Yoshida Kiju, Master of the Modern Art Film
by Dick Stegewerns
Yoshida Kiju is one of the most obscure treasures of Japanese cinema. Although he is duly mentioned in historical overviews of Japanese film, not many people outside Japan and France have ever seen any of his beautiful and intriguing films. In order to rectify this injustice, the International Film Festival Rotterdam will show seven representative works from the various periods of his half-century-long career, as an overture to a more extensive retrospective that subsequently will be shown in the Dutch Film Museum and other European venues.
Yoshida Kiju (born in 1933, formerly known as Yoshida Yoshishige) burst upon the film scene exactly 50 years ago with his raw debut, Good for Nothing (1960). It was remarkable in many ways. In Japan’s studio-dominated film world, assistant directors normally only got their first opportunity to make a movie when they were in their forties, and most would never get a shot at the real work. Nevertheless, Yoshida made his debut when he was 27 years old, after only five years of apprenticeship (mainly under Kinoshita Keisuke, master of comedy and melodrama). The onslaught of television had caused a universal crisis in the film world, and this worked in his favour. Yoshida’s employer, Shochiku, one of the three big film companies, was losing its main audience – housewives – who were turning to their TV sets at home. Needing to find another audience, the company choose young people as the new target group, and thus young assistant directors were all of a sudden being ordered to provide suitable product.
These overnight directors were not just part of a younger generation, however, they also had varied backgrounds. The film world originally was composed of lower class and even criminal elements, but the post-war crisis had drawn the brightest minds of the nation to the secure jobs in the film industry. Yoshida had been selected in 1955 along with seven others, all university-educated, from a group of more than 2500 applicants. He had graduated in French literature from Tokyo University, Japan’s top university, and was heavily influenced by Sartre’s existentialism. The young intellectual elite within the Shochiku Company, including Oshima Nagisa and Shinoda Masahiro, brought their academic views of society to the screen and rejected harmony and resignation, the two basic concepts of Shochiku’s staple genre of melodrama. At first, the young Turks were protected by their critical and commercial success, but when Oshima turned his films into an instrument of agitation at the time of the mass protests against the American-Japanese military alliance, Shochiku immediately pulled the plug. The young directors of a dozen groundbreaking films, promoted by the company itself as ‘The Shochiku Nouvelle Vague’, were forced to conform or leave.
Yoshida chose to remain. Emphasizing as always that he was a coincidental filmmaker, who had not joined the film world with a strong affection for the medium but merely out of an economic need to support his family, this was the logical choice of a mere employee. Still, loyal employees do not tend to turn down company projects and insist on their own original scripts, but nonetheless, this was what Yoshida did. As a result, there were two more masterpieces during his Shochiku period, The Eighteen Who Stirred Up a Storm (1963), a stark and understated piece of social realism completely inimical to the company’s regular output, and The Affair at Akitsu (1962), a beautiful and intense melodrama that combines the best of the Shochiku genre and Yoshida’s sophisticated style.
This classic melodrama is also seminal in the sense that it marked Yoshida’s first collaboration with the star actress Okada Mariko. Before long they became inseparable, both privately and professionally, and they got married and established their own independent production company, Gendai Eigasha. Starting with A Story Written on Water (1965), Okada also starred in the six so-called ‘anti-melodramas’ Yoshida made after he left Shochiku in 1964. In his first independent period, he embarked on a filmic analysis of human relationships and female nature, mainly shot on location, that was experimental in style and structure. Not unlike the heroines in Antonioni’s masterpieces, we find Okada Mariko estranged in landscapes, transgressing the bounds of memory, ‘reality’ and illusion, and caught up in strong – often erotic – emotions. Although made by a male director, Yoshida’s films are often termed ‘feminist’, seeing as his female protagonists almost unconsciously but resiliently go against the oppression of the Japanese family and state.
From 1968 onwards, Yoshida became completely independent, as his films were no longer distributed in the Nikkatsu and Shochiku theatres but in the independent Art Theater Guild (ATG) circuit. In this period, a strong political element entered his oeuvre. A three-part enactment of contemporary Japanese history, in which he deals with real historical personae, traces the relations between love and politics, sex and revolution. In the first instalment, Eros + Massacre (1969), Yoshida takes on Osugi Sakae, the pre-war anarchist and advocate of free love, and his relations with three different women, but has them mingle and interact with a couple of student radicals from the 1960s. This complex yet enchanting tour de force is almost unanimously acclaimed as his true masterpiece. It was also the first film that caused the outside world to take notice of Yoshida and which established his long-lasting relationship with France. The third part of his historical triptych, Coup d’état (1973), is a beautifully accomplished attempt to journey into the mind of the rightist revolutionary Kita Ikki, and which takes on the position of the emperor in the modern Japanese setting. Yoshida himself considered this film to be the completion of his work, in both content and style, and took a break from fiction film making. Notwithstanding the killing pace of making – mostly independently – as many as sixteen films in thirteen years, Yoshida had indeed created a completely unique oeuvre characterized by formal rigor, philosophical depth and profound beauty that would easily secure him a well-deserved place in the annals of world cinema.
He nevertheless accepted an offer from the Japanese state television to direct documentaries on art – mainly European – on a weekly basis. After five years, he was completely overworked and was sent off to Mexico to be away from it all, but once again, his love for cinema prohibited him from taking a complete rest. He became mixed up in a Fitzcarraldo-esque project based on the true story of sixteenth-century Japanese samurai crossing the South American continent on their road to the Vatican.
Simultaneously with the Mexican peso’s crash, the project imploded and Yoshida returned to Japan in 1983. He was active as ever, among other things making documentaries, writing books, directing the opera Madame Butterfly (in Lyon), and writing a Noh play. Especially interesting for film fans are his documentaries and book on the senior Shochiku director Ozu Yasujiro, translated as Ozu’s Anti-Cinema (University of Michigan Press, 2003).
What is most noteworthy, however, was his return to fiction film. With long intervals, an older and socially involved Yoshida treated his former audience to three ambitious and gripping works: The Human Promise (1986) dealing with the taboo subject of euthanasia, Wuthering Heights (1988) in which the Emily Brontë classic is transposed to the Japanese middle ages and enacted as a Noh play, and The Women in the Mirror (2002), Yoshida’s long-harboured and very sensitive attempt at dealing with the wounds that the atomic bombings have left on Japanese society. Although no longer as experimental, this most recent of his films impressively shows the consistency of his style and after an absence of three decades reunites Yoshida with Okada Mariko on screen. The film is widely acclaimed and has sparked renewed interest in the imposing oeuvre of this eminent master of the modern art film, to which this retrospective pays homage.
The Yoshida Kiju retrospective is curated by Dick Stegewerns.
Yoshida Kiju will attend the festival together with the famous actress Okada Mariko, his wife and the star of many of his films. A booklet, including interviews, essays and articles on Yoshida, will be for sale at the festival.
Thirteen films will be screened at the Dutch Film Museum in Amsterdam from 4 through 24 February.