MIZOGUCHI: THE MASTER


The films of Kenji Mizoguchi, along with those of Kurosawa and Ozu, are perhaps the most celebrated works of Japanese cinema throughout the world. In the years since his death in 1956, his reputation as one of the master directors of world cinema has continued to grow. Few critics today would neglect to include at least one Mizoguchi film on their short lists of "best films of all time," and audiences the world over return again and again to his films, discovering something new in them with each re-viewing.


Kenji Mizoguchi’s life closely parallels the development of cinema in Japan: born in 1898, only a year or two after the introduction of the first Kinetoscope and Vitascope films into Japan, Mizoguchi entered the film industry in the early 1920s, just as filmmakers were breaking away from the conventions of Japanese traditional theater to establish themselves as independent artists. Though Mizoguchi made eighty-five films during his thirty-three years as a director (1923-56), his exalted international reputation rests on a relatively small number of works. Only about a dozen of his films are in regular distribution outside Japan, and of these fewer than half are seen with any real frequency. Among them, the three masterpieces that brought international acclaim to Mizoguchi by winning top awards at the Venice Film Festival in three consecutive years -- The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu (1953), and Sansho the Bailiff (1954) -- continue to fascinate us with their extraordinary artistry.


If there is a single theme uniting all of Mizoguchi’s films, a "red thread" running through his entire body of work, it is his sympathy for individuals, particularly women, who are victimized by society. His very first film, The Resurrection of Love (Ai ni Yomigaeru Hi), a story of two impoverished sisters in love with an artist, has been described as "a portrayal of the poor so devastatingly realistic that it proved unacceptable to the censors" when it was made in 1923. Much the same could be said of his very last film, the 1956 Street of Shame (Akasen Chitai), a sensitive portrayal of the hardships suffered by prostitutes, made at the time of a national debate over a new anti-prostitution law. In all his films, Mizoguchi’s compassionate humanism hovers like a protective angel over the women oppressed by society as he investigates with remarkable delicacy the nuances of human relationships. And in each film, regardless of whether it is a medieval ghost story, an adaptation from Maupassant or Eugene O’Neill, or a domestic tragedy unfolding in the back alleys of modern Osaka, the viewer is enveloped in an atmosphere perfectly attuned to the subject at hand. Transcending mere accuracy in selecting and decorating his settings, Mizoguchi seems almost to control the textures and vapors and aromas that draw the viewer totally into the worlds he created on film.


The words of Akira Kurosawa, spoken in eulogy at Mizoguchi’s funeral, serve as eloquent commentary of the admiration of one Japanese film master for another:


"Mizoguchi’s greatness was that he would do anything to heighten the reality of every scene. He never made compromises. He never said that something or other ‘would do.’ Instead, he pulled or pushed everyone along with him until they had created the feeling which matched his own inner image. He had the temperament of a true creator. Mizoguchi pushed and bullied and was often criticized for it. But he held out, and in doing so he created masterpieces.... Directors like him are especially necessary in Japan, where this kind of pushing is so resisted. Of all Japanese directors, I have the greatest respect for him..... With the death of Mizoguchi, Japanese film has lost its truest creator."

***

When most people think of the great Japanese directors they usually site Akira Kurosawa as number one and Yasujiro Ozu as number two. Kenji Mizoguchi is usually number three and is less discussed in film circles which is much unfortunate. He was loved by the French critics of Cahiers du cinema which included Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette and they described Mizoguchi as not only the greatest of Japanese masters but high in the ranks of the greatest filmmakers who have ever practiced the art. French critic Jean Douchet has said, "Kenji Mizoguchi: Like Bach, Titian, and Shakespeare, he is the greatest in his art." The great director Jean-Luc Godard declared him as "The greatest of Japanese filmmakers," and the New York Times critic Vincent Canby described him as, "one of the great directors of the sound era." Mizoguchi was famous for the 'one scene, one shot,' technique. His style avoids close-ups and instead links the characters to their environment which creates tension and psychological density. Consider a scene in Ugetsu where Lady Wakasa visits Genjuro as he is bathing in an outdoor pool, and as she enters the pool to join him, water splashes over the side and the camera follows the splash into a pan across rippling water that ends with the two of them having a picnic on the grass. Yasujiro Ozu had a similar technique in his films but the difference with Ozu was that he never moved his camera, unlike Mizoguchi which was a more fluid poetic style. Mizoguchi belongs in the same company as some of the greatest directors in the world, like Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, John Ford, Orson Welles, Luis Bunuel, Jean Renoir, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alfred Hitchcock, Yasujiro Ozu, Charles Chaplin, Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer and last but not least Akira Kurosawa; who looked up to Mizoguchi as a master. (http://www.classicartfilms.com/ugetsu-1953)

