Kenji Mizoguchi

Kenji Mizoguchi made film after film about women destroyed by the arrangements men had built, and had reason to. His father's business failed when he was a boy and his elder sister was sold to a geisha house to keep the family; she then supported him. He worked as a designer, entered films in 1923, and was slashed with a razor by a lover in 1925, which the studio hushed. He made around eighty-five pictures, more than half now lost. The style is the opposite of cutting: long unbroken takes, the camera withdrawing to watch a scene whole from a distance, so that violence and grief happen in real time without emphasis. The Life of Oharu follows a court lady down every stage of decline to street prostitution. Ugetsu sets a potter's ambition against the women it ruins, and won at Venice in 1953, as did Sansho the Bailiff the following year. He drove actors brutally and demanded impossible authenticity in sets and costume. He died at fifty-eight of leukaemia. Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion, both 1936, are usually taken as the point where his own manner arrives. Kinuyo Tanaka acted in fifteen of his films and later became one of Japan s first women directors, which he opposed publicly and which ended their friendship. Street of Shame, his last film, was released months before Japan banned licensed prostitution, and is sometimes credited with helping the vote. The New Wave critics at Cahiers du cinema ranked him above Kurosawa, which reversed the Western order of the two for a generation.

• Lived: 1898 CE – 1956 CE
• Nationality: Japanese
• Roles: artist