In contrast to the pared-down narrative and cast of Farewell to the Summer Light, the three-and-a-half hours of unrelenting experimentation found in Yoshida’s next film preclude any attempt at summative analysis. Ostensibly, Eros Plus Massacre is a historical epic depicting early twentieth century anarchists Itō Noe (Mariko Okada) and Sakae Ōsugi (Toshiyuki Hosokawa), concentrating on the triangulation between Noe and between Ōsugi’s other lovers—his wife, Hori Yasuko (renamed Akiko Hiraga, and played by Kazuko Inenon), and his mistress, journalist Kamichika Ichiko (renamed Masaoka Itsuko afer the real-life Ichiko threatened to sue, and played by Yuko Kusunoki) —and culminating in Ichiko/Itsuko’s attempted murder of Ōsugi, ten years before he and Noe were murdered by the police. This timeline is intercut with scenes of the aimless present-day students/actors/dropouts Eiko (Toshiki Ii) and Wada (Dajiro Harada), reading about the earlier events which they half-recreate, half imitate, half-dismiss. Signalled by the constant psychedelic rock soundtrack, the contemporary segments seems to signal their own contemporaneity, but the slower, more patient historical segments are also characterised by stringent formal experimentation which provides both an equivalent to and critique of the passions that unfold within them, as well as the lens of the historical film itself. As the two timelines begin to blur in the more surreal focus of the film’s second half, such experimentation becomes an increasing part of the film’s method. The point, as Yoshida noted in interviews, is to view the past for the way it views the future, not to reduplicate it in the present. Yoshida opens the film with a startling scene in which Eiko interviews Noe’s daughter, framed as a spotlit interrogation with uncomfortable echoes of State torture. As such, the refusal to divulge, to narrate, to present a coherent chronicle of the past comes to seem an act of resistance in itself: the subject refuses to answer questions, insisting on the exploitation of mothers as such, rather than a focus on the spectacular life of her own mother as either revolutionary exemplar or cautionary tale. The present, Yoshida suggests, treats historical figures like the urn containing Ōsugi’s ashes which opposing rugby teams kick about a field in one of the film’s most startling sequences.
In the film’s second half (the two broken by a brief interval screen), Yoshida more explicitly signals the breaking down of boundaries between the two time periods earlier signalled in subtle nods such as Noe arriving at the modern-day Tokyo train station at which she’d in reality arrived decades earlier—-with little attempt to ‘disguise’ the location. Having interviewed Noe’s daughter, Eiko now ‘interviews’ Noe herself, and it becomes hard to place scenes of Osugi, Noe and Tsuji wandering the seafront as fantasy, historical re-enactment, or a kind of ghostly presence in the modern day.
This section culminates in the multiple re-tellings of the attempted murder of Ōsugi which serve as the film’s climax, and which the modern-day students take to attest, not to the breakdown of sexual experimentation—the return of the repressed in the guise of murderous jealousy—but as the point to which it led all along, embraced as the height of ecstasy. Significantly, their attempts to combine eros and thanatos, eros plus massacre, are seen to be conducted through the modality of film itself. Scenes of the pyromaniac Wada setting fire to rolls film or wielding a cine-camera with shades of Powell’s Peeping Tom, and of film rolls turned into a noose as the director first encountered having sex with Eiko—kicks away cannisters of celluloid in a final, suicidal act—problematise the act of representation at every stage, as does the extreme, light-bleached low contrast black and white, the anti-symmetrical framing (honing in one detail rather than attempting an overall picture). Would a revolutionary cinema be destructive—a thanatopic self-immolation akin to the anarchist philosophy espoused by Ōsugi, at once egoist and self-destructive—or constructive, of alternative visions of social life represented by the dreams of free love and revolution?
A haunting line concerning the springtime flowers that survive the massacre, which plays out in the film’s final scenes, is first heard when Ōsugi tells Noe of how the cherry blossom season reminds him of his release from prison after his comrades in the anarchist movement had been executed. This scene, in which Ōsugi and Noe first kiss in public, watched by a police spy—in real life, the subject of much controversy at a time when such actions were constrained by heavy social taboo—is key to the film, as Noe unfolds her own dilemma. Escaping the patriarchal trappings of an initial marriage, she’s escaped into the ostensibly more liberated marriage to Tsuji, yet feels equally constrained by his passive, apolitical stance and unwillingness to follow up on the feminist principles he espouse; Ōsugi serves as a third alternative. Yet, in both cases, love doesn’t compensate for the losses suffered in political struggle—which rendered Ōsugi increasingly wary of openly espousing revolution—or the trap of conventional domesticity. When Ōsugi espouses a theory that Yoshida himself endorsed in interviews at the time—the destruction of monogamy as the precondition for the destruction of attendant restrictions on freedom, the family and the State—it comes across as shallow pontificating justifying his own exploitation of three women who accept his ‘free love’ arrangement unwillingly. The film constantly brings up questions which it deliberately refuses to answer. Is Ōsugi merely an egotistical practicing a kind of male dominance disguised as free love? Or are the constraints of heterosexual jealousy and monogamy? Is the revolution stymied by sexual jealousy as much as by State power? Does eros lead to, or compensate for ‘massacre’? At certain points, Yoshida implies that Noe’s salvation might have lain in living separately from both Tsuji and Ōsugi—a means of avoiding the clash between committed feminism and the modes of male domination and heterosexual competition that characterise even ‘open’ relationships. But these dreams—whether those of male free love advocates or of the independent feminist rejecting heterosexual relationships—are stymied throughout, as Ōsugi’s mistress wryly notes, by money, which creates situations of economic, sexual and emotional dependency that seems impossible to escape.
Yet if the ultimate check on freedom is economic, we see little of the world of private or State power, of the operations of class warfare, that we hear about in dialogue. In particular, the film arguably under-emphasizes the State power that actually killed Ōsugi and Noe. By focusing instead on the attempted murder associated with the earlier menage, the film risks repeating the public/private division of State conservatism, with violence the province of unregulated private passions rather than a tool of State power, or of the imbrication of ‘crimes of passion’ with the law-making violence of patriarchal power. Thus, we see the tea-house murder of 1916 in endless detail, while Ōsugi and Ito’s actual death is rendered in a series of static shots of their corpses, with the assailants nowhere in site. (In real life, policemen murdered them and dumped their bodies in a well.)
State power and the conservative force of public opinion are, indeed, remarkably absent given their significance in Ōsugi and Noe’s lives: the power of gossip, scandal and patriarchal disapproval in preventing Ito from choosing her own path is hinted at in dialogue, but never really presented outside the smaller triangulations of individual relationship. More generously, one might read this as a self-conscious reduplication of the public/private division by which the hypocritical sexual morality of public order is maintained, and which was a key target for Noe’s proletarian, feminist defense of abortion, prostitution and marriage for love.
Certainly, that inability to translate ‘private’ experimentation to social transformation dogs Eiko and Wada’s desultory experiments. Eiko’s encounters with a policeman, who interrogates her over her supposed role in a prostitution ring, see the policeman extolling a kind of predatory order over the sexual/political revolution (which the State interpellates under the criminalised heading of ‘prostitution’). The contemporary repressiveness enforced by the modern-day cop is here characterised more by a kind of world-weary 'common sense', than by any kind of fanatical or committed belief in hierarchical order, such a manifestation of State power is more insidious in its operations. The accumulation of wealth, power and privilege found in State and private interest adapts its morality as suits: might even, in certain wings, lead to what Marcuse called ‘repressive desublimation’, relying on the fact that revolutionaries and artist who experiment with personal life as much as with cinema, writing or politics are as likely to self-immolate, to destroy themselves internally, as to be destroyed from without. Eiko and Wada stage outrageous reconstructions of scenes of death, disaster and eros in abandoned industrial spaces, at one point ‘crucifying themselves’ on two sides of a giant cross. Obsessed with the sexual and revolutionary experimentation they read about in the life of Ōsugi and Noe, their own experiments are mediated almost entirely through artistic reconstruction—descriptions of sex acts compensating for impotence, Wada’s obsessive, pyromaniac play with cigarette lighters instead of the making of bombs, desultory wanderings through a near-empty city or a projection room for political organising. At a time when the explicit hierarchies of an imperial and moral code against which Noe and Ōsugi struggled have been vanquished through American nuclear violence and the imposition of a falsely democratic, capitalist model which Yoshida deeply distrusted, it’s perhaps no surprise that the contemporary segments feel adrift In that sense, both Yoshida himself and the audience puzzling their way through the deliberately exhausting excesses of this film come to seem something like the figure of Noe’s husband Jun Tsuji (Etsushi Takahashi), who historically turned to the life of a ‘vagabond’ as a means of achieving happiness, neither in revolutionary struggle nor in accepting a place within the dominant, hierarchal social order. Perpetually drunk, repeatedly institutionalise, and dying of starvation in a friend’s one-bedroom apartment following the second world war, Tsuji’s self-marginalisation dramatizes the exclusionary powers by which the State renders surplus requirements entire lives, entire ways of living. In the film’s first half, as the couple’s marriage slowly breaks down in the sliding walls of their own home—an endless series of reconfigured boxes, with no way out—Tsuji already seems a ghost in his own life. As he fades out of the centre of Noe’s life, he nonetheless continues to haunt the second half of the film, playing shakuhachi (as he did in real life in order to support himself), followed by the distant figure of his and Noe’s small son. Glimpsed only in silhouetted long shot and the eerie, echoed sounds of the shakuhachi on the soundtrack, it’s his fate—shadowed by our knowledge of his death in real life, starving and alone—as much as the more spectacular passions that are the film’s principle subject, that reverberates in the afterglow of the film’s pyromaniac passions.
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