*****

If Mizoguchi was the poet of women, he was also the poet of houses, rooms, landscape and urban vistas. His period detail and sumptuous camera style lent his stories a fantastic naturalism, heightened by an almost musical editing style. He was capable of everything from waspish comedy to tenderness to epic battle scenes. He was a director for all seasons, and Kurosawa - far better known in the west - freely acknowledged Mizoguchi as his master

.

http://www.filmref.com/directors/dirpages/mizoguchi.html

http://film.guardian.co.uk/Century_Of_Films/Story/0,4135,109935,00.html

http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/mizoguchi/

http://www.theyshootpictures.com/mizoguchikenji.htm

 

Sisters of Gion (1936)

The women who embody Mizoguchi's ideal often live in a time too far in the past to be role models for today, a quirk of which Mizoguchi seems to have been aware. He once said of himself that he portrayed "what should not be possible as if it should be possible," a statement that most aptly describes the virtues of his period heroines. . .Mizoguchi's ideal postwar women show the same self-sacrificing characteristics, but they move yet farther into the past while developing a spiritual power to transcend their physical suffering. . .In all of these paragon portrayals, the vision of society remains the same. The dramatic form is tragic, and spiritual success brings death and worldly defeat. . .The other side of the paragon is the rebel. She is often a prostitute or geisha or similar social outcast, and most often a contemporary woman. She resents the abuses of fathers, employers, and men who buy her and leave her, and attempts to lash back. But her solitary, proud, spiteful opposition does nothing to change the system, and in fact she usually subscribes to its corrupt values, using seduction, deceit and financial exploitation as her methods for revenge. She has nothing spiritual with which to replace the consuming love relationship, and in rejecting it she condemns herself to a life of self-seeking bitterness. She often appears with a meek woman counterpart who underscores the unviability of either stance in the modern world. . .

Omocha (literally "toy'), the modern geisha is Sisters of the Gion (1936), resents the way men treat women as objects and mocks her older sister's devotion to a bankrupt former patron. Setting out to beat men at their own game, she deceives and ruins a sincere young store clerk and has his employer provide her with what she wants: money, pretty clothes and fancy restaurant meals. But as surely as her sister's old patron returns to his wife and a new business opportunity, the clerk takes revenge on Omocha, and she ends up in a hospital bed decrying the institution of geisha while her abandoned sister sits sobbing at her side.

Audie Bock, Japanese Film Directors, pp. 42-43.

http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/22/mizoguchi.html

 

See the essay by Kato Mikio

I thought that film was about reproducing reality.  I knew that literature could be fantastical but I thought movies ere supposed to be a faithful reflection of reality. But watching Ugetsu, I forgot all about that.  In Ugetsu I felt as if the world of fairy tales had been perfectly recreated in images and this was a huge surprise.  So we can say that Mizoguchi was a supreme realist while at the same time, a supreme fantasist.  Therefore, he presents to us as an ambivalent figure. 
For temporal reality we usually expect three things: Events, Narration and Dramatic Progression.  But with Ugetsu, Mizoguchi broke all those rules.  He had real time and fantasy time, along with real space and fantasy space completely mixed together; they were all part of a single world.  Ugetsu is the most successful film I have ever scene at moving back and forth between worlds, between these two realities.  His approach reminds me of traditional Japanese scrolls-emaki.  Having his characters move back and forth through spaces like this was unprecedented.

Masahiro Shinoda


[T]his director’s compassionate, if bitter, moral vision and his choice of camera angle reinforce each other.  Mizoguchi’s formalism and humanism are part of a single unified expression.


