Product Code Database
16 May 1898 – 24 August 1956 was a Japanese filmmaker who directed roughly one hundred films during his career between 1923 and 1956. His most acclaimed works include The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939), The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu (1953), and Sansho the Bailiff (1954), with the latter three all being awarded at the Venice International Film Festival. A recurring theme of his films was the oppression of women in historical and contemporary Japan. Together with Akira Kurosawa and Yasujirō Ozu, Mizoguchi is seen as a representative of the "golden age" of Japanese cinema.
In 1911, Mizoguchi's parents, too poor to continue paying for their son's primary school training, sent him to stay with an uncle in Morioka in northern Japan for a year, where he finished primary school. His return coincided with an onset of crippling rheumatoid arthritis, which left him with a walking gait for the rest of his life. In 1913, his sister Suzu secured him an apprenticeship as a designer for a yukata manufacturer, and in 1915, after the mother's death, she brought both her younger brothers into her own house. Mizoguchi enrolled for a course at the Aoibashi Yoga Kenkyuko art school in Tokyo, which taught Western painting techniques, and developed an interest in opera, particularly at the Royal Theatre at Akasaka where he helped the set decorators with set design and construction.
In 1917, his sister again helped him to find work, this time as an advertisement designer with the Yuishin Nippon newspaper in Kobe. The film critic Tadao Sato has pointed out a coincidence between Mizoguchi's life in his early years and the plots of dramas, which characteristically documented the sacrifices made by geisha on behalf of the young men they were involved with. Probably because of his familial circumstances, "the subject of women's suffering is fundamental in all his work; while sacrifice – in particular, the sacrifice a sister makes for a brother – makes a key showing in a number of his films, including some of the greatest ones ( Sansho the Bailiff/Sansho Dayu 1954, for example)." After less than a year in Kobe, however, Mizoguchi returned "to the bohemian delights of Tokyo" (Mark Le Fanu).
In 1922, Mizoguchi was promoted to director, and his directorial debut was released the following year, The Resurrection of Love. His early works included remakes of German Expressionist cinema and adaptations of Eugene O'Neill and Leo Tolstoy. In 1923, the Nikkatsu studios in Mukojima was destroyed in the Great Kantō Earthquake, so Mizoguchi moved to Nikkatsu's studios in Kyoto. While working in Kyoto, he studied kabuki and noh theatre, and traditional Japanese dance and music. He was also a frequent visitor of the tea houses, dance halls and brothels in Kyoto and Osaka, which at one time resulted in a widely covered incident of him being attacked by a jealous prostitute and then-lover with a razor. (2026). 9780415328470, Routledge. ISBN 9780415328470 His 1926 Passion of a Woman Teacher ( Kyōren no onna shishō) was one of a handful of Japanese films shown in France and Germany at the time and received considerate praise, but is nowadays lost like most of his 1920s and early 1930s films. By the end of the decade, Mizoguchi directed a series of left-leaning "", including Tokyo March and Metropolitan Symphony ( Tokai kokyōkyoku).
In 1927, Mizoguchi met and quickly fell in love with Chieko Saga, a dancer from Osaka. Chieko was married to a yakuza at the time, and her husband confronted Mizoguchi. With the help of Masakazu Nagata, a member of Nikkatsu's general affairs division, Mizoguchi convinced Chieko's husband that Mizoguchi and Chieko had not committed adultery but were in love. Mizoguchi and Chieko married in the summer of 1927. Their love for each other was strong, but their marriage was tumultuous. Mizoguchi and Chieko were both adulterous and frequently fought, with some of the fights getting violent. Chieko helped Mizoguchi with his work, often offering comments about his films during production.
In 1932, Mizoguchi left Nikkatsu and worked for a variety of studios and production companies. The Water Magician (1933) and Orizuru Osen (1935) were based on stories by Kyōka Izumi, depicting women who sacrifice themselves to secure a poor young man's education. Both have been cited as early examples of his recurring theme of female concerns and "Long take" camera technique, which would become his trademark. The 1936 diptych of Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion, about modern young women (Modern girl) rebelling against their surroundings, is considered to be his early masterpiece. Mizoguchi himself named these two films as the works with which he achieved artistic maturity. Osaka Elegy was also his first full sound film, and marked the beginning of his long collaboration with screenwriter Yoshikata Yoda.
1939, the year when Mizoguchi became president of the Directors Guild of Japan, saw the release of The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, which is regarded by many critics as his major pre-war, if not his best work. Here, a young woman supports her partner's struggle to achieve artistic maturity as a kabuki actor at the price of her health.
1941 also saw the permanent hospitalisation of his wife Chieko (m. 1927), whom he erroneously believed to have contracted venereal disease.
