![]() What follows is a narrative dance between a slimy paparazzo (Harada), Takashi’s ad agent (Ikuyo), and Takashi as they set out to exploit, control, and destroy one another. A life insurance company gets wind of this story and decides to hire him as the mascot of their new ad campaign – literally selling suicide under the slogan: “It’s high time that you are all happy.” He reluctantly agrees, and after a staged photo reenactment, his image is plastered all throughout Tokyo. ![]() The film begins when a salaryman named Takashi Kiguchi is laid off from his job he then makes a dramatic, failed attempt at shooting himself in the head. Marcus Iwama’s summary of it in a review for Little White Lies is as follows: The doomed, aimless run of the lead character at the movie’s end recalls that of Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds of 1958 Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, released the same year as Yoshida’s film, and Sam Fuller’s Underworld U.S.A., released the following year, have similar final sequences and Good-for-Nothing, along with the director’s other early features, like these classics and the early works of his Shōchiku contemporary Ōshima, is representative of what was an exciting new aesthetic sensibility in world cinema.Įven more impressive and original in style is his next feature, the corrosive Blood is Dry from 1960, one of the most extraordinary discoveries of the retrospective. Our protagonist is the Rimbaud-reading son of a prominent business executive as he and his companions idle around, Yoshida visionarily renders their casual nihilism as an inevitable outcome of the sociocultural malaise resulting from Japan’s postwar reconstruction and subsequent economic boom. The Film at Lincoln Center program note provides this brief description: Good-for-Nothing from 1960, a youth film and crime drama, is a remarkable debut, consistently visually dynamic if in accord with commercial norms. It was like that, almost by accident, that I was able to make my first feature, which I titled Rokudenashi( Good-for-Nothing).Ī useful way of entry into appreciation and assessment of his cinema might be through the commentary of Noël Burch, one of the most important writers on Japanese cinema alongside such eminent Anglophone critics as David Bordwell and Robin Wood in his entry on Nagisa Ōshima and the Japanese New Wave for Richard Roud’s Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, he said about Yoshida, “His early films, made for a major company, were quite traditional, intimist dramas, in the manner of Ozu and Naruse, but on a level with, say, post-war Tasaka (i.e., respectable).” Burch’s then commitment to a modernist aesthetic-he subsequently abandoned this perspective-may explain his considerable undervaluing here of the filmmaker’s early achievements. And it was because of this crisis that Shochiku decided to give the younger directors a chance. By 1960 Japanese cinema was in crisis, mainly due to television. At this time Japanese cinema, above all that of the major studios, was a predominantly industrial, commercial cinema, against which we fought violently. For another five years, Oshima, myself, and the rest of the younger generation at the studio wrote scripts, and at the same time – outside the studio, of course – contributed to a journal, “Film Criticism,” of which Oshima was editor-in-chief. When I entered Shochiku, Oshima had already been there a year. At this time I wasn’t particularly set on making films, but as a literature student, I wasn’t happy with the stuffy academic milieu, and for this reason I left and turned to cinema. He recounted his beginnings in Japanese film production in an interview with Pascal Bonitzer and Michel Delahaye published in the October 1970 issue of Cahiers du Cinéma:Īfter leaving university in 1955, I started immediately at Shochiku as an assistant director. Yoshida studied French literature at the University of Tokyo and then entered the Shōchiku studio where he assisted Keisuke Kinoshita. ![]() From December 1st through the 8th, Film at Lincoln Center-in collaboration with the Japan Foundation, New York-presented a long overdue retrospective programmed by Dan Sullivan-with all but two of the features shown in 35-millimeter prints-devoted to the work of the late Kijū Yoshida, one of the most talented Japanese directors to emerge in the 1960s his political interests are a source of fascination but what the series revealed above all is his boldness and brilliance as a visual stylist, surpassing that of even some of his more famous contemporaries. ![]()
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