Philip Lopate


Mizoguchi’s greatness was that he would do anything to heighten the reality of every scene. He never made compromises. He never said that something or other ‘would do.’ Instead, he pulled or pushed everyone along with him until they had created the feeling which matched his own inner image. He had the temperament of a true creator. Mizoguchi pushed and bullied and was often criticized for it. But he held out, and in doing so he created masterpieces.... Directors like him are especially necessary in Japan, where this kind of pushing is so resisted. Of all Japanese directors, I have the greatest respect for him.....With the death of Mizoguchi, Japanese film has lost its truest creator.


Akira Kurosawa

Kenji Mizoguchi

Often named as one of Japan’s three most important filmmakers (alongside Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu), Kenji Mizoguchi created a cinema rich in technical mastery and social commentary, specifically regarding the place of women in Japanese society. After an upbringing marked by poverty and abuse, Mizoguchi found solace in art, trying his hand at both oil painting and theater set design before, at the age of twenty-two in 1920, enrolling as an assistant director at Nikkatsu studios. By the midthirties, he had developed his craft by directing dozens of movies in a variety of genres, but he would later say that he didn’t consider his career to have truly begun until 1936, with the release of the companion films Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion, about women both professionally and romantically trapped. Japanese film historian Donald Richie called Gion “one of the best Japanese films ever made.”

Over the next decade, Mizoguchi made such wildly different tours de force as The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (1939), The 47 Ronin (1941–42), and Women of the Night (1948), but not until 1952 did he break through internationally, with The Life of Oharu, a poignant tale of a woman’s downward spiral in an unforgiving society. That film paved the road to half a decade of major artistic and financial successes for Mizoguchi, including the masterful ghost story Ugetsu (1953) and the gut-wrenching drama Sansho the Bailiff (1954), both flaunting extraordinarily sophisticated compositions and camera movement. The last film Mizoguchi made before his death at age fifty-eight was Street of Shame (1956), a shattering exposé set in a bordello that directly led to the outlawing of prostitution in Japan. Few filmmakers can claim to have had such impact.

http://www.criterion.com/explore/200-kenji-mizoguchi

Ugetsu

Film Review: Ugetsu

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/ugetsu

 

Ugetsu is Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi's most widely heralded film and one of the couple dozen intractable stalwarts in worldwide cinema history polls, perhaps because it not only encapsulates so many of his concerns (post-WWII questions of jingoism, the plight of women trapped in patriarchy, and conversely issues of national character), but because he also folds them into a dense, fairly complicated episodic narrative, taking place during Japan's civil wars of the 16th century. (Because the storyline has what could legitimately be considered “twists,” be advised that the rest of the review contains spoilers, though Mizoguchi purposefully undercuts the plot's potential surprises by foreshadowing every revelation through internal, formal echoes.)

The film's main storyline, in which a destitute potter is sidelined from his wife and child by a seductive spirit, is an adaptation of an Akinari Ueda story that has passed through cinematic memes like so many other macabre folk tales (it was even used in Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan not once, but twice: first in a rather benign form also recalling Gift of the Magi, and then in a vengeful variation espousing the value of keeping secrets that would reach American cinema in Tales from the Darkside: The Movie). Genjuro, the potter, makes an attempt to stockpile his ceramic wares into a skiff along with his doting, maternal wife Miyagi (played by Mizoguchi's own Marlene Dietrich: Kinuyo Tanaka, who also played Oharu) and young son Genichi (prepubescent and, in Mizoguchi's critique of masculinity, nearly invisible in his father's eyes) so that he can cash in at the city street market. Genjuro's sister Ohama and her husband Tobei tag along, though Tobei is far more interested in pursuing his dream of becoming a renowned samurai warrior than helping Genjuro sell his merchandise.

Adrift in the night-shrouded lake blanketed with Val Lewton-esque ruffles of fog, a seemingly abandoned boat glides up to the quintet and an emaciated near-corpse warns the men in the boat to watch out for marauding bandits and to keep a close eye on their women. In the very next scene, Genjuro is dropping his wife and child alone on the shoreline to fend for themselves because, so he says, it would be too dangerous for them in the city. He is correct, of course, but the danger in the city is directed toward him, whereas the countryside brings Miyagi almost immediate death at the end of a scavenger's spear. Because Genjuro unloads his family so swiftly at the first hint of danger, and because his peril comes accompanied by the sexual rapture he experiences with the spirit Lady Wasaka, it wouldn't be a radical leap to chart his misguided anti-domestic detour with that of Tobei, who also leaves his wife (who immediately succumbs to prostitution) to pursue his selfish, quixotic quest to become a samurai legend.

