Film · Around the world

Kenji Mizoguchi

1898–1956 · Japanese

Classical Japanese cinema; the jidaigeki and the 'women's film'

Kenji Mizoguchi made some ninety films, of which about a third survive, and spent almost all of them on the suffering of women under Japanese patriarchy — courtesans, geisha, prostitutes, wives sold or abandoned. He is the great formalist of the three classical Japanese masters: long, gliding takes that hold a whole scene in a single shot from a distance, with close-ups almost entirely refused. Three films in three consecutive years took prizes at Venice in the early 1950s and made him a European cause.

How to spot them

▸'One scene, one shot' — very long takes with a roving crane, held at a distance, close-ups refused
▸Women destroyed by men and by money: geisha, courtesans, prostitutes and sold wives
▸Compositions modelled on scroll painting; a camera that pulls away rather than moving in at the moment of greatest pain
▸The actress Kinuyo Tanaka in the late masterpieces; the screenwriter Yoshikata Yoda; the cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa
▸Championed by Cahiers du cinéma against Kurosawa as the more authentically Japanese master

Key films

A potter in a war-torn province is seduced by a noblewoman who proves to be a ghost, while the wife he abandoned waits at a cold hearth (1953)

Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari) — Silver Lion at Venice, adapted from tales by Ueda Akinari.

A provincial governor's children are sold into slavery; the son escapes, and the daughter walks into a lake rather than betray him (1954)

Sansho the Bailiff (Sanshō dayū) — Silver Lion at Venice; the children are Zushio and Anju.

A court lady's fall, step by step, from imperial concubine to ageing streetwalker, remembered as she sits among Buddhist statues (1952)

The Life of Oharu — International Prize at Venice, from Ihara Saikaku's novel.

A kabuki actor's mediocre career is rescued by the family maid, who sacrifices everything and dies as he takes his triumph from a river boat (1939)

The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums — the great pre-war showcase for his one-scene-one-shot method.

Two sisters in Kyoto's pleasure quarter take opposite views of being kept; the younger, who fights back, ends injured in a hospital bed, shouting at the audience (1936)

Sisters of the Gion — one of his two 1936 breakthroughs, with Osaka Elegy.

Five women in a Tokyo brothel work on while the Diet debates outlawing their trade; it closes on a terrified new girl calling to passers-by (1956)

Street of Shame — his last film, released months before Japan's Anti-Prostitution Law was passed.

Quick-fire facts

•Three films in three years took prizes at Venice: The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu (1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (1954)
•His elder sister was sold as a geisha to support the family — biographers treat this as the root of his lifelong subject
•He was slashed across the back with a razor by his lover Yuriko Ichijo in 1925, a scandal that nearly ended his career
•His method is summarised as 'one scene, one shot': a single long take for each dramatic scene, with a crane-mounted camera
•Kinuyo Tanaka starred in most of the late masterpieces; the two fell out when she began directing her own films and he opposed her
•Yoshikata Yoda wrote or co-wrote most of his scripts from Osaka Elegy (1936) onwards
•Kazuo Miyagawa, who also shot Kurosawa's Rashomon, photographed Ugetsu
•He died of leukaemia in Kyoto in August 1956, aged 58
•Jacques Rivette and the Cahiers du cinéma critics set him above Kurosawa; Jean-Luc Godard cited Sansho the Bailiff as a film that made him weep

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Sources

Alexander Jacoby, Senses of Cinema — Mizoguchi, Kenji — Great Directors