Kenji Mizoguchi

Kenji Mizoguchi 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. Mizoguchi was born in Hongō, Tokyo, as the second of three children, to Zentaro Miguchi, a roofing carpenter, and his wife Masa. The family's background was relatively humble until the father's failed business venture of selling raincoats to the Japanese troops during the Russo-Japanese War. The family was forced to move to the downtown district of Asakusa and gave Mizoguchi's older sister Suzu up for adoption, which in effect meant selling her into the geisha profession. 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 shinpa 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)." Mizoguchi began his career as an assistant director in 1920 before directing his first film, “With Love and Perseverance” (1923). However, it was with “The Sister of Gion” (1936) and “The Sisters of the Gion” (1937) that he gained recognition for his unique talent for capturing the emotions and struggles of his female characters. Mizoguchi addressed themes such as prostitution, personal sacrifice, unrequited love, and the quest for freedom, offering powerful commentary on the condition of women in Japanese society of his time. He also experimented with different genres and styles, such as adaptations of Eugene O’Neil and Tolstoy, expressionist imitations of Caligari, and historical dramas. During the Second World War, Mizoguchi was under the close supervision of government censors, and made films that focused on male characters and anti-war themes, such as The 47 Ronin (1941) and The Loyal 47 Ronin (1958). After the war, Mizoguchi's career reached its peak with his late masterworks of the 1950s, which were praised internationally for their poetic and artistic sensibility, their meticulous attention to period detail, and their use of long takes and tracking shots. His films of this period include The Life of Oharu (1952), which won the International Prize at the Venice Film Festival, Ugetsu (1953), which won the Silver Lion at the same festival, and Sansho the Bailiff (1954), which won the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. These films are haunting visions of feudal Japan, tragically shaped by the suffering heroines and the inexorable movement of history. Mizoguchi also made contemporary films that dealt with social issues, such as Women of the Night (1948), which depicted the lives of post-war prostitutes, and Street of Shame (1956), which exposed the harsh realities of the legal brothel district in Tokyo. His last film, Princess Yang Kwei-Fei (1955), was a co-production with Hong Kong, and marked his first and only venture into color filmmaking. 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. Mizoguchi's legacy as a master of Japanese cinema and a pioneer of cinematic art has been widely acknowledged by critics, filmmakers, and audiences around the world. His films have influenced many directors, such as Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Andrei Tarkovsky, Martin Scorsese, and Hou Hsiao-hsien. Mizoguchi is also regarded as one of the greatest humanist filmmakers, whose films express a profound compassion and empathy for the oppressed and the marginalized, especially women.