Which of these is the best introduction to Mizoguchi?

Sansho Dayu & Ugetsu Monogatari are two of my favourite films. really need to get round to seeing some more.
thats not helping much is it?

Those are the only two I've seen either (also not helping)

See them!

Bump for the wekdayers.

Out of those I've only seen Sister of the Gion and Story of the Late Chrysanthemums, which are both quite good. Both are early period Mizoguchi, so they're dominated by looong continuous mid-range shots. I guess they're a good introduction to him, since they sum up his two main interests: feminist critiques of women's position in contemporary Japan, especially the Geisha institute (SotG) and almost fairy-tale like period love stories (SotLC). Mizoguchi later remade Sisters of Gion as Gion Festival Music, which is less polemic but more mature and overall better.

My favourite films of Mizoguchi are Women of the Night and Street Shame, both set in the then-present-day and revolve around women's position in the society and prostitution. Prostitution was his favourite subject, but even though his attitude towards it was generally a feminist one, his depictions or prostitutes are much less moralistic and more nuanced than in the Western fiction of that time. I think his more romantic period pieces are better known outside Japan, but some of them might be a bit thick for those who're not immersed in Japanese culture. Ugetsu Monogatari deserves all the praise it gets though.

"Street Shame" = "Street of Shame".

Life of Oharu on DVD at last.

has been available as a region 2 dvd for many years

Only ever seen it in theater

> Life of Oharu

i saw it on dvd about 4 years ago. was available (region 2) via Artificial Eye "DVD Release Date: 26 April 2004", has been OOP for a while, i think. bought the criterion version last month...

saw it on this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B000HN32QE/ref=s9_simh_gw_p74_d0_i1?pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0W3FF7CE24P1R4F4VRR4&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=455344027&pf_rd_i=468294

which is 2 x Ozu, 2 x Mizoguchi and all kinda rare now (Floating Weeds reissued just last year on Eureka)

Hard to find in the States though; now out on Criterion.

and Netflix!

man life of oharu is a depressing movie, even by mizoguchi standards. the only film more depressing is naruse's floating clouds, which after i saw just left me contemplating the bleakness and meaninglessness of existence for like a full week.

floating clouds is a long film that's basically a chronicle of increasingly desperate self-abnegation. the two protagonists are both extreme depressives. it's great, as long as you are willing to be bummed out like forever after you see it.

man life of oharu is a depressing movie, even by mizoguchi standards. the only film more depressing is naruse's floating clouds, which after i saw just left me contemplating the bleakness and meaninglessness of existence for like a full week.

The segment in which she (briefly) finds happiness at the store was the only one that felt like a bludgeon. On the other hand, when she breaks free of her handlers and she follows her son for a brief look, Mizoguchi's pitiless camera following her through the garden and hallways, destroyed me.

yup. compared to many other of mizoguchi's films, oharu peels away nearly anything not directly related to the protagonist's suffering.

i worry that the young people today don't "get" mizoguchi. the last generation for which he was an axiom of cinema seems to be the early baby boomers. maybe I'm wrong about that?

Def. feels that amongst cineastes Ozu has eclipsed Mizogouchi and even Kurosawa as THE great Japanese auteur, but in Europe at least he still has enough of a reputation to sustain something like this (poss the greatest box set ever!):

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Late-Mizoguchi-1951-1956-Masters-Cinema/dp/B004GBB67U

Didn't know that the Artificial Eye Life of Oharu had gone out of print. It's a pretty bare bones release, with no obvious remastering, tho' the print they used was OK. I do wonder if the relatively poor print quality of the pre-war Mizogouchis is another barrier for viewers today.

(i say it was OOP just because the dvds on amazon.co.uk were going for £££s. but it's not in the current AI catalogue)

that mizoguchi box also out of print by the looks (oh, blu-ray box is £50, same films on dvd are £95).

Thanks for the Bluray box tip! I haven't seen any of those films since the 90s, when our local movie archive had a Mizoguchi program, but I still remember them vividly.

