films I've seen so far, the score reminded me a lot of John Lewis' beautifully spare score for 'Odds Against Tomorrow'
(I haven't checked but it certainly would seem an apt source of inspiration).
My favourite of the first set was 'Bitter End of a Sweet Night', which I consider some kind of Masterpiece, and an (almost) perfect film.

Will compare notes in more detail later

[Yojimbo]

A Story Written with Water

StevenH’s favourite. Now that I’ve seen it with subtitles (albeit French ones) I feel in a better position to comment on it, so here goes.

Good as the films up to this point were, this is the one where Yoshida takes flight and ends up in undiscovered country. Akitsu Hot Springs could just about have been made by some other genius; this film could only have come from Yoshida.

The incest theme was a mainstay of the Japanese New Wave - in fact, it’s all but unavoidable in Imamura’s films – but it’s treated with uncommon delicacy here. Until the last twenty minutes or so it’s possible for an obtuse viewer to come up with other explanations for the traces of Shizuo’s obsession (his reluctance to marry, his concern over other men’s attentions to his mother, his constant flashbacks to his sick father), and that obsession is sublimated into the film’s obsession with Mariko Okada. Just look at the care with which she’s presented and framed throughout: her first appearance, with that constant return to the beauty of her delicate nape; the great movie-star entrance when a train passes by to reveal a parasol (pay close attention to that particular fetiche), which lifts to reveal her perfect countenance.

Yoshida’s idiosyncratic camera placement and movement is fully developed here (although he’d push some aspects of his signature style even further in later works). The lowering roller door in the opening shots practically announces the extreme blocking and masking of the frame that Yoshida will use throughout. Some shots are framed so that black shapes block off one or both sides of the widescreen frame, creating temporary, moveable academy ratios, and characters can be deployed anywhere within those frames: the extreme edges, the remote distance, upside-down. He’s also constantly experimenting with negative space, so that the placement of figures is only one of the variables he’s playing with to create a gallery of unexpected compositions.

The film, and Shizuo the protagonist, are plagued with flashbacks, and he transitions to some of them with amazing swirls of the camera; others with mysterious direct cuts or deceptive reverse angles. The underlying story is dense rather than obscure, but the storytelling is so nimble (many major events are elided, and timeframes have to be inferred) that you need to be constantly interpreting and readjusting. The whole film has a wonderful air of mystery that is much more down to style than (lack of) substance: marginal shots linger for no obvious plot-related reason; character motivations are ambiguous even if their actions aren’t; the eerie, minimal score.

The bravura sequence comes near the end, after Shizuo’s car accident, in the form of his eerie, slow-motion death-haunted dream. There’s a particularly amazing ‘shot’ in which Yumiko (his wife) and Shizuko (his mother) pass in single file before his eyes again and again and again. But the final sequence, one of Yoshida’s highly charged little-boat-in-big-water scenes (we’d seen rehearsals for this in End of a Sweet Night and 18 Who Stir Up a Storm), is probably even better, particularly the way in which it and the film just end, with the sun’s reflected glare annihilating the characters.

The more of these films I see, the harder it is to believe that at least some of them won’t be picked up by a bold English language company.
How can you see this film and not be impressed?

I've only this past week started watching the second box-set, and at time of writing have also watched 'Le Lac Des Femmes'
Largely agree with your comments: for me this is his best todate: in the first set it had been End of a Sweet Night, and 'Le Lac...' isn't far behind.
What I would also say, having only recently watched Oshima's 'Violence At High Noon' is the similarities between the two directors styles and the common influence of Resnais
(I think Antonioni is probably more of an influence in the case of 'Le Lac...')
In Oshima's case an abiding influence is a rage, albeit a controlled one, against post-war Japan; Yoshida is far more controlled, almost forensically so, in his dissection of these relationships.
The dream sequence reminded me somewhat of Bergman's 'Wild Strawberries', even 'The Seventh Seal', although I don't think Bergman is much of an influence compared to the other two.
I'm glad the remaining films are all in black and white as I think that 'medium' was better suited than the colour of such as 'Akemitsu Springs'
(and I don't usually care for allegorical films, anyhow).

Loved the soundtrack once again: as evidenced by his, Teshigahara, and Shindo, to name but three, Japanese film had wonderfully innovative composers in that period

[zedz]

What I would also say, having only recently watched Oshima's 'Violence At High Noon' is the similarities between the two directors styles and the common influence of Resnais

I think Resnais is a key influence on several Japanese new Wave directors (maybe the key Nouvelle Vague influence), particularly since so many of them are concerned with memory and history.

