Yoshishige Yoshida

Yoshida came up at Shochiku around 1960 with the young directors the press called the Shochiku Nouvelle Vague. His early films are about bored, ambitious young men, like the department store clerk in Bitter End of a Sweet Night who plays three women against each other to climb. The later ones, many starring his wife Mariko Okada, break melodrama into puzzles of time and framing: Eros + Massacre follows the anarchist Sakae Osugi and his lovers in the 1920s.

Signature

• Mariko Okada in the lead from Akitsu Hot Springs to Eros + Massacre.
• Off-centre framing and large areas of empty white space.
• Love affairs that take apart postwar Japanese respectability.
• A trilogy about radicals: Eros + Massacre, Heroic Purgatory, Coup d'Etat.