Eros + Massacre

Yoshishige Yoshida's 1969 film folds two eras into each other. One follows the anarchist Sakae Osugi in the 1920s, his idea of free love and his entanglements with three women: his wife Yasuko, his lover Noe Ito, and the jealous Itsuko, including the 1916 stabbing at a tea house. Osugi and Ito were killed by the military police in 1923. The second strand follows two students in the 1960s researching his ideas. Yoshida does not keep the two apart chronologically; scenes bleed into one another and the same event is played more than once in different versions. The visual language is extreme: very wide frames, large empty areas, compositions thrown deliberately off balance. Yoshida's stated point was that the state destroyed Osugi precisely because his idea threatened monogamy, and through it the family and the state. Who it's for: viewers ready for the most experimental edge of the Japanese New Wave. Who it's not for: anyone wanting a followable plot or a running time under three hours.