Art Theatre Guild

EROSU + GYAKUSATSU

Eros Plus Massaker
Yoshida YoshiShige (kijû)
Japan 1970
165 min
V'03

The masterpiece of Yoshida Yoshishige is <i>Erosu + Gyakusatsu (Eros Plus Massacre)</i>. Few films in the Western cinema are as freely disjunctive and as dialectical in their approach to narrative space-time. The mythical space-time of Teshigahara, in contrast, simply tends to dissolve chronology along with the historical
dimension as such. This film offers, moreover, a remarkable reading of the new theatricality, memorable embodiments of the archetypal «madman», as well as an empirical but provocative use of strategies borrowed from traditional art, notably the principle of de-centred composition. These are allied with more directly Brechtian procedures, such as theatricalized interpolations, title boards, mixtures of historical fact and fiction, past and present, etc. The films length precludes a full-scale analysis. It is a three-and-a-half-hour fantasmagoria around the life and death of a noted Japanese anarchist, Ôsugi Sakae, killed by the police with one of his lovers and his nephew early in this century.
(Noël Burch, «To the Distant Observer», Berkeley: University of California Press 1979, pp. 348f.)

Credits
  • Okada Mariko - Itô Noe/Mako
  • Hosokawa Toshiyuki - Ôsugi Sakae
  • Kusunoki Yûko - Masaoka Itsuko
  • Takahashi Etsushi - Tsuji Jun
  • Inano Kazuko - Hiraga Aichô
  • Yagi Masako - Hori Yasuko
  • Shinbashi Taiko - Dai Chiyoko
  • Matsueda Kinji - Sakai Toshihiko
  • Kawabe Kyûzô - Unema Mitsuru
  • Sakaguchi Yoshisada - Aratani Raison
  • Takagi Takehiko - Okumura Hiroshi
  • Harada Daijirô - Wada Kiwamu
  • Ii Toshiko - Sokutai Eiko
  • Tamai Midori - Utsuroi Megumi
  • Kanauchi Kikuo - Hishiro Mamiji
Produktion Gendai Eigasha
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