Kenji Mizoguchi Retrospective

Kenji Mizoguchi (溝口 健二) Retrospective
Billy Wilder Theatre in Westwood

January 16, 2015 -  February 15, 2015 

Organized by the UCLA Film & Television Archive                        

 

Although Kenji Mizoguchi is widely regarded as one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema, screenings of his movies are rare.  The core of Mizoguchi’s greatness is his use of the medium to convey a profound worldview, one that moves between social commentary, a deep feeling for tragedy and romance, and a transcendent sense of man’s—and woman’s—place in the cosmos.  The plight of women in a restrictive society is a recurring theme in his films, and many of his films are melodramas about the clash between women’s desires and the restrictions of social tradition.  Mizoguchi, whose masterful use of tracking shots and compositions that move between close-ups and tableaus, always viewed his deeply human dramas with a cosmic perspective.  No director made movies that were so intensely emotional without being overly sentimental, and movies that were so rigorous in their portrayal of the social order, yet so profoundly in touch with the human experience.  This series, drawn from a major retrospective presented at Museum of the Moving Image this summer, showcases a selection of Mizoguchi’s acknowledged masterpieces.

 

The Mizoguchi retrospective at Museum of the Moving Image was organized by Chief Curator David Schwartz and Assistant Film Curator Aliza Ma.  Program notes adapted from the Museum of the Moving Image program.

 

Program Schedule:

January 16, 2015 - 7:30 pm (Double feature)

Street of Shame  ★★★★

(赤線地帯,, 1956) Akasen Chitai

35mm, b/w, in Japanese with English subtitles, 87 min.

Director Kenji Mizoguchi’s final film is nothing less than a summation of his art.  The Japanese National Diet’s debate over illegalizing prostitution is in the air, but it’s business as usual in Tokyo’s red-light district at the Dreamland salon (Hiroshi Miutani’s fantastic closed-world set).  Street concerns five working girls living double-lives as daughters, mothers, wives, loan sharks and dreamers when they are not waylaying potential clients in a terrifying pull-and-tug clamor.  Machiko Kyo is a standout as Hollywood-brainwashed “Mickey” in this unusual late-period contemporary drama. Shortly after it premiered, Mizoguchi was dead of leukemia at 58, and prostitution was outlawed in Japan.

 

Ugetsu ★★★★★

(雨月物語, 1953) Ugetsu Monogotari
35mm, b/w, in Japanese with English subtitles, 96 min.

In war-torn 16th-century Japan, two brothers, Genjuro and Tobei, prodded by their ambition, leave their wives and their village behind to pursue respective dreams of wealth and martial glory.  Initial good fortune only increases their yen for adventure, and on their next venture out, they encounter a beguiling noblewoman, Lady Wakasa, who puts further temptations before them—though she may not be of this earth.  Justly celebrated as containing some of director Kenji Mizoguchi’s most otherworldly and unforgettable imagery, Ugetsu is considered by many critics as one of the greatest of all films.

 

 

January 17, 2015 - 7:30 pm (Double feature)

 

Osaka Elegy  ★★★

(浪華悲歌, 1936) Naniwa Ereji
35mm, b/w, in Japanese with English subtitles, 71 min.

“In this film the mature Mizoguchi style emerges for the first time,” wrote film scholar Joan Mellen.  Ayako is barely making ends meet by working as a switchboard operator to support her family, so she becomes her boss’s mistress, and hardens herself into the role of a moga (“modern woman”).  Kenji Mizoguchi said that Osaka Elegy was the film with which he found his true direction, and it is evidently among his most personal—Ayako’s feckless father is rumored to be based on the director’s own.  Capped by a devastating final shot, it is also a trenchant social criticism, and after 1940 was banned by the military government.

 

Sisters of Gion  ★★★

(祇園の姉妹, 1936) Gion no Shimai
35mm, b/w, in Japanese with English subtitles, 96 min.

Along with Osaka Elegy (released the same year), this devastating portrait of courtesans scraping by in Kyoto’s “pleasure district” marked a turning point in Kenji Mizoguchi’s career.  Its story of two geisha sisters—one deferential and loyal, the other defiant and mercenary—lays forth one of the earliest and most forceful expressions of the director’s central thematic concern: the subjugation of women in a callously patriarchal society.

 

 

January 23, 2015 - 7:30 pm

 

Sansho the Bailiff  ★★★★★

(山椒大夫 , 1954) Sansho Dayu

35mm, b/w, in Japanese with English subtitles, 124 min. 

 

 

One of director Kenji Mizoguchi’s crowning achievements, this deeply affecting fable is a harrowing, heartrending story of human suffering and resilience.  In feudal Japan, the children of a nobleman are kidnapped and sold into slavery to the merciless Sansho the Bailiff, while their mother yearns desperately to see them again.  Exquisitely crafted and rapturously photographed (witness the knockout shot of the family making their way through a field of gently swaying tall grass), the film is a hugely compassionate, overwhelmingly emotional experience.

 

 

January 26, 2015 - 7:30 pm
 

Utamaro and His Five Women  ★★★★

(歌麿をめぐる五人の女, 1946) Utamaro o Meguru Gonin no Onna
35mm, b/w, in Japanese with English subtitles, 95 min.

 

Woodblock print-master Utamaro shuts out the turbulence of the rambunctious 17th-century Edo period by painstakingly and conscientiously practicing his art, with the help of five selflessly devoted models.  The outside world refuses to be ignored, though, and an incensed local magistrate devises a particularly insidious punishment for Utamaro by banning him from drawing for 50 days—here there is an echo of director Kenji Mizoguchi’s own struggles for creative freedom under both the censorious wartime government and the American Occupation.  This artistic self-portrait is a key illustration of Mizoguchi’s theme of sacrifice: of women for men, and of creator for creation.

 

 

January 30, 2015 - 7:30 pm
 

Life of Oharu  ★★★★★

(西鶴一代女, 1952) Saikaku Ichidai Onna
35mm, b/w, in Japanese with English subtitles, 136 min.

“Death is easy, but life is not so simple.”  So learns once beautiful, but now aging prostitute Oharu, who must endure hardship after hardship on her slow descent into the lowest rungs of society.  Mizoguchi beautifully renders the tragedy through carefully composed long takes, psychologically charged camera movements, and a delicate handling of actors.  As embodied by the remarkable, infinitely touching Kinuyo Tanaka, Oharu stands as arguably the most poignant and enduring of the director’s many “fallen” women.

 

February 6, 2015 - 7:30 pm
 
Story of the Last Chrysanthemum  ★★★★

(残菊物語, 1939) Zangiku Monogatari
35mm, b/w, in Japanese with English subtitles, 143 min.

In 19th-century Meiji-era Tokyo, a young actor, Kikunosuke, breaks away from his adoptive father’s Kabuki practice after a family servant, Otoku, is dismissed.  When they are reunited as lovers, Otoku encourages Kikunosuke to rededicate himself to his art—he is an oyama, playing female roles, but she is the one who makes the ultimate sacrifice.  Director Kenji Mizoguchi’s first film for Shochiku Studios is a key work in defining his mature style, encapsulating his ideas on the vampiric nature of artistic production, and altogether making for what scholar Joan Mellen called “one of the most brilliant satires of the Japanese family system.”

 

February 15, 2015 - 7:30 pm

The 47 Ronin  (Part 1 & 2)  

(元禄忠臣蔵, 1941) Genroku Chushingura
35mm, b/w, in Japanese with English subtitles, 241 min.

 

In the early years of the 18th century, the retainers of slain Lord Asano, led by the loyal Oichi, set out to avenge themselves against the man whose treachery was responsible for their master’s death over a matter of court protocol.  The most famous version of the most famous of Japanese tales, this epic was produced at the behest of the military government with propagandistic intent, but was made with a conviction, humanity and graphic genius that transcend the circumstances of its production.