Heroic Purgatory (Yoshida, 1970): Close-Up Cinema, 8pm
Peter Mandelson’s grandfather Herbert Morrison, deputy Prime Minister in Clement Attlee’s landmark post-War Labour government, famously carried his Desert Island Discs choices in his wallet, expecting the call to appear on the programme. It was an invitation that sadly was never extended to him and I thought of that tale when I was actually asked to contribute to the most famous of all movie polls, run by Sight & Sound magazine. All those years of trawling the previous decades choices with rapt fascination, reading the articles on the canon and the time keeping that running list of my ten all-time favourites that were inevitable mixed up with the greatest in my head was not wasted. Now, though, I was going to be forced to think about it and make a definitive list. Others were doing the same, prompting responses varying widely from “it’s a bit of fun” to “it’s agony”.
The more I thought about it the more I wanted my contribution to be just that, a genuine heartfelt one, made up of the films I desperately wanted people to see but had not been considered in the previous voting, and modestly hoping for a re-evalution of the choices. I made two rules. All of the films in my list (reproduced below) would deserve to be part of the Sight & Sound Greatest poll conversation and all the choices would not have received a single vote in the 2012 poll.
Some in this list are simply neglected favourites but in other cases there are very good reasons some of these films have been overlooked. Jean Grémillon, for instance, faded from view after an ill-fated directorial career, and has only resurfaced in the last decade with devoted retrospectives and DVD releases. The heartbreaking Remorques is one of his masterpieces. The Alfred Hitchcock melodrama Under Capricorn, which quickly disappeared after bombing at the box office and the subsequent dissolving of the director’s production company, deserves high rank in the Master’s work but languishes in limbo, only seen at major retrospectives. The Exiles and Spring Night, Summer Night are both once lost American independent classics only just receiving their due after recent rediscovery. White Dog, after a desultory release overshadowed by misguided accusations of racism, was not in circulation for many years. Warhol's Vinly, based on Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, was shown in 2013 from (fortuitously I later discovered) 16mm in an ICA gallery and felt thrillingly authentic, the sound of the whirring projector and the artist’s singular framing combining to create a mesmeric experience. Here is the full list:
Remorques/Stormy Waters (Jean Grémillon, 1941)
Under Capricorn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1949)
The Exiles (Kent Mackenzie, 1961)
La Baie des anges/Bay of Angels (Jacques Demy, 1963)
Vinyl (Andy Warhol, 1965)
Spring Night, Summer Night (Jospeh L. Anderson, 1967)
Heroic Purgatory (Yosgishige Yoshida, 1970)
Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971)
White Dog (Sam Fuller, 1982)
Three Times (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2005)
The ten I chose (above) should all ideally be seen screened so continue to keep an eye on this blog and the listings at Close-Up Cinema in Shoreditch. This presentation of Heroic Purgatory (which also screens on February 11th) is part of the Essential Cinema strand at the venue (full details here).
Village Voice review:
Heroic Purgatory is a world-beater of a film, a more condensed and intense dose of director Kishu Yoshida-ness, in which a student gaggle of would-be terrorists angst about their communal non-action, a strange runaway teen infiltrates the lives of a middle-class couple, and characters keep taking off wigs, revealing that they’re someone else. Every vertiginous shot is an idea, and Yoshida musters the dislocation living in an arthouse science fiction film, when in fact it’s just life at the end of the Sixties.
Michael Atkinson
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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