Are there any comparable Bluray boxes for early and mid-period Mizoguchi? I'd love to rewatch Sisters of Gion, Late Crysanthemums and Women of the Night too.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mizoguchi-Collection-Blu-ray-Minosuke-Band%C3%B4/dp/B006WPC29O/ref=sr_1_sc_2?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1397127271&sr=1-2-spell&keywords=mizogouchi

tho tbh, can't see blu ray being a vast improvement over the DVDs there

I checked that, but it has a lot of Amazon comments about bad transfers and poor subtitles. Have you seen these versions yourself?

From what I can remember, the film quality of the pre-war Mizoguchis that I saw at the movie archive wasn't particularly bad... Though I guess if you watch them as digital versions, the errors can become more noticeable?

I do own that set (on DVD). The discs are watchable - akin to seeing unrestored prints at a rep cinema - but yeah, I can only imagine that bluray highlights even further the many flaws in the prints that Artifical Eye used for that set. AFAIK, it's the only way to legitimately own those movies in Europe, tho, and I can't imagine another European label offering a competing product, or spending any money on digital etc restoration.

In general, Masters of Cinema take far greater care, and offer much better packaging/extras, than Artifical Eye (see the comments on their Tarkovsky Box for similar complaints). I sometimes prefer the MOC editions to their Criterion equiv.

I saw Sisters of Gion on youtube. It was an okay quality. And the film is great, one of the best Mizoguchi's I've seen.

My library has these: http://www.criterion.com/films/967-sisters-of-the-gion

the print quality of a lot of 1930s and 1940s japanese films (the ones that survive) is pretty shitty and there's not much that can be done about that.

not sure what folks mean by "remastering," that's kind of a marketing term more than anything else. by definition all these films were newly mastered for digital. if you're talking about "restoration," a term i think is largely misapplied when we're talking about some digital cleanup of scrapes and scratches etc. at 2k or 1080p, I think it depends largely on the Japanese studio that made the transfer. Masters of Cinema definitely is more dependable in that regard. the 1950s mizoguchis look astonishing on Blu-Ray, that's for sure.

i guess what i'm saying is that i'd rather reserve the term "restoration" for when a film is "cleaned up"--now that's done almost exclusively digitally, though some places will do this by various analog means--in such a way that it can be output back to 35mm (or whatever was the film's original format). simply cleaning it up for home video does not really aid in the restoration to a print source or in the film's preservation.

i think a lot of people get confused by this stuff, in large part because home video companies play fast and loose with all these terms and concepts for marketing purposes.

NYC retro

http://www.movingimage.us/films/2014/05/02/detail/mizoguchi/

http://www.timeout.com/newyork/film/mizoguchi-at-moving-image

further roundup

http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-mizoguchi-momi

Better Than Ozu and Kurosawa

Odd that he chooses 3 films I didn't rate to illustrate his point.

Also, where's the picture from? Seems untypical (might be 47 Ronin but I don't recognise it)

Well in the comments it says its from a Kurosawa film! I haven't seen Yojimbo so cannot comment.

In effect, Mizoguchi is both Japan’s John Ford, with his emphasis on history and legend, and its Max Ophüls, with the grandly operatic resonances of his highly stylized images.

Can't go on beyond the para starting with this sentence. Mizoguchi's world is actually micro. At times there is little complexity - he presents the subjugation of women directly, starkly with no pretense to nuance.

“The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums” is great, hasn't much to do with John Ford, from what I've seen of his films. Had a similar feeling which I should've had with Kane, it is amazing how it was made pre-War.

I think the fact he has gone down on the list front is little to worry about.

Yojimbo makes sense, I just figured it was mizoguchi given the subject of the article.

(Yojimbo, oddly, another film I couldn't get into last time I watched it. Preferred Sanjuro)

After watching The Life of Oharu and Sisters of the Gion on consecutive nights, I'm inclined to agree with Brody.

You're going to have to move to NY to see the stuff that's UNAVAILABLE.

Ranking is a distraction, but all those lonely daughters in Ozu sure do run together for me.

