Retinal Dreams: Heroic Purgatory - Yoshishige Yoshida

This is a strange one in that I don't enjoy the content of the film, but it is one of my all-time favourites visually. It's certainly not a bad film and there are those who love all aspects of it, but I find it needlessly opaque and too obstinately revolutionist and political. Yoshida is one of the many members of the Japanese New Wave whose work was eclipsed by the more popular artists in the movement. This is a great shame as he made some of the most audacious, complex and visually stunning films out there. My personal favourite of his is Farewell to the Summer Light, which I may do a post on later.

The compositional style employed by Yoshida here is all architecture and no actor. His films take a lot of influence from Antonioni and this is felt particularly strongly here, with many shots evoking the modern alienation of his Italian peer. Some examples:

From La Notte

From L'Avventura

Yoshida and Hasegawa are more overtly experimental, however, playing with under- and over-exposure and taking the architecture-dominated style to sometimes ridiculous levels.

Top 3:

One of the film's opening shots, exposing its style with little ado. The curves of the building with the separate floors looks like a ribcage, with the presumably dead woman being consumed by it.

Stairways give film-makers a lot to play with (see Vertigo or Battleship Potemkin) and this is one of my favourite examples. I love the strong variations in light, the odd perspective, the angles of the rails and walls.

One of the more overindulgent shots in the film where the makers decided to do away with the characters almost completely. That said, the angles created by the beams, the way they frame the action and the contrast in light is very striking.

The rest: