The Eighteen Who Stirred up a Storm

While The Eighteen Who Stirred Up a Storm was made the year after the success of The Affair at Akitsu, it could hardly be more different. Whether too outlandish or ahead of its time, this film was completely neglected at its release and only re-evaluated recently. Neither a sensationalist gang movie nor a Marxist-humanist outcry over social injustice, Yoshida’s realistic depiction of a group of young contract labourers at the very bottom of society may be closest to Italian neo-realism. The story is simple, the black-and-white widescreen camera work is stark, and the young actors are all amateurs. The young rough labourers are not allowed to become individuals but remain an anonymous group, and human relations are depicted as void of mutual understanding and reconciliation. In this distancing way, however, Yoshida confronts us all the stronger with the absurd reality of human beings used as mere ‘things’ providing labour, without offering any easy explanations.