Utamaro and His Five Women is good.

i never know what brody is on about, even if i happen (as in this case) to love the filmmaker and films he's writing about.

i think he's basically a know-nothing who does a good job of bluffing, making himself seem very knowledgeable and knowing to folks who aren't well versed in film and film history.

the number of historical howlers i find in his columns is unbelievable, and the only conclusion is that he is forever talking out of his ass

his beard doesn't really help things

that said you should see any and every mizoguchi film you can

aside from the big ones (sansho, ugetsu, oharu) i particularly recommend

- oyuki the virgin
- straits of love and hate
- osaka elegy
- street of shame
- madame yuki

but basically, everything. except that wartime jidai geki that isn't very good (can't recall the title). and the one he made in hong kong, the empress yang kwei fei, that one is a disappointment.

so jealous that you are getting all these in NY, btw.

i was actually tempted to fly out there for a month, crash on friends' couches, and go to every one of the films.

but, you know, work and life etc.

and i can't knock brody for trying to steer folks toward attending the revival. that's a good thing, and i hope it does the trick. i just can barely read his stuff without wincing, is all.

to me he and Rosenbaum are indistinguishable, except he's less persuasively batshit

for all of rosenbaum's faults as a critic (and they are legion, and get worse and worse by the year since he's retired from the chicago reader), he seems to actually know a lot more than brody.

Does Rosenbaum make an appearance in that Muscle Shoals doc?

he did grow up around there, right? answer is: i haven't seen it, so no idea.

Not that versed in film history and theory but I often can't stand Brody.

This is a lot better -- was in by the time the whole Mizoguchi vs Kurosawa vs Ozu distinction is rubbished:

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/may/06/mizoguchi-beauty-sacrifice/?insrc=wbll

I saw three at the Astoria retro yesterday (after failing to get there on Saturday thx to torrential downpour and the MTA)... Hometown is a modest little quasi-talkie about the price of fame (for an opera singer) and Tokyo nightlife. The print of White Threads of the Waterfall, which had plenty of visual panache and stark melodrama, was kind of ruined by the benshi soundtrack -- I know it was a traditional approach but I don't want to hear an actor doing all the voices (and making the implicit explicit) when that (presumably?) was not the original iteration.

Miyamoto Musashi is a lean 55-minute swordsman parable he made in '44 as the war was spiralling into defeat, really iconic lead performance and core philosophizing on revenge vs The Way, which Nick Pinkerton discusses at the end of this column:

http://www.filmcomment.com/entry/bombast-revenge

was the benshi narration in english or japanese?

white threads is an amazing film, sorry it was sort of ruined for you.

miyamoto musashi doesn't usually get much praise, as with the other films mizoguchi made toward the end of the war. so it's interesting that you liked it. i haven't seen it.

if you can make it to other screenings, i'd recommend the rare-ish straits of love and hate. madame yuki and the love of sumako the actress are two other must-sees that aren't on video.

benshi narration in japanese; english subtitles just like the intertitles (and occasionally contradicting what appeared to be happening onscreen)

i think the contradicting thing is par for the course, i.e. authentic benshi. it's a very time-and-place-specific art form that doesn't translate (in all that word's senses) very well, i think.

was it a real live benshi-- or just a pre-recorded benshi track?

Pre-recorded. I saw it on Saturday, thought it was amazing too.

I'm away next weekend when Straits of Love and Hate playes; i see there's a subtitled version on YT.

i'm very jealous of y'all.

Not sure how many of these I'll really get to see tbh.

you should see them all! just quit your job.

Tried that once before for Fassbinder. Can only do that trick once.

Wish I could consult the reference handouts from this past weekend, but I lost them running home in the torrential downpour.

all the screenings are on weekends, but the subway directions to MOMI should read "Good luck"

The camera movement in the silent sequences of Hometown is really frenzied, spinning around nightclubs etc

oh, is this out in astoria? that sucks.

i mean, astoria's fine, but it can be a pain to get to in time

xpost

yeah a lot of the famed japanese directors (mizoguchi, ozu, naruse) had more flamboyant styles (naruse in particular) before they "settled down" (not really the apt phrase but whatever) into the styles we know them by.

For real. I watched Kurosawa's No Regrets For Our Youth last week; it's like a Luise Rainer picture.

Hometown is definitely not in the high Mizoguchi style, but still kind of fascinating in its right, both as an example of one of those early sound films that are about the medium of sound itself and because of the broader, much more melodramatic approach (there is even some broad comedy in there provided by the sidekick figure), which at times reminded of certain UFA productions, so much so that I half-expected to see Fritz Rasp or Dr. Mabuse appear. Although not any egg-on-head cracking, which would have been going too far.

did we cover A Geisha? I should go bcz it doesn't circulate, right?

so The 47 Ronin is... kind of stultifying? Very elegant and full of perfect tracking, but begins with 5 minutes of violence ahead of 3-1/2 hrs of conversational strategizing, guilt, and anguish. I wonder how many action addicts have walked out on it over the years.