In other words, it seems as though Genjuro is already subconsciously aware of the erotic rewards of his bad judgment. Which turns the film's finale, in which Genjuro is enchanted a second time by the spirit of a dead woman (this time, his murdered wife) into a withering hip check against machismo: Genjuro's wandering hips are checked and he realizes the price of his sex folly. In Ugetsu, Mizoguchi's female characters are as always put through the wringer (even Wasaka, who would be expected to drop the painted-eyebrow façade and emerge as a malevolent demon in the final reel, is actually a crushed, tragic victim of earlier male violence, a woman who never lived long enough to experience love), but interestingly enough, it's the men who end up shouldering the emotional toll. With all due respect to Mizoguchi's mysterious, incantory, gorgeous parable, is it this crucial variation on the filmmaker's approach to feminism that causes Ugetsu's pinnacular reputation in the film critic boys' club?

Mizoguchi’s Game of Vision from David Bordwell http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2007/11/30/sleeves/

Mizoguchi is renowned for his long takes, which are often sustained in distant views featuring considerable camera movement. In the Mizo chapter in Figures Traced in Light, I suggest that these stylistic choices spring from his effort to engage the viewer mesmerically—as he put it, “to work the viewer’s perceptual capacities to the utmost.” He asks us to downshift our attention to the finest details of the action, which he then modulates for expressive effect. I draw examples from various films across his career to show how he creates drama out of remarkably slight differences in character position, lighting, and other factors.

But what happens when he foreswears virtuoso camera movements and single-take scenes and breaks the drama up into several shots? Today, many ambitious directors seem to take pride in stretching out their takes, so cinephiles are sometimes inclined to see a cut as a loss of nerve and a concession to the audience. But I try to show in Figures that Mizoguchi sustains his concern for nuance when he creates an edited sequence. The modulation of fleeting details is to be found in his closer shots too.

 

JAPANESE CINEMA—Ugetsu Monogatari (Tales of the Pale and Silvery Moon After the Rain) / 雨月物語


I first saw Kenji Mizoguchi's 1953 masterpiece Ugetsu Monogatari (Tales of the Pale and Silvery Moon After the Rain) on Turner Classics one fateful idle afternoon earlier this year. San Francisco was socked in with fog and I was feeling under the weather. Invariably, I find myself drawn to vintage black and white films under such circumstances; they comfort me. With my honeyed Throat Coat cooling in front of me, I found myself disbelieving that so much beauty could pour out of my television set into my living room like the swirling mist on Lake Biwa, a beauty as fecund yet ethereal as the shadows of Lady Wakasa's Kutsuki mansion, ensorcelling me. I vowed to myself I would someday appreciate Ugetsu appropriately on a large screen. With the Pacific Film Archives' participation in the traveling "Unfolding Mizoguchi: Seven Classics" retrospective (currently in progress), and Shelley Diekman's gracious hospitality, my dream came true last Friday night.

Watching Ugetsu projected larger than life was even more satisfying than I anticipated. I was struck by how there is not one superfluous moment in this film even as it is dense with detail. The script is exact and the editing perfect. It is, unquestionably, one of the most complete cinematic experiences I've ever had and it is certainly right up there—as it is for many others—in my top ten. It makes sense that so much has been written about this film—and such great commentary at that!—that it's nearly daunting to add even a sigh to the chorus of praise. I commiserated with Shelley—and she concurred—that it is much more difficult to write about a masterpiece than something less than perfect. Ugetsu has proven that fact. The thesaurus simply does not have sufficient superlatives. Once again, image proves itself superior to description. Still, it's the nature of our vocation to try.


