Series Site
"Film at Lincoln Center announces “The Radical Cinema of Kijū Yoshida,” a retrospective of the films of one of Japan’s greatest cinematic rebels, running from December 1 through 8, with all films presented on 35mm or 16mm at FLC’s Walter Reade Theater, the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, and the Japan Society.
Of the iconoclastic Japanese filmmakers who rose to prominence in the 1960s, perhaps none worked as fearlessly and concertedly toward crafting an unapologetically subversive body of work than Kijū Yoshida (1933–2022). Starting his career as a young recruit to Shochiku’s directing apprenticeship system (alongside fellow enfant terrible Nagisa Ōshima), Yoshida’s earliest work finds him radically politicizing the commercially minded projects to which he was assigned, frequently in collaboration with the actress Mariko Okada, who would become his wife and lifelong creative partner. They soon moved away from the mainstream film industry entirely in order to create increasingly ambitious, eminently political films together, exemplified by their epochal Eros + Massacre (1969), a legendary work that traces a visionary counter-history of radical art and politics in Japan. An intrepid experimentalist whose films confront the political issues of his day with a keen interest in the taboo and a staunch refusal to be confined to any one formal approach, Yoshida’s oeuvre endures as one of Japanese cinema’s wildest and most intellectually stirring.
Most notably, the series will feature Yoshida’s famed political trilogy, which captures significant moments in 20th-century Japanese history: Eros + Massacre (1968), regarded as his masterpiece, examining the last days of anarcho-feminist writer Noe Ito (Mariko Okada) and her lover, the anarchist theorist Sakae Ōsugi, before their assassination; Heroic Purgatory (1970), a kaleidoscopic, mazelike memory piece about an atomic engineer whose past as a college-age revolutionary militant erupts into the present; and Coup d’état (1973), a spellbinding portrait of notorious militarist Ikki Kita, whose 1936 attempt at staging a coup against the Japanese government would later serve as inspiration to the similarly controversial nationalist writer Yukio Mishima.
Additional films in the series include Akitsu Springs, (1962), considered to be Yoshida’s first commercial success in this early studio phase, is his first in color and stars Okada, who became his lifelong collaborator; A Promise (1986), a meditative drama about aging and dignity and Wuthering Heights (1988), a broodingly atmospheric version of Emily Brontë’s novel transposed to medieval Japan, both were made after Yoshida returned to filmmaking following a 13-year hiatus. And his final feature, Women in the Mirror (2002), which links three generations of women in Hiroshima back to the bomb." - Film at Lincoln Center