In this intricately layered Japanese film, the nature of actresses and what they gain from acting is explored. The lives of three actresses are laid bare, and scenes from their lives are woven in and out of interviews with each of them. Each of them has experienced a traumatic event which contributes to their particular enjoyment of becoming someone else in dramatic roles.
Kokuhakuteki joyûron, Трактат: Исповедь актрисы, 女优的告白, 여배우의 고백, Aveux, théories, actrices
Japan
Japan
One thing about going back through these to screencap them is that it gives me a chance to view the film purely on a visual level. I was ready to talk about this film in terms of performance (melodramatic, but in a good way) and how striking the framing of every scene was--even outdoors, Yoshida finds a way to almost literally frame things. But in my rapidfire rewatch, certain visual motifs became much more clear. Part of it is, I don't have to focus on both subtitles and visuals in my screencap watch, but part of it is that visuals are all I am interested in in said rewatch.
What we have in this film is not just a visual…
Contains more ideas in a single frame than most directors can manage in a lifetime.
Too much talking perhaps to actually connect with the stories properly but my god the framing is absolutely god tier. Every single frame is so incredibly constructed and is so incredibly stunning, it's hard to look away.
Performance and living. Yoshida making a very direct treatise from his long time work with Okada. Above all, it is an impressive formal achievement with its ideas getting expressed through constant reframing of his actresses as their relation toward keep getting filtered and transformed.
A fractured maelstrom of performative identities and deconstructed gender roles, Yoshishige Yoshida's Confessions Among Actresses is almost entirely impenetrable upon first watch, shifting between multiple characters, viewpoints, and layers of reality with no hand-holding whatsoever. It slowly becomes clear that what we're watching is a series of actresses telling stories of various traumas and exploring the consequences of such upon their lives. Yoshishige seems most interested in the way that hysteria had (has) become so ingrained into the idea of a "great actress" that such women's own problems become marginalised in the shadow of the prescribed performative lives.
These themes are explored with the unending parade of gorgeous, voyeuristic cinematography that I've come to expect from Yoshishige, though here he…
Trauma itself becomes a performance, death as a performance, daily life as a performance. The identity of being an actress as an inescapable reality. As an expected reality, to have your whole inner world exposed to all those who wish to view it. For it be believed as performance, where unsettling truths to one’s trauma is not accepted for anything but fiction. To act is an act of self-preservation—taking on a new character, to live in their inner world that is obscured by cinema’s artifice to all but the performer.
Not sure why I am trying to make sense of this. Confessions Among Actresses deconstructs the art of performance, explores the engendered expectations within the craft, and the impossibility to understand the psyche of the women who dedicate their lives to it. Performance has always been the most confounding thing to me. What I know though is this feels…monumental?
Confissões entre Atrizes estreava há 50 anos no Japão.
Apesar de Yoshishige Yoshida ter pleno domínio estético e psicológico de forma natural como podemos ver nos seus filmes de temática anarquista de fins de 60/início de 70, fica difícil não ver Confissões entre Atrizes oriundo de um mundo que preexistiu o Persona de Bergman.
É como se os mesmos elementos do filme do sueco se tripartissem em três atrizes diferentes e o psicodrama (o real da psicologia, o profissional do cinema e o casual da vida diária) fosse o modo de se espelharem entre si.
Mais um tour de force em amplos sentidos dentro da filmografia do diretor.
DVDRip no MakingOff.
Part of my Japanese New Wave Top 200
If you’re an actress, you cannot really die. Even dying is acting.
Dense, layered, disorienting, entrancing. As with Yoshida’s other more challenging films, a rewatch or two seems more or less mandatory for even trying to grasp all that’s going on here, and I’m still not sure exactly what I think and feel about it. Dream, fiction and reality move in and out of each other. Actors talking about acting, actors acting as actors talking about acting. Masks and faces, are they so different really? Borders between the performing self and the ”real” self dissolve, but was there even any difference to begin with? Aren’t we performing our selves, all the time?…
Confessions Among Actresses is a hard film to rate, and at the same time, a difficult one to talk about coherently. It’s the second film by Yoshishige Yoshida that I’ve seen, and even though it was shorter by about 90 minutes than that other one (Eros + Massacre), I found it a good deal more challenging.
I mean, I don’t think I would’ve had any idea what was going on if I hadn’t the short plot synopsis, stating that it’s about three different actresses who all have traumatic events from their past which served as reasons for becoming actresses.
It all feels very deliberate, and I do get the sense it’s tackling some heady themes surrounding identity, art, and the…
Kind of a great accidental back to back pair with Rivette's Gang of Four centering on the performative requirements of womanhood in society. Both draw a distinct parallel between performance used in careerism, and performance used to interact in a man's world daily. This time, the focus is on image and exploitation, fragile like glass. The mirror is a recurring image, whether in the hand to allow the image to be consumed, implied in the visual replication of the body mirrored across the screen, or cracked when stricken. The broken mirror is a particularly strong image, removing its subject from one pane on impact as the reflection distorts. The fracturing of a public image comes in the way trauma is received as a performer; the self is compartmentalized from the screen, and only one can heal at a time.
Bloody hell, ok off the bat this what an Antonio film would be like if any of them were any good and he could write Monica Vitti as an actual three dimension character instead as a 2D cipher of obscure and obtuse, objectification of male gaze. Well maybe not just Antonio, as Yoshida throws in a nice side order of Bergman psycho-babel as well..... Wooooo Hoooooo - let's go!!!!!!!!
However on a serious note but there does seem to be a weirdly late 1960s European style to this, possibly the colour design and film stock used. This does differ slightly from the Japanese films I have seen from the time, however I will fully admit if I am wrong here.…
