Donald Keene Lecture 2: Emperor Meiji and Foreign Visitors

February 8

Donald Keene Lecture 2: Emperor Meiji and Foreign Visitors
Altschul Auditorium (417 International Affairs Building), Columbia University (118th St. and Amsterdam Ave.)
6:00 PM

February 14 – March 6
Kenji Mizoguchi Film Series
Miller Theatre, Columbia University (116th St. and Broadway)
6:00 PM

MIZOGUCHI: THE MASTER

The films of Kenji Mizoguchi, along with those of Kurosawa and Ozu, are perhaps the most celebrated works of Japanese cinema throughout the world. In the years since his death in 1956, his reputation as one of the master directors of  world cinema has continued to grow. Few critics today would neglect to include at least one Mizoguchi film on their short lists of “best films of all time,” and audiences the world over return again and again to his films, discovering something new in them with each re-viewing.

Kenji Mizoguchi’s life closely parallels the development of cinema in Japan: born in 1898, only a year or two after the introduction of the first Kinetoscope and Vitascope films into Japan, Mizoguchi entered the film industry in the early 1920s, just as filmmakers were breaking away from the conventions of Japanese traditional theater to establish themselves as independent artists. Though Mizoguchi made eighty-five films during his thirty-three years as a director  (1923-56), his exalted international reputation rests on a relatively small number of works. Only about a dozen of his films are in regular distribution outside Japan, and of these fewer than half are seen with any real frequency. Among them, the three masterpieces that brought international acclaim to Mizoguchi by winning top awards at the Venice Film Festival in three consecutive years—The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu  (1953), and Sansho the Bailiff  (1954)—continue to fascinate us with their extraordinary artistry.

If there is a single theme uniting all of Mizoguchi’s films, a “red thread” running through his entire body of work, it is his sympathy for individuals, particularly women, who are victimized by society. His very first film, The Resurrection of Love (Ai ni Yomigaeru Hi), a story of two impoverished sisters in love with an artist, has been described as “a portrayal of the poor so devastatingly realistic that it proved unacceptable to the censors” when it was made in 1923. Much the same could be said of his very last film, the 1956 Street of Shame  (Akasen Chitai), a sensitive portrayal of the hardships suffered by prostitutes, made at the time of a national debate over a new anti-prostitution law. In all his films, Mizoguchi’s compassionate humanism hovers like a protective angel over the women oppressed by society as he investigates with remarkable delicacy the nuances of human relationships. And in each film, regardless of whether it is a medieval ghost story, an adaptation from Maupassant or Eugene O’Neill, or a domestic tragedy unfolding in the back alleys of modern Osaka, the viewer is enveloped in an atmosphere perfectly attuned to the subject at hand. Transcending mere accuracy in selecting and decorating his settings, Mizoguchi seems almost to control the textures and vapors and aromas that draw the viewer totally into the worlds he created on film.

The words of Akira Kurosawa, spoken in eulogy at Mizoguchi’s funeral, serve as eloquent commentary of the admiration of one Japanese film master for another:

“Mizoguchi’s greatness was that he would do anything to heighten the reality of every scene.  He never made compromises. He never said that something or other ‘would do.’  Instead, he pulled or pushed everyone along with him until they had created the feeling which matched his own inner image. He had the temperament of a true creator. Mizoguchi pushed and bullied and was often criticized for it. But he held out, and in doing so he created masterpieces… Directors like him are especially necessary in Japan, where this kind of pushing is so resisted. Of all Japanese directors, I have the greatest respect for him… With the death of Mizoguchi, Japanese film has lