Post by captainofbeef on Nov 30, 2008 21:30:28 GMT -5
Over the course of a three-decade, more than eighty film career, master cineaste Kenji Mizoguchi (Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff) would return again and again to one abiding theme: the plight of women in Japanese society. In these four lacerating works of social consciousness—two prewar (Osaka Elegy, Sisters of the Gion), two postwar (Women of the Night, Street of Shame)—Mizoguchi introduces an array of compelling female protagonists, crushed or resilient, who are forced by their conditions and culture into compromising positions. With Mizoguchi’s visual daring and eloquence, these films are as cinematically thrilling as they are politically rousing.
Osaka Elegy
Osaka Elegy established Mizoguchi as one of Japan’s major filmmakers. The director’s often-used leading actress Isuzu Yamada stars as Ayako, a switchboard operator trapped in a compromising, ruinous relationship with her boss to help support her wastrel father.
Sisters of the Gion
The independent, unsentimental Omocha and her sister, the more tradition-minded Umekichi, are both geishas in the working-class district of Gion. Mizoguchi’s film is an uncompromising look at the forces that keep many women at the bottom rung of the social ladder.
Street of Shame
For his final film, Mizoguchi brought a lifetime of experience to bear on the heartbreaking tale of a brothel in Tokyo’s red light district, full of women whose dreams are constantly being shattered by the socioeconomic realities surrounding them.
Women of the Night
Filmed on location in Osaka, Women of the Night concerns two sisters—Fusako, a war widow, and Natsuko, having an affair with a narcotics smuggler—who along with their younger friend Kumiko descend into prostitution and moral chaos amid the postwar devastation surrounding them.