As Judy Bloch synopsizes for PFA's program notes: "In sixteenth–century Japan [the Sengoku Era], with the pandemonium of civil wars a looming presence in their lives, the potter Genjuro [Mori Masayuki] and [Miyagi] his wife [Tanaka Kinuyo] long to be "rich and safe," respectively. But artistic vanity draws Genjuro into the paradisiacal realm of [Lady Wakasa] a phantom enchantress [Machiko Kyô]. In a parallel tale, Genjuro's brother-in-law Tobei [Ozawa Eitarô], out for military glory, achieves a general's rank for his fraudulent exploits—another acrid apparition. In Ugetsu, the all-too-real and the supernatural move steadily toward each other; a boat ride on foggy waters foreshadows the horizontal unity Mizoguchi will give his two worlds. For, just as his images overflow with life—characters forever running off toward more life outside the frame—so this reality flows into the phantom universe as well. Mizoguchi builds an eerie netherworld entirely out of what he is given in this one: shadows and lighting, decor and texture, and the graceful chicanery of human desire."

Written by Matsutarô Kawaguchi and Yoshikata Yoda, based on two of nine stories by Ueda Akinari (1768) and sumptuously photographed by Kazuo Miyagawa, Sarudama's Scott David Foutz has suggested that—for all those interested in the recent J-horror craze—Ugetsu is required viewing, being possibly the first in the genre and "perhaps the first film to fully depict a Japanese perspective of the supernatural and its meaning." Foutz opines that the film retains a unique freshness even after 50 years because, unlike current fare like Ringu and Ju-On, its elements were not sequelized unto banality. He further notes the effective balance between Ugetsu's contemplative depths and its engaging, steady action sequences. Slant's Eric Henderson distinguishes Ugetsu from other horror fare because it neither startles nor shocks, but purposely and systematically foreshadows "every revelation through internal, formal echoes."

Criterion's dvd release of Ugetsu came in first place for the "DVD of the Year Award 2005" at Masters of Cinema and it's easy to understand why, though I've not had the opportunity to sample its many extras, other than for Phillip Lopate's exceptional essay "From the Other Shore", provided at the Criterion website.

Lopate outlines how Mizoguchi "perfected his signature 'flowing scroll,' 'one shot–one scene' style of long-duration takes" with Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939) where "by keeping the camera well back, avoiding close-ups, and linking the characters to their environment, [Mizoguchi] generated hypnotic tension and psychological density." He describes Ugetsu as a "gender tragedy" where "men pursue their aggressive dreams, bringing havoc on themselves and their wives."


The first scene that mesmerized me was, of course, the "celebrated" Lake Biwa sequence where—reiterating Judy Bloch's apt description—"the all-too-real and the supernatural move steadily toward each other; a boat ride on foggy waters foreshadows the horizontal unity Mizoguchi will give his two worlds." Lopate concurs, stating, "the movie's supreme balancing act [is] to be able to move seamlessly between the realistic and the otherworldly" and describing the scene as "surely one of the most lyrical anywhere in cinema." Acquarello—who has written eloquently on several of Mizoguchi's films at his encyclopedic site Strictly Film School [which was just named one of the top five film journals by The Times UK]—understands the "coexistence between the physical and supernatural realm" in Ugetsu as "a reflection of the duality of the human soul."

The Lake Biwa sequence is likewise narratively pivotal because—as Jared Rapfogel has written for Stop Smiling—shortly thereafter, "the four protagonists quickly splinter off, thanks partly to fate, partly to their own misjudgments, allowing Mizoguchi to create a rich and complicated structure, the separate stories paralleling and commenting on each other."

Like those gorgeous painted Japanese scrolls that situate and diminuate humans against indifferent beautiful landscapes (and where the descriptive term "flowing scroll" derives), Mizoguchi achieves this effect through detailed background activity that did not register in the TCM broadcast but which dramatically drew into focus on the big screen, most notably in the scene where Miyagi is victimized by "the bestial behavior of the hungry, marauding soldiers"; a scene "shot from above, with a detached inevitability that makes the savagery more matter-of-fact, the soldiers pathetically staggering about in the background" while Miyagi, wounded, dies in the foreground. My colleague Frako Loden—who has singlehandedly taught me so much of what I know about Asian cinema, and who attended the PFA screening—was as thrilled as I was at this visual layering between foreground and background and its contextual landscape "surrounding human need."