Has any actress made more films with a major director than Kinuyo Tanaka w/ KM? (15) Miss Oyu is particularly deserving of rediscovery.

http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr1201/ckfr13a.htm

According to List of film director and actor collaborations:

D. W. Griffith / Lillian Gish (13, plus "approximately 20 films between 1912-1914")

Closest after that are Allen/Farrow (13) and Bergman/Bibi Anderson (13).

well their scoring is off re M/T

indeed

David Bordwell w/ close analysis:

I can’t deny that Mizoguchi’s fluctuating reputation is due to more than availability. He is easier to admire, even to worship, than to love. His films, though visually sumptuous, can be somber and bleak. Often unremitting tales of suffering, they lack humor (though not irony). Ozu’s mix of poignancy and comedy is much easier to enjoy than Mizoguchi’s forbidding, near-tragic despair. Ozu is also a more rigorous stylist; his signature is in every frame. While Mizoguchi was no less distinctive, he was more pluralistic in his technique.

Another obstacle: despite working with melodramatic material, Mizoguchi cools it down, sometimes to the point of remoteness. For many of his films, the prototype was Japan’s shinpa drama, an early twentieth-century theatrical tradition that blended kabuki themes and situations (e.g., the conflict of love and duty) with Western-style dramaturgy. Shinpa plays tended to concentrate on the sufferings of women in a male-dominated society. Shinpa women are victimized, exploited, and condemned; when they sacrifice themselves for men, too often the men attack them, betray them, or dump them. Mizoguchi worked many variations on these plot elements. When the American Occupation demanded more liberal films from the industry, he simply let the oppressed woman win some victory in the end.

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2014/05/10/mizoguchi-secrets-of-the-exquisite-image/

These MOMI screenings have been well attended, btw

Ozu’s mix of poignancy and comedy is much easier to enjoy than Mizoguchi’s forbidding, near-tragic despair

Eh. The ease with which the mind confuses Late Summer and Late Spring with Early Summer and Late Spring also inhibits full-fledged Ozu love.

(not mine; the titles are less confusing in Japanese)

Ozu’s mix of poignancy and comedy is much easier to enjoy than Mizoguchi’s forbidding, near-tragic despair

Eh. The ease with which the mind confuses Late Summer and Late Spring with Early Summer and Late Spring also inhibits full-fledged Ozu love.

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, June 5, 2014 4:07 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sez you

i don't confuse those movies btw.

physician, heal thyself

I do every time I watch Early Summer.

wait til your mind gets to confuse all of Mizoguchi's geisha/brothel films if they ever become AVAILABLE

They are! I havent had any trouble with those.

you havent seen em all, dont front

eg A Woman of Rumor

the woman in the rumour (uwasa no onna) is available in uk as part of that late mizoguchi box.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Late-Mizoguchi-BLU-RAY-Masters-Cinema/dp/B00EZT3KYA/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1402408426&sr=1-1&keywords=mizoguchi

you Bay Area ppl get him now

http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/filmseries/mizoguchi_2014

Seeing Shin Heike Monogatari (aka "New Tale of the Heike" aka "The Taira Clan Saga") Saturday at the Birmingham Museum of Art.

LA series

https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/events/2015/01/16/kenji-mizoguchi

you bastards.

Utamaro and His Five Women I haven't seen the VHS days; the others are out in sparkling Eclipse prints.

Sisters of the Gion is really remarkable. his Eclipse set is great.

Machiko Kyo obit roundup

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6408-remembering-machiko-kyo

My second viewing of Life of Oharu confirmed it's the best fallen woman film in cinema. Those dollies regard her with such ambivalence.

^yes! Also good for the almost comic one-and-only appearance of Toshiro Mifune in a Mizoguchi iirc.

I like his 30s films best, there's an earthy urgency that I don't get from the very well-crafted later movies.

Ugetsu gets the Criterion treatment. 4K too!

https://www.criterion.com/films/369-ugetsu