Mizoguchi Film Series: The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna)
March 6, 2000
Mizoguchi Film Series: The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna)
Director: Kenji Mizoguchi (1952, 137 min.)
Original story by Ihara Saikaku. Screenplay: Yoshikata Yoda. Photography: Yoshimi Hirano. Music: Ichiro Saito. With Kinuyo Tanaka, Toshiro Mifune, Ichiro Sugai, Toshiaki Konoe, Sadako Sawamura, Eitaro Shindo, Jukichi Uno, Daisuke Kato, and Chieko Higashiyama
Miller Theatre, Columbia University (116th St. and Broadway)
8:00 PM
In this film adaptation of Saikaku’s 17th-century cautionary tale The Woman Who Loved Love (Koshoku ichidai onna), Mizoguchi substitutes a heartrending pathos for the bitter irony and self-mocking humor of Saikaku’s original. Both versions depict the downfall of a well-bred woman, caused both by social forces and by her own sexual appetites. The Life of Oharu, like Mizoguchi’s powerful 1936 film Osaka Elegy, shows how a woman can be stripped of social respectability and her own self-esteem simply by the fact of her own helplessness in a world dominated by men.
Winner of the Grand Prize at the 1952 Venice Film Festival, The Life of Oharu is the film that first brought Mizoguchi to international prominence, and is ranked as one of his greatest masterpieces.
