Mizoguchi Film Series:

February 28

Mizoguchi Film Series:
Utamaro & His Five Women (Utamaro wo meguru gonin no onna)
Director: Kenji Mizoguchi (1946, 93 min.)
Screenplay:  Yoshikata Yoda; Photography: Shigeto Miki. With Minosuke Bando, Kinuyo Tanaka, Kotaro Bando, and Hiroko Kawasaki
Miller Theatre, Columbia University (116th St. and Broadway)
6:00 PM

In this film about the renowned 18th-century woodblock print artist Utamaro, Mizoguchi may have found the perfect allegorical subject for his own experience as a film director. Utamaro, like Mizoguchi, was the creator of a popular art form, not always appreciated as art, yet he was profoundly convinced that his work was of no less quality than that of conventionally acknowledged artists.  Both men were obsessed with women as subjects, and both were hampered throughout their careers by restrictions imposed by outsiders.

Utamaro was the first period film made after the war to be approved by the censors of the American Occupation, no doubt because its theme is about freedom and equality  The film depicts Utamaro’s irrepressible creative impulses and his relationships with the many women who posed for him.

8:00 PM
My Love Has Been Burning (Waga koi wa moenu)
Director: Kenji Mizoguchi (1949, 84 min.)
Screenplay: Yoshikata Yoda & Kaneto Shindo.  Photography:  Kohei Sugiyama. With Kinuyo Tanaka, Ichiro Sugai, Mitsuko Mito, Eitaro Ozawa, and Kuniko Miyake.

A Meiji-period drama based loosely on the autobiography of Eiko Kageyama, one of that era’s most influential feminists.  Eiko defies her family and leaves her job as a schoolteacher in Okayama to live in Tokyo with her lover, a leader of the new Liberal Party.  She leaves him for another political activist, with whom she is arrested.  Released from prison in the 1889 amnesty following the issuance of the Meiji Constitution, she rejoins her husband in liberal political work, but leaves him when he has an affair with her former servant.  An interesting view of Meiji-period politics through the eyes of an intensely committed advocate of women’s rights.