Yoshida’s debut feature vividly depicts the ennui and intellectual and spiritual restlessness of a generation of bourgeois youth in Tokyo at the dawn of the 1960s.

Yoshida’s satirical second feature, about a salaryman who attempts to save his colleagues’ jobs by threatening to commit suicide, again ferociously critiques Japanese society following its postwar reinvention as a capitalist giant.

The first great commercial success of his young career, Akitsu Springs is a tear-jerking romance set across 17 years that finds Yoshida working in collaboration with his frequent star and lifelong filmmaking partner Mariko Okada.

A group of migrant workers fed up with their being ruthlessly exploited by the society around them lash out in Yoshida’s rugged widescreen chronicle of proletarian unrest, which marked the beginning of his break with the Japanese studio system.

Yoshida’s first independent film is a startling affair, depicting the unbreakable love of mother and child when a young man finds himself torn between his fiancée and the single mother who raised him. Starring Mariko Okada, whose otherworldly beauty is framed by Yoshida in typically striking, veiled compositions.

A mesmerizing account of a woman’s reconnection with her long-suppressed desires and the resultant tension this causes, The Affair is one of Yoshida and Mariko Okada’s most forceful collaborations and ranks among Yoshida’s most visually precise works.

Yoshida returned to the melodrama—this time synthesizing elements of the horror film in the process—with this chronicle of a woman’s suddenly swelling desire for her child’s biological father.

A love triangle plays out in the snow in Yoshida’s 11th feature, a striking deconstruction of the melodrama, in which a woman reconnects with an old boyfriend while on a trip to a mountain resort with her current lover.

A fascinating transitional film for Yoshida, Farewell to the Summer Light finds the restless iconoclast heading to Europe to tell the tale of an on-again-off-again romance between a married expat and a Japanese scholar who is searching for an architecturally significant cathedral.

Among the greatest of all political films and perhaps the work that best embodies the spirit of Yoshida’s artistic project, Eros + Massacre is an epic, historiographic examination of the last days of anarcho-feminist writer Noe Ito (Mariko Okada) and her lover, the anarchist theorist Sakae Ōsugi, before their 1923 assassination by military police officers.

The second film in a trilogy (inaugurated by Eros + Massacre) concerning 20th-century Japanese history, Heroic Purgatory is a kaleidoscopic, mazelike memory piece about an atomic engineer whose past as a college-age revolutionary militant erupts into the present.

Something like Yoshida’s response to Bergman’s Persona, Confessions Among Actresses finds Yoshida teaming up with three prominent Japanese actresses to craft a fragmentary, perpetually shapeshifting work on the relationship between performance and trauma.

The culminating film in the trilogy formed by Eros + Massacre and Heroic Purgatory, Yoshida’s 16th feature is a spellbinding portrait of notorious militarist Ikki Kita, whose 1936 attempt at staging a coup against the Japanese government would later serve as inspiration to the similarly controversial nationalist writer Yukio Mishima.

Yoshida came out of his feature filmmaking retirement with this typically idiosyncratic meditation on the situation of the elderly as they try to hang onto a shred of their own dignity while awaiting the end of their lives. Featuring music by Haruomi Hosono.

Emily Brontë’s Gothic romance is transposed to feudal Japan for Yoshida’s powerfully stark, elemental take on the story, conjuring a savage world of expressionistic landscapes, spurting blood, and demonic spirits.

In his final fiction feature, Yoshida returned to an old subject in his work: the unfathomable trauma known by Japan due to the United States’ dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Three women return to Hiroshima as Yoshida’s film mutates into a mesmerizing and melancholic puzzlework with vast psychological and political implications.