Heroic Purgatory

Yoshishige Yoshida's 1970 Japanese film is the middle part of his political trilogy. A lost teenage girl brought home by the wife of Rikiya, an engineer at the Atomic Energy Agency, calls back his past in the student movement of the sixties; the story leaps back and forth in time and it is often unclear when a given scene takes place. What Yoshida is after is the collapse of a revolutionary movement from within: betrayal, the gap between generations, the past rewriting the present. The visual construction is extremely cold, with figures pushed to the edge of the frame and wide white spaces swallowing them. The film is deliberately difficult and does not open itself to a viewer without the context. Who it's for: viewers interested in the Japanese new wave and political modernist cinema. Who it's not for: anyone wanting a followable plot, or who will find the cold formalism wearing.