Yoshida's first feature follows the lives of young students against a background of jazz, emptiness and boredom. The plot is fairly simple: a "good-for-nothing" from a poor background falls in love with the young secretary of his rich friend's father. The woman senses good in him and tries to lead him on the right path.
Rokudenashi, Bon à Rien, Никудышный, Bon à rien, O Imprestável, 一无是处, Никчёмный человек, 쓸모없는 녀석
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Do you think in an alt timeline if Yoshida had stuck to conventional genre based film-making, he possibly still would have been one of Japan's best. I ponder that as I slip from big bottle of Asahi.
I try when watching films, to judge on individual merits but I do take into consideration of them in context to the run of the body of work, so for the Kō Nakahira Summer Heat review from yesterday, that was bad all round, bad film at the end of an amazing run.
What I find fascinating with this is how good it is for a debut, yes there is a slight Godard influence, but this is very complete, confident and stylised (great for…
Japanuary 2022: Yoshishige Yoshida
Yoshishige Yoshida's debut, Good-for-Nothing, possesses almost all of the hallmarks of the Japanese New Wave and Sun Tribe films. Young people caught up in a world that could not care much about them, a jazzy score, and a sense of doom looming beneath the surface. However, Yoshida's script and direction go against expectations in some clever ways.
Explosions of sex and violence, or general rebelliousness, are suggested more so than depicted here. We do not bear witness to wealthy boys flaunting floral apparel, although we still spend some time on the beach. Instead, we follow a group of boys from differing social classes. Toshio is the group leader and essentially has an unlimited money supply because…
"In a 1960 roundtable discussion about the political potential of filmmaking in general, Yoshida succinctly expressed what he believed was fundamental to a form of politically engaged cinema: conflict. Responding to a question about how he treated the protests against the 1960 resigning of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in his first film, Good for Nothing, he stated that he was not concerned with the details of the treaty itself or the dynamics of the protests. Rather, he said that he wanted to capture “the buried energy of Japan’s younger generation and how those on the inside responded to and coped [with the protests].” That is, he aimed to use fictional filmmaking to show the normally concealed forces at work within…
-why do you take such an interest in me?
-why indeed?
an aimless youth who doesn’t know what he wants, or perhaps, is too scared of what he wants - someone who believes in him. sometimes all it takes is one person to believe in you, so that you can begin to believe in yourself.
there’s nobody like you in my life
01/04/23
The more pulp material is drowned by Yoshida's somber point of view and while fomally accomplished it is never as radical as some of the better early New Wave films. His oppresive framing is already great and the sense of quiet despair registers strongly.
YOSHIDA (1/19)
First Yoshida, so, thoughts are scattershot, but highest expectations have been met. Remarkably reserved, especially for an early, debut even, Japanese New Wave film. (Ignore the concomitant implication of out-of-the-gate qualitative superiority over Good-For-Nothing's compatriots. I live for the unbridled hysteria and colorful gusto behind and to behold in e.g. The Sun's Burial, Killers on Parade, I Hate But Love, and on.) Indeed, all the textural signifiers of green Nūberu bāgu entries are here (Jazz a'plenty and a'glorious(!!) (see also: One Way Ticket To Love, Everything Goes Wrong, The Warped Ones, etc.)), but they're put to screen with precocious precision versus a younger man's characteristically heartfelt, stylistic cannonade. It plays with effortless calculation (despite how mathematically put this…
Volúpia Perigosa estreava há 60 anos no Japão.
Yoshida é de fato um mestre da composição, mas embora ele mantenha uma certa potência cool, me parece que este filme é mais domesticado do que outros cineastas da nouvelle vague japonesa estavam fazendo em 1960.
DVDRip no MakingOff.
Yoshida would later become one of the greats but this certainly feels like a debut in that the inklings of greatness spread throughout (really, one would be hardpressed to find a less-than-good Japanese New Wave film) suggest the filmmaker he would later become. The commodification of a male physicality here directly acts against Yoshida's later portrayal of femininity but I'd have to spend more time with this to truly parse it out, and I'd rather spend my time with other Yoshida works.
Part of my Japanese New Wave Top 200
Just as many of his contemporaries of the Japanese New Wave, Yoshishige Yoshida started out by directing films about disillusioned youth growing up in a bleak post-war Japan. This, Yoshida's debut, closely follows the formula for the so-called sun tribe genre which was popularized already in the late 50's, inspired by the literature of Shintaro Ishihara. This has everything you'd expect from such a film: bored disillusioned youth rebelling against an uncaring adult world, a focus on class privilege, and a smooth jazzy soundtrack. Where this film primarily deviates is in how restrained it feels: it operates on the other side of the spectrum from, say, the unhinged The Warped Ones which…
Yoshida's debut continues the Sun-tribe-influenced filmmaking, clearly becoming more exciting and radical than predecessors such as Nakahira's Crazed Fruit or Ichikawa's Punishment Room that still struggled to get out of old forms despite new themes, but not quite reaching the innovative mastery of Ôshima's Cruel Story of Youth, another Shochiku effort in the field released in June, a little more than a month before Yoshida's film.
But to define "Sun-tribe films" is not to define the central artistic adolescence of Japanese cinema of the 1950s as these films were made by many different directors who approached form very differently. Rather, this definition works to pinpoint a thematic change, the birth of (post-war) youth that would become the driving force of…
