Another mighty brick of excavated cine-miracles: Arrow Films’ pink house of Japanese avant-gardism, Kiju Yoshida: Love + Anarchism. Yoshida was one of the major Sixties New Wave bomb throwers, though his movies for some reason never exported like Oshima’s or Imamura’s. His keynote epic Eros + Massacre (1969) would’ve certainly posed a challenge — at three and a half hours, it’s a monster of an experiment, dovetailing the tale of fin de siècle anarchist/free love doyen Sakae Osugi with the young radicalized lovers in 1969 Japan failing to find a shared morality in a crazy modern world. It’s a ball-busting trip, full of youthful anarchistic cant and literary declaration (a la Godard), and shot in Yoshida’s trademark style, all inky black-and-white images of extreme angles, forever corridors, off-balance compositions, absurd perspectives, and voguing tableaux. The effect is like being trapped at an ultracool mescaline party with sexually hyperactive grad students for whom every gesture is catastrophic.
The Village Voice, “The Restoration Revolution”
