Eros + Massacre (Yoshida, 1969): Close-Up Cinema, 7pm
This presentation of Eros + Massacre (which also screens on February 4th) is part of the Essential Cinema strand at the venue (full details here).
Chicago Reader review:
Said to be the most important work of the Japanese new wave, this
beautiful and provocative 1969 feature by Yoshishige Yoshida intertwines
two narratives for a dialectical examination of love and politics, the
individual and society. One, set in the early 20th century, is based on
the life of anarchist Sakae Osugi, who advocated free love as part of
his philosophy of personal liberation; the other, set in the 60s,
concerns a journalist who emulates Osugi with two lovers, one a voyeur.
Yoshida uses a variety of devices to distance us from the action,
including scenes staged as theater, incidents presented in several
different ways, and characters from the past popping up in the present.
Yet the film is held together by his sensitive use of black-and-white
‘Scope: filling space with water, cherry blossoms, or urban surfaces, he
casts his characters adrift on the screen just as the editing floats
them across time. The film implicitly rejects what the actual Osugi
called the “conscious destruction of past cultural residue” in favor of a
more nuanced understanding of human contradiction, and in their quest
for freedom the protagonists are foiled by the social order and their
inherent limitations, becoming alienated from each other and themselves.
Fred Camper
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