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Film Description
Eight films from the revered Japanese director Kenzo Mizoguchi: Sansho Dayu, Gion Bayashi, Oyu-sama, Ugetsu Monogatari, Chikamatsu Monogatari, Uwasa No Onna, Akasen Chitai and Yokihi.
Kenji Mizoguchi looms over the history not only of Japanese cinema but of world cinema altogether. These eight films from the last decade of Mizoguchi's career represent a collection of eight of his greatest works - which is to say, eight of the greatest films ever made.
Oyu-sama (1951) is an adaptation of Junichiro Tanizaki: a poignant tale of two sisters and their ill-fated relationship with the same man: a tale of the social mores and affairs of the heart that might destroy siblings.
Ugetsu monogatari (Tales of the Rain and Moon) (1953), a ghost-tale par excellence and one of the most highly acclaimed works of the cinema, is an intensely poetic, lyrical tragedy of men lured away from their wives which consistently features on polls of the best films ever made.
Gion-bayashi (1953) is a drama set in the world of the courtesan, contrasting two different types of geisha – on one hand, Eiko, a sixteen-year old orphan who wishes to be taken in and trained; on the other, Miyoharu, an older, more experienced geisha, who agrees to mentor the younger woman – living under the same roof in difficult personal circumstances. A fascinating, subtle insight into the lives of these women in 1950s Japan.
Sansho-dayu (1954) is one of the most critically revered of all of Mizoguchi's films, and a classic of world cinema, often cropping up in lists of the greatest films ever made. Set in 11th century Japan, it follows an aristocratic woman, separated by feudal tyranny from her husband, and her two children who are kidnapped and sold into slavery to the eponymous 'Sansho'.
Uwasa no onna (1954), another Mizoguchi picture set in a modern geisha house, pits mother against daughter, with the ensuing drama forcing both to confront their attitudes toward family and business in what is one of the filmmaker's most astute filmic examinations of oppressed femininity.
Chikamatsu monogatari (1954), the tragic story of a forbidden love affair between a merchant's wife and her husband's employee, was hailed by the legendary Akira Kurosawa as 'a great masterpiece that could only have been made by Mizoguchi'.
Yokihi (1955) recounts an 8th-century Chinese story of a widowed emperor and his imperial concubine, filmed in sumptuous, hallucinatory Agfa-stock colour.
Akasen-chitai (1956), aka Street of Shame, is Mizoguchi's final masterpiece and one of the greatest last films ever made, depicting the goings-on in a Tokyo brothel carrying the name 'Dreamland', where dreams are nevertheless shattered beneath the weight of financial necessity and all questions of conscience - a last testament which inspired the great French critic Jean Douchet to proclaim: 'For me, along with Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux and Renoir's La Regle du jeu, the greatest film in the history of the cinema.'