Frako also made it clear to me that Ugetsu was one of the first wave of Japanese films to truly influence the international cinema scene (including Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), Teinosuke Kinugasa's Gate of Hell (1953), and Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953)). By winning the Silver Lion at the 1953 Venice Film Festival, Ugetsu followed the European success of Rashomon (which likewise featured the remarkable Machiko Kyô) and confirmed the status of Japanese cinema in world film culture.


Speaking of Machiko Kyô, Lopate astutely notes how Lady Wakasa's seduction of Genjuro involves not so much her own alluring Noh-masked eyebrow-smudged beauty, but her flattery of his craftsmanship. She snares him through his artistic vanity, raising him "from artisan to artist" and, thereby, placing them "on a more equal social footing." How else could a lowly peasant gain the confidence to accept the love of such an elegant lady? How else could we, as an audience, believe the "breathtakingly audacious" segue from their steaming bath together to their paradisiacal lakeside picnic, made all the more poignant for being illusory, transient, and subject to betrayal? Yet, "[w]hile all appearances are transitory and unstable in [Ganjuro's] world, there is also a powerfully anchoring stillness at [Ugetsu's] core, a spiritual strength no less than a virtuoso artistic focus." Roger Ebert recalls Pauline Kael's own reminisce of gasping when she heard Genjuro proclaim, "I never dreamed such pleasures existed!"

Cinemarati's M.S. Smith quotes Susan Sontag as stating that the Japanese film tradition that includes Mizoguchi is "an incomparable model of beauty, moral seriousness, and emotional expressiveness in narrative art" and he articulates that "[i]n many ways, the experience of Ugetsu is one of visual and cultural immersion", which links into Mark Cousins' cover story for Prospect wherein he qualifies that the power of Ugetsu is not just in its amazing imagery but in the film's distinctive Buddhist and Taoist underpinnings which present a "different sense of what a person is, and what space and action are", thereby making them new to western eyes.

Catherine Russell's Cineaste review of the Criterion release of Ugetsu is equally noteworthy for its examination of the literary and historical underpinnings of the film and goes into lengthy detail of the dvd's extras. Her essay highlights some tasty gossip about Mizoguchi as well.


Phillip Lopate disagrees with Scott David Foutz that Ugetsu is—in essence—a cautionary tale. "Are we to take it, then, that the moral of the film is: better stay at home, cultivate your garden, nose to the grindstone?" Lopate enquires. "No. Mizoguchi's viewpoint is not cautionary but realistic: this is the way human beings are, never satisfied; everything changes, life is suffering, one cannot avoid one's fate." In his Senses of Cinema essay on Ugetsu Dan Harper relies on Donald Richie's definition of mono no aware: "that awareness of the transience of all earthly things, the knowledge that it is, perhaps fortunately, impossible to do anything about it: that celebration of resignation in the face of things as they are." This resigned acceptance of the way things are rather than an insistence on change and resistance to the status quo Harper identifies as one of the central themes of Japanese film.


Harper likewise describes what I found magical about the spectral representations in Ugetsu, especially in the scene where Genjuro rejects Lady Wakasa. She reaches to touch him and then recoils in sad horror because of the protective markings on his skin. She steps away from him, her corporeality swallowed by a shifting of light into shadow. These are not "your typical movie ghosts—created through double exposure or other special effects" but evocations of light and shadow realized by Mizoguchi and his cinematographer, the "irreplaceable" Kazuo Miyagawa. The Mizoguchi-Miyagawa team create the same magic at the film's transcendent ending.

Gary Morris's Bright Lights Film Journal profile of Mizoguchi culls out the biographical details that have influenced the helmer's oeuvre and he describes the film's ending: "Mizoguchi's ability to wring intense emotions from the smallest gestures is evident throughout Ugetsu, but particularly when the boy . . . goes to [his mother's] grave and puts a bowl of rice on it, the action punctuated by a simple bow, after which the camera cranes up and away. This scene works because of Mizoguchi's refusal to sentimentalize it, or any of the tragic events that preceded it."