Mizoguchi died of leukemia at the age of 58 in the Kyoto Municipal Hospital. At the time of his death, Mizoguchi was working on the script of An Osaka Story, which was later realised by Kōzaburō Yoshimura.
| Hometown | Furusato | |||
| The Dream Path of Youth | Seishun no yumeji | |||
| City of Desire | Joen no chimata | |||
| Failure's Song is Sad | Haisan no uta wa kanashi | |||
| 813: The Adventures of Arsène Lupin | 813 | |||
| Foggy Harbour | Kiri no minato | |||
| Blood and Soul | Chi to rei | |||
| The Night | Yoru | |||
| In the Ruins | Haikyo no naka | |||
| The Sad Idiot | Kanashiki hakuchi | |||
| The Queen of Modern Times | Gendai no joō | |||
| Women Are Strong | Jose wa tsuyoshi | |||
| This Dusty World | Jinkyō | |||
| Turkeys in a Row | Shichimenchō no yukue | |||
| A Chronicle of May Rain | Samidare zōshi | |||
| No Money, No Fight | Musen fusen | |||
| A Woman of Pleasure | Kanraku no onna | |||
| Death at Dawn | Akatsuki no shi | |||
| Out of College | Gakusō o idete | |||
| The White Lily Laments | Shirayuki wa nageku | |||
| The Earth Smiles: Part 1 | Daichi wa hohoemu: Daiichibu | |||
| Shining in the Red Sunset | Akai yūki ni terasarete | |||
| The Song of Home | Furusato no uta | Extant | ||
| Human Being | Ningen | |||
| Street Sketches | Shōhin eigashū: Machi no suketchi | Omnibus, Mizoguchi directed one of four parts | ||
| The Copper Coin King | Dōkaō | |||
| A Paper Doll's Whisper of Spring | Kaminingyō haru no sasayaki | |||
| My Fault, New Version | Shinsetsu ono ga tsumi | |||
| The Passion of a Woman Teacher | Kyōren no onna shishō | |||
| The Boy of the Sea | Kaikoku danji | |||
| Money | Kane | |||
| The Cuckoo | Jihi shinchō | |||
| Tokyo March | Tōkyō kōshinkyoku | Few minutes preserved | ||
| The Morning Sun Shines | Asahi wa kagayaku | Co-directed with Seiichi Ina, few minutes preserved | ||
| Metropolitan Symphony | Tokai kōkyōgaku | |||
| Okichi, Mistress of a Foreigner | Tōjin Okichi | Few minutes preserved | ||
| The Dawn of Manchuria and Mongolia | Manmō kenkoku no reimei | |||
| Gion Festival | Gion matsuri | |||
| The Jinpu Group | Jimpūren | |||
| The Poppy | Gubijinsō | |||
| Sisters of the Gion | Gion no kyōdai | |||
| The 47 Ronin Part 1 | Genroku chūshingura | |||
| Miyamoto Musashi | Miyamoto Musashi | |||
| Victory Song | Hisshōka | Co-direction with Masahiro Makino and Hiroshi Shimizu | ||
| Utamaro and His Five Women | Utamaro o meguru gonin no onna | |||
| The Lady of Musashino | Musashino fujin | |||
| A Geisha | Gion bayashi | |||
| The Woman in the Rumor | Uwasa no onna | |||
| The Crucified Lovers | Chikamatsu monogatari | |||
| Tales of the Taira Clan | Shin heike monogatari | |||
Mizoguchi's films have regularly appeared in "best film" polls, such as Sight & Sound's "The 100 Greatest Films of All Time" ( Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff) and Kinema Junpo's "Kinema Junpo Critics' Top 200" ( The Life of Oharu, Ugetsu and The Crucified Lovers). A retrospective of his 30 extant films, presented by the Museum of the Moving Image and the Japan Foundation, toured several American cities in 2014. Among the directors who have admired Mizoguchi's work are Akira Kurosawa, Orson Welles, Andrei Tarkovsky, Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, Theo Angelopoulos and many others. Film historian David Thomson wrote, "The use of camera to convey emotional ideas or intelligent feelings is the definition of cinema derived from Mizoguchi's films. He is supreme in the realization of internal states in external views."
‘On 24 August 1956, Japan's greatest film-maker died in Kyoto. And one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Kenji Mizoguchi was the equal of a Murnau or a Rossellini... If poetry appears at every second, in every shot that Mizoguchi makes, it is because, as with Murnau, it is the instinctive reflection of the inventive nobility of its author’. Jean-Luc Godard, Arts, 5 February 1958.
‘There is no doubt that Kenji Mizoguchi, who died three years ago, was his country's greatest filmmaker. He knew how to discipline for his own use an art born in other climes and from which his compatriots had not always made the most of. And yet there is no slavish desire on his part to copy the West. His conception of setting, acting, rhythm, composition, time and space is entirely national. But he touches us in the same way as Murnau, Ophüls or Rossellini’. Éric Rohmer, Arts, 25 September 1959.
‘Comparisons are as inevitable as they are unfashionable: Mizoguchi is the Shakespeare of cinema, its Bach or Beethoven, its Rembrandt, Titian or Picasso’, James Quandt, Mizoguchi the Master, (retrospective of Mizoguchi centenary films), Cinematheque Ontario and Japan Foundation, 1996.
|
|
