Yoshishige Yoshida

Synopsis:
Yoshida returned to feature filmmaking after a hiatus of thirteen years with this brave and moving film about the struggle to maintain dignity in the face of old age and approaching death. The Human Promise reaffirms Yoshida’s ability to deal with difficult and even taboo topics by exploring the question of euthanasia with a profound sensitivity and subtlety. The film’s unusually frank meditation on death is anchored by the restrained performances by its veteran actors, including Rentaro Mikni, who starred in several of Yoshida’s earlier works, including A Story Written on Water. The Human Promise’s use of water imagery enriches a motif central to the rich ambiguity at the heart of Yoshida’s cinema.Read More »

Quote:
Until 1973 Kijû Yoshida had made sixteen feature films in thirteen years. Having just completed his trilogy on Japanese history “Eros + Massacre” (1969), “Heroic Purgatory” (1970) and “Coup d’Etat” (1971) in which he achieves the form of artistic independence he was striving for and creates his own radical visual and narrative style, the stress of fundraising, producing, writing and directing at the same time takes its toll on him. Yoshida breaks down and falls seriously ill. He has to undergo surgery, but recovers only slowly. In this situation Yoshida receives and accepts the offer of a Japanese TV channel to produce a documentary series on art entitled “The Beauty of Beauty”, which will be broadcasted every Saturday night on Channel 12 from 1974 to 1978. Yoshida left Japan in the fall of 1973 for Europe and works on this series for the next four years producing 94 episodes in total, a project of a truly monumental scale, which can only be compared to the television work of Rossellini after he abandoned cinema.Read More »

Synopsis:
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).Read More »

Beautiful young Oriko (Mariko Okada) has an unhappy marriage. Her husband Takashi (Tadahiko Sugano), owner of a securities company, has been having an affair and comes home only once in a week at most. In a poetry party, Oriko meets sculptor Mitsuharu (Isao Kimura), who was one of the lovers of Oriko’s deceased poetess mother…Read More »

Quote:
‘Escape from Japan’ chronicles the misadventures of Tatsuo Ihara, a small-time criminal who dreams of seeking his fortune away from Japan. 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.Read More »

Plot: An ambitious department store worker endeavors to improve his station in life
by manipulating women to get what he wants – money that is.Read More »

This erotic and violent story taken from Emily Bronte’s classic novel, and Georges Bataille’s analyzes, takes place in medieval Japan instead of 19th-century Yorkshire. Onimaru (Yasaku Matsuda) is an orphan boy taken in by a group of priests who worship the Mountain Of Fire and try to appease the gods of anger. He loves Kinu (Yuko Tanaka), the beautiful daughter of a local family. When she marries an heir to a rival family, his heart is broken. When she dies in childbirth, Onimaru loses what is left of his mind.Read More »

Quote:
Eight years into her marriage, Miyako Mizuki (Mariko Okada) looks happy on the outside, but in fact she is not satisfied with her husband, Yuzo (Shinsuke Ashida), who cares about nothing but his career. Miyako has been having an affair with a young interior designer named Kitano (Tamotsu Hayakawa), who in turn has a fiancée named Machie (Keiko Natsu). One night in a hotel, Miyako lets Kitano takes some nude photos of her. On her way back, she is followed by a stranger (Shigeru Tsuyuguchi), and loses her handbag with the film negatives inside while trying to escape. Later at home, Miyako receives a call from the stranger. He uses the negatives to threaten her to follow his instructions and take a train to the north. The stranger is named Ginpei. He was a teacher in a girls’ school, but was expelled because of a scandal with one of his students. As Miyako meets up with Ginpei, she develops a strange attraction towards him.
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