"Unfolding Mizoguchi: Seven Classics" continues at the Pacific Film Archives Friday evening, August 25, with screenings of Street of Shame and Sansho the Bailiff at 7:00 and 8:50, respectively, continues Sunday, August 27, with a 5:30 screening of The Life of Oharu, and concludes Wednesday evening, August 30, with a 7:30 screening of The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums. As mesmerized as Genjuro by the apparition of Lady Wakasa, I'll have to return to treat myself again and again to Mizoguchi's cinematic mastery. You should too.

Cross-posted to Twitch, where Logboy has likewise posted on the dvd releases of the Mizoguchi material as well as providing some additional linkage to Mizoguchi write-ups out on the web.

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Kenji Mizoguchi entered the film world as a promoter of Western novelty in Japanese cinema and exited it as an acclaimed international director who exemplified Japan at its most traditional. After The Life of Oharu and Ugetsu won prizes in successive Venice Film Festivals in the early '50s, Mizoguchi became an icon for the nascent French New Wave. His mastery of mise-en-scène was lauded by Jacques Rivette, while Jean-Luc Godard praised his metaphysics and his stylistic elegance, at the same time deriding Akira Kurosawa as a second-rate talent. Mizoguchi is still recognized as one of the 20th century's greatest filmmakers.

Born in Tokyo, in 1898, Mizoguchi was the middle child of a roofer/carpenter. His family's financial situation went from modest to desperate when his erratic, dreamer father (who was the model for the heroine's father in Osaka Elegy) tried to make a killing by selling raincoats to the military during the Russo-Japanese war (1904-1905). By the time he borrowed the money, set up the factory, and produced the coats, the war was over. Not having enough money for food, Mizoguchi's older sister was put up for adoption at age 14. She was later sold to a geisha house. Mizoguchi himself was taken out of elementary school and apprenticed in a pharmacy in northern Iwate prefecture. Later, he returned to Tokyo and studied painting at the Aohashi Western Painting Research Institute. In 1922, Mizoguchi was hired as an assistant director for Osamu Wakayama at Nikkatsu Studios.

The Japanese film industry was changing rapidly when Mizoguchi entered it, Kabuki-inspired movies of the 1910s were giving way to those inspired by Western films. Mizoguchi, who became a full-fledged director in 1923, quickly showed an enthusiasm for novelty and the West. One of his first films, Blood and Soul, employed the kind of exaggerated sets and makeup seen in such German Expressionist films as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; his 1929 Metropolitan Symphony was a highpoint in the leftist tendency film genre. As his style matured, his work underwent an astonishing transformation. This former advocate of the faddish and the radical began creating finely crafted period pieces centered on downtrodden women. To be sure, Mizoguchi's metamorphosis was hastened in no small measure by growing political oppression during the 1930s. One of his few contemporary dramas during this time, Osaka Elegy, was banned by the military government in 1940.

Like Mikio Naruse, Mizoguchi populated his films with marginalized women such as geishas, barmaids, and mistreated housewives. But unlike Naruse's proud, willful heroines who toil for an elusive dignity, Mizoguchi's women selflessly devote themselves to the objects of their love. Characters such as Taki in Taki no Shiraito or Otoku in Story of the Late Chrysanthemums willingly destroy themselves to enable success for their men. The Chinese maid in Empress Yang Kwei Fei molds herself into the king's vision of perfection and then calmly walks to her death to save his life. Mizoguchi's heroines blame no one during their headlong trajectory toward destruction; they seem to transcend the horrors they endure in a manner that is simply not possible in Naruse films.

In his later films, Mizoguchi couched these tragic tales in a quiet lyricism that evoked the impermanence of human life. Like a traditional Chinese scroll painting that depicts unfolding human drama in the midst of an overwhelming landscape, Mizoguchi's camera lingers on the stillness of a natural setting or the passing of a moment, rather than on the machinations of plot. Individual humans seem barely consequential: they work, suffer, love, and die beneath a larger, unchanging order.

In the 1950s, Mizoguchi reached his creative zenith with masterpiece after masterpiece, including The Life of Oharu, Sansho the Bailiff, Chikamatsu Monogatari, and Ugetsu, often considered one of the most beautiful films ever made. Mizoguchi died, a devout Buddhist, in 1956.

http://www.allmovie.com/artist/kenji-mizoguchi-p103129