Oshima in Violence at Noon is probably the closest he comes to Yoshida, but he was all over the place stylistically during the 1960s, from the extremes of montage in that film to the extremes of long plans sequences in Night and Fog in Japan (both films that bear out your Resnais observation, nevertheless). Yoshida's aesthetic is much more consistent and cumulative.

In Oshima's case an abiding influence is a rage, albeit a controlled one, against post-war Japan; Yoshida is far more controlled, almost forensically so, in his dissection of these relationships.

I agree. Oshima is far more consistent in terms of his thematic preoccupations than in terms of the details of his style from film to film, whereas Yoshida is developing and refining both in tandem during this period.

[Yojimbo]

What I would also say, having only recently watched Oshima's 'Violence At High Noon' is the similarities between the two directors styles and the common influence of Resnais

I think Resnais is a key influence on several Japanese new Wave directors (maybe the key Nouvelle Vague influence), particularly since so many of them are concerned with memory and history.

Oshima in Violence at Noon is probably the closest he comes to Yoshida, but he was all over the place stylistically during the 1960s, from the extremes of montage in that film to the extremes of long plans sequences in Night and Fog in Japan (both films that bear out your Resnais observation, nevertheless). Yoshida's aesthetic is much more consistent and cumulative.

In Oshima's case an abiding influence is a rage, albeit a controlled one, against post-war Japan; Yoshida is far more controlled, almost forensically so, in his dissection of these relationships.

I agree. Oshima is far more consistent in terms of his thematic preoccupations than in terms of the details of his style from film to film, whereas Yoshida is developing and refining both in tandem during this period.

I've managed to pick up some early Region 2 Oshimas: 'The Suns Burial', 'Cruel Story Of Youth' and 'Night and Fog in Japan' among them, but I suspect the Oshima films I may like more include 'Boy' ,(which smacks to me more like something Imamura might have done), 'Diary of a Shinjuku Thief' and 'The Man Who Left His Will on Film' which are not currently available on either Region 1 or 2, I believe.
Hopefully though, by the middle of next week, I'll have watched the remainder of the Yoshida box-sets, and also 'Eros Plus Massacre' and I'll post more detailed observations.
Its certainly proved a very rewarding trip so far: its always great to 'discover' another unfairly neglected 'Master of Cinema'

[Yojimbo]

Flame and Woman / Impasse

A further intensification of the Yoshida / Okada collaboration. These last three films seem to form a unit distinct from A Story Written with Water: they’re exploring ideas of women’s freedom, and the films orbit around Mariko Okada as an alienated wife. Story was less intently focussed on Okada, she was a mother rather than a wife, and the issues treated were different.

The relationship of this film to The Affair seems to be particularly close. It’s the director’s first original screenplay for a while, but it is built on ideas, images and settings from the previous film. When the couple share confessional flashbacks, his (an encounter with a dead child) uses similar compositions, similar blocking, silence and the same lens as the visions of the mother’s death in The Affair; hers (a sexual assault by a rough labourer) mimicks the sexual assault in the earlier film, and is incongruously accompanied by the sounds of the sea (surf, seagulls) that Yoshida removed from the parallel scene in The Affair. It’s almost as if the past of this couple is the past of Yoshida’s cinema. There are other matched scenes as well (e.g. Okada hiding in the bathroom from an intruder).


The new element here is artificial insemination and anxiety / uncertainty over paternity. It’s almost as if Yoshida decided to explore those ideas (and the ways in which new reproductive technologies impacted on women’s freedom) by simply adding this element to a pre-exisiting set of variables (characters, milieu, settings, style).

Yoshida’s style continues to evolve. We’re now seeing him use large foreground objects to block off our view of characters or interrupt tableaux. There’s also extensive use in this film of prowling, circling handheld camera, which counterpoints the asymmetrical (or, in some cases, oppressively symmetrical, with central vanishing points) static compositions elsewhere.

His use of sound is even more outré, though perhaps not as eerie, as in The Affair: incongruous sound effects in the place of naturalistic sound are the order of the day, including the repeated use of an abrasive noise like something being rubbed against the mike, or a particularly nasty old-vinyl crackle. In a shocking vision in which Ritsuko smothers her own baby, the action is accompanied by the flapping and cawing of birds. Another sequence is accompanied by what sounds a bit like somebody in an iron lung playing Pong. The score (Teizo Matsumura, this time, not a name I’m familiar with) is an odd, Liska-esque wordless vocal one that functions as another layer of disjunctive sound.

The flashback structure in Flame and Woman is even denser and less overtly signalled than in the foregoing films, and it required greater attention to follow the back-and-forth shuttling of the narrative (particularly as the scenes also included projections and memories extrinsic to the main story and a couple of baby-POV sequences). An audacious, provocative film that’s gagging for another viewing.

Also on this disc is a substantial retrospective documentary that goes through Yoshida’s life and work at a fair clip, functioning as an extended ad for the sets in Carlotta’s ‘Complete Works’ series (it’s broken up into segments that relate to the different box sets). On the basis of how this is divided up, we can expect the three seventies features plus Farewell to the Summer Light (and maybe one version of Eros + Massacre) in the next box. The Beauty of Beauty TV series might also get in there, but that would be about 9 hours. His three 80s/90s/00s features would make up the last box, probably along with his Ozu and Dream of Cinema docs. Actually, if we’re assuming two more four-disc boxes, I don’t see how Beauty of Beauty could fit – unless, of course, Carlotta are planning a fifth box dedicated to his television / documentary work.

Affair in the Snow

This 1968 film is quite distinct from the sort-of trilogy that preceded it. For one (big) thing, it’s quite linear. It also has a more classical visual syntax and more naturalistic sound, and score: the film relies heavily on its whimsical theme tune. There are some typical tropes: the threatening lake, the fateful train (also a key site / motif in The Lake, The Affair and Flame and Woman), the bad but inescapable marital relationship. But in most respects this is a companion piece to Akitsu Hot Springs: a comparatively straightforward romantic melodrama that gives the traditional form a couple of crucial twists (extremely deep and dark obsession, the plot device of impotence).

It’s kind of a surprise to see Yoshida return to his earlier success, but it affords a kind of liberation. How much further could he have gone with the concerns of the previous three films without repeating himself? In many repects his later films, specifically Eros Plus Massacre, are more extreme stylistically, but they also head in quite different directions.

The film is made compelling by Yoshida’s brilliant eye. The dramatic encounters unfold in a series of amazing shots in amazing landscapes: a lake dominated by a mountain; a foundry; a snowbound resort; the stark mountain slopes. Although the narrative has the same three-way character structure as the three previous films (Mariko Okada, her husband, and the Other Man), the roles here are more balanced and there’s less a sense of seeing the world of the film through Okada’s character, so the film’s dynamic is quite different.

Eros + Massacre

I actually watched this a while back, in preparation for the 70s list, but I should add a few comments here for completion’s sake. It’s a tough, dense, powerful film, and it’s now available in its elusive original cut. These discs are probably the current frontrunner for single-film release of the year.

The two versions are much more different than I’d imagined. Because the excised material all relates to a particular character, its reinstatement radically alters the balance and structure of the finished film. In the shorter cut, the modern and historical aspects of the film are more evenly matched: in the full-length version, the modern scenes read much more as a frame or commentary. They’re more subordinate, but in a way that actually draws greater attention to their function in relation to the historical material.

Similarly, the historical material in the short version is strongly focussed on Noe Ito, with Osugi’s wife Yasuko and lover Itsuko as secondary figures; in the long version, Noe is balanced by Itsuko. Consequently, the early feminist angle is much more thoroughly explored, and the character dynamics more fully expressed, as opposed to the women’s relationships being mediated through Osugi.

Just a few points about Affair in the Snow: overall, it reminded me of nothing so much as Claude Lelouch's "A Man And A Woman", which I didn't particularly care for.
Naturally, Yoshida's film is so much darker in mood and tone
I can't imagine that he would have been influenced by Rohmer, at least not by the Rohmer films I've seen, but he has consistently made great use of natural backgrounds, of widescreen, where he likes to shoot from a distance to give a broad perspective on the protagonists background , and its yet another very effective score, albeit that it mostly consists of a repetition of a simple musical phrase
(this time its 60's lounge music, which is very apt: not at all unlike the music for Melville's 'Bob Le Flambeur', although its use was more ironic in the latter case).

This second boxset is proving to be not only superior to the first: hardly surprising, in view of the director's increasing maturity, if not that they all feature his wife in lead roles, but also one of my very favourite box-sets.
And thats really saying something.
I can see myself revisiting the complete set many times

Interesting choice of title for the set: 'Contre Le Melodrame', literally, 'against the melodrama': I suspect it may be that he set out to subvert the traditional Hollywood melodrama/'Woman's Picture', whatever about contemporary Japanese conventions.

[bergelson]

Hi everyone,

Until a while ago we had a flood of these wonderful French releases with custom English subs and then it all stopped abruptly. I know it's quite time consuming but is there anyone who is willing to carry on with the task and make subtitles for some of the rest (Story Written With Water, for example, is just crying out for English subtitles). I wish I knew French...

Thanks.