Confessions Among Actresses

Something like Yoshida’s response to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Confessions Among Actresses finds Yoshida teaming up with three prominent Japanese actresses—Mariko Okada, Ruriko Asaoka, and Ineko Arima, each renowned for playing eminently modern women who have been wronged by the men around them—to craft a fragmentary, perpetually shapeshifting work on the relationship between performance and trauma. Confessional scenes marked by an air of documentary are interspersed with more conventionally staged moments, and, when combined with Yoshida’s radical sense of visual composition and jagged, deliberately conspicuous editing, this film conjures a dizzying swirl of disparate realities. Print courtesy of the National Film Archive of Japan.