The retrospective at the Pompidou Center in Paris and the French release of his works on DVD have been long overdue. Although less famous than Mizoguchi, Ozu and Kurosawa, Kijû Yoshida is still a critical figure in Japanese film history.

Very active from 1960 to 1973, he was part of the Japanese New Wave, along with Nagisa Oshima, Shohei Imamura and Hiroshi Teshigahara. Employed in the late fifties by Shochiku Studios (where Ozu worked), he insisted on writing the screenplay for his first film, Good-for-Nothing, in line with the studio’s policy of producing films to which contemporary youth could relate. Albeit heavily influenced by Breathless, Good-for-Nothing already showed what was unique to this other “New Wave”: the movies were more oriented towards generational conflicts, opposing rebellious sons to their capitalist fathers. They were less playful but more sensual and explicitly political and were profoundly marked by the War, defeat and the atomic bomb.
Hence, his second film, Blood Is Dry (1961), is the story of an employee in an assurance company who threatens to commit suicide when management announces a massive layoff, and recounts how the company uses this threat to its own advantage by turning it into an advertising campaign. The character then crosses the city and comes face to face with his own image at every street corner, as in a hall of mirrors. With the success of the campaign, however, he is no longer a desperate man pointing a gun to his head, but a potential leader who wishes to take advantage of his failed suicide – unless he is simply an image of the People, manufactured by management to further their own cause. Yoshida never divorced narrative from a thoughtful reflection on the use of image. In Woman of the Lake, adapted from Kawabata, a young bride begs a blackmailer to give her back compromising photos of an adulterous affair: the film shows that the woman’s image is still not her own. Yoshida thus wanted to construct his films from the woman’s point of view, in contrast to a society structured by the male figure of the emperor, and chose his wife, Mariko Okada, a great actress who starred in Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon and Naruse’s Sound of the Mountain, to play the heroine in most of his films.
The Bomb is another critical aspect in his movies. For Yoshida, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki defy representation, akin perhaps to the Holocaust in the West. This missing image structures his directing; as opposed to the tracking shots for which Mizoguchi is famous, he shoots in such a way that the audience can never understand the exact architecture of a place and must mentally reconstruct the space themselves. Shots filmed from behind someone’s head, actors filmed from a distance through a frame or the sliding panels of a shoji (a wall divider with paper-covered doors), and sharp low-angle shots that flatten the space all contribute to disorienting one’s view and exteriorizing the drama. According to Yoshida, the break between classic and modern Japanese films was the movement from humanism to “anti-humanism”, in which the yardstick is no longer the ideal man, but rather man in a specific situation, such as a time of war.
Starting in 1969 with Eros Plus Massacre, followed by Heroic Purgatory and Coup D’Etat in 1973, Yoshida opted for a more radical perspective. Eros Plus Massacre sets the story of a nearly legendary anarchist in Japan, Takae Osugi, including his relationships with three women and his assassination by the police in 1963, against a contemporary tale of two students trying to make sense of Osugi’s politics. The fragmented viewpoints extend to the spoken word, and the multiplicity of expression puts History into perspective, and yet still gives it vivid immediacy. Yoshida sees the assassination of Osugi as the State’s way of defending itself against the imagination and freedom that reject it. Yoshida went so far politically and esthetically that, after Coup D’Etat in 1973, he stopped directing fiction, left Japan and only shot art documentaries (several episodes of “Beauté de la beauté” may be seen in the Pompidou Center’s retrospective) until he returned to fiction in 1986 with A Promise, followed by Onimaru in 1988, and Women in the Mirror in 2002, in which he dealt with Hiroshima head-on. He has recently published an impressive book on Ozu (the French translation, Ozu ou l’anti-cinéma, is published by Actes Sud), which combines both a filmmaker’s personal relationship to his a work and a precise yet elegant analysis, and is written with a rare and singular voice, as demonstrated in his “Pick of the Week” for There Was a Father.

Bastien Hader.