by Sam Juliano
By any standard of measurement Kenji Mizoguchi must surely be considered among the masters of cinema. He’s one of four Japanese directors to be so regarded, along with Yashujiro Ozu, Akira Kurosawa and Mikio Naruse. He was amazingly prolific, considering he lived to be only 58, dying in 1956 of a rare form of leukemia. He made 85 films, most of these between 1922 and 1935, (all but six of these are lost) but is known in the west for about a half-dozen films coming late in his career that are considered masterpieces by film scholars, critics and audiences. Like John Ford, Mizoguchi once headed the vast union governing all production personnel in Japan, and he liked to consider himself as popular as much as a serious artist, but during his storied career is was unrelentingly meticulous and a ceaseless researcher. He is said to have been tyrannical over his actors, as he sought perfection demanded by few other artists including Dreyer, Bresson and Hitchcock. He saw his later films as the culmination of many years’ work, his style evolving from one in which a set of tableaux were photographed from an imperial distance and then cut together to one in which the camera moves between two moments of balance, beginning with the movements of a character, then coming to rest at its own proper point. (more…)
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