Film at Lincoln Center to Spotlight Japan’s Cinematic Rebel
The Radical Cinema of Kijū Yoshida
Friday, December 1 through Friday, December 8
Walter Reade Theater – 165 W. 65th Street (unless otherwise noted)
Admission: $17 General Public | $14 Students, Seniors, individuals with disabilities | $12 Members
Film at Lincoln Center presents “The Radical Cinema of Kijū Yoshida,” a retrospective spotlighting the films of one of Japan’s greatest cinematic rebels. Running from December 1 through 8, all 16 films will be presented on 35mm or 16mm at Film at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater, the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, and Japan Society.
The retrospective presents the most comprehensive collection of Yoshida’s work ever screened in the United States. 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; 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.
To purchase tickets, please visit Film at Lincoln Center’s website. Use promo code OKADA to enjoy $5 off all ticket purchases.
Lineup
Good-for-Nothing
Friday, December 1 at 2:00 p.m.
Tuesday, December 5 at 8:45 p.m.
Yoshida’s debut feature vividly depicts the ennui and intellectual and spiritual restlessness of a generation of bourgeois youth in Tokyo at the dawn of the 1960s.
Blood Is Dry
Friday, December 1 at 4:15 p.m.
Saturday, December 2 at 8:30 p.m.
Yoshida’s satirical second feature again ferociously critiques Japanese society following its postwar reinvention as a capitalist giant.
Eros + Massacre
Friday, December 1 at 7:00 p.m.
Tuesday, December 5 at 2:00 p.m.
Among the greatest of all political films and perhaps the work that best embodies the spirit of Yoshida’s artistic project, Eros + Massacre is an epic, historiographic examination of the points of intersection between the domains of desire and politics.
Affair in the Snow
Saturday, December 2 at 1:00 p.m.
A love triangle plays out in the snow in Yoshida’s eleventh feature, a striking deconstruction of the melodrama.
Heroic Purgatory
Saturday, December 2 at 3:15 p.m.
The second film in a trilogy (inaugurated by Eros + Massacre) concerning 20th century Japanese history, Heroic Purgatory is a kaleidoscopic, mazelike memory piece that is perhaps Yoshida’s most recognizably avant-garde work.
The Affair
Saturday, December 2 at 6:00 p.m.
Wednesday, December 6 at 1:00 p.m.
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center – 144 W. 65th Street
Again using the melodrama genre as an instrument of oblique social critique, Yoshida’s ninth feature stars Mariko Okada as a woman trapped in a loveless marriage to a philandering businessman who finds herself mysteriously drawn toward an old lover of her deceased mother’s.
Akitsu Springs
Sunday, December 3 at 1:00 p.m.
Thursday, December 7 at 1:00 p.m.
The first great commercial success of his young career, Akitsu Springs is a tear-jerking romance that finds Yoshida working in color and in collaboration with his frequent star and lifelong filmmaking partner Mariko Okada (in her 100th on-screen appearance).
Wuthering Heights
Sunday, December 3 at 3:30 p.m.
Thursday, December 7 at 3:30 p.m.
Emily Brontë’s Gothic romance is transposed to feudal Japan for Yoshida’s powerfully stark, elemental take on the story.
18 Who Cause a Storm
Sunday, December 3 at 6:30 p.m.
Wednesday, December 6 at 3:15 p.m.
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center – 144 W. 65th Street
A group of migrant workers fed up with their being ruthlessly exploited by the society around them lash out in Yoshida’s rugged widescreen chronicle of proletarian unrest.
Women in the Mirror
Sunday, December 3 at 9:00 p.m.
In his final fiction feature, Yoshida returned to an old subject in his work: the unfathomable trauma known by Japan due to the United States’s dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Flame and Women
Tuesday, December 5 at 6:30 p.m.
Yoshida returned to the melodrama—this time synthesizing elements of the horror film in the process—with this chronicle of a woman’s suddenly swelling desire for her child’s biological father.
Coup d’état
Wednesday, December 6 at 6:30 p.m.
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center – 144 W. 65th Street
The culminating film in the trilogy formed by Eros + Massacre and Heroic Purgatory, Yoshida’s 16th feature is 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 some years later.
A Promise
Wednesday, December 6 at 8:45 p.m. – Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
Friday, December 8 at 9:00 p.m. – Japan Society
Yoshida came out of his feature filmmaking retirement with this typically idiosyncratic meditation on what was, at the time, a taboo topic: euthanasia.
Farewell to the Summer Light
Thursday, December 7 at 6:30 p.m.
A fascinating transitional film for Yoshida, Farewell to the Summer Light finds the restless iconoclast heading to Europe to tell the tale of an on-again-off-again romance between Naoko, a married expat who specializes in import-export (Mariko Okada), and Makoto (Tadashi Yokouchi), a Japanese scholar who is searching for a cathedral that served as the architectural inspiration for a church built in Nagasaki by Portuguese missionaries.
Confessions Among Actresses
Thursday, December 7 at 8:45 p.m.
Something like Yoshida’s response to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Confessions Among Actresses finds Yoshida teaming up with three prominent Japanese actresses—Mariko Okada, Ruriko Asaoka, and Ineko Arima, each renowned for playing eminently modern women who have been wronged by the men around them—to craft a fragmentary, perpetually shapeshifting work on the relationship between performance and trauma.
A Story Written with Water
Friday, December 8 at 6:00 p.m.
Japan Society – 333 E. 47th Street
Bearing a title inspired by John Keats’s epitaph and taken from the Yōjirō Ishizaka novel it adapts, Yoshida’s first independent film is a startling affair, depicting the unbreakable love of mother and child.
For full descriptions of the films and to learn more about Kijū Yoshida, please visit Film at Lincoln Center’s website.
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