cinephilearchive: “His greatness was that he never gave up trying to heighten the reality of e

cinephilearchive: “His greatness was that he never gave up trying to heighten the reality of each 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. An ordinary director is quite incapable of this. And in this lay his true spirit as a director—for he had the temperament of a true creator. He pushed and bullied and he was often criticized for this but he held out, and he created masterpieces. This attitude toward creation is not at all easy, but a director like him is especially necessary in Japan where this kind of pushing is so resisted. In the death of Mizoguchi, Japanese film lost its truest creator.” —Akira Kurosawa on Kenji Mizoguchi (May 16, 1898 — August 24, 1956) Often named as one of Japan’s three most important filmmakers (alongside Akira Kurosawa and Yasujirō 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. —Criterion ‘Kenji Mizoguchi: The Life of a Film Director’ is a 1975 Japanese documentary masterpiece on the life and works of director Kenji Mizoguchi (“Quite simply one of the greatest of filmmakers,” said Jean-Luc Godard), directed by Kaneto Shindo (Onibaba). It runs 150 minutes and can be found on the second disc of the Region 1 Criterion Collection release of ‘Ugetsu’ (1953). For more film related items throughout the day, follow Cinephilia & Beyond on Twitter. Get Cinephilia & Beyond in your inbox by signing in. You can also follow our RSS feed. Please use our Google Custom Search for better results. If you enjoy Cinephilia & Beyond, please consider making a small donation to keep it going: // -- source link

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