The trio of titles that are joining 4xblu’s online offerings today consists of Woody Allen’s “Everyone Says I Love You,” Nicholas Ray’s “55 Days in Peking,” and Arrow’s “Love + Anarchism” Kijû Yoshida box set.
Kijû Yoshida got his start at Japanese studio Shôchiku in 1955, working as an assistant director for the likes of Keisuke Kinoshita and Yasujiro Ozu. Beginning in 1960 Yoshida directed five features in three years for Shôchiku, then resigned after the sixth was recut by the studio while Yoshida was on his honeymoon with actress Mariko Okada, an established star prior to appearing in his breakthrough “Akitsu Springs” who would prominently feature in his later films. The pair formed their own production company, which would finance his next five pictures before Yoshida moved on to the Art Theatre Guild of Japan (ATG), an outfit known for its small budgets and decidedly non-commercial fare. ATG distributed Yoshida’s so-called political trilogy: “Eros + Massacre,” “Heroic Purgatory,” and “Coup d’etat,” which are the films featured in Arrow’s box set. With the trilogy, Yoshida used three failed student movements from across the political spectrum (one anarchist, one leftist, and one authoritarian) as the basis for his films, presenting them in formally dazzling sequences that explode conventional notions of how narrative information is disseminated in stories drawn from historical events, even going so far as to bend space and time by having characters from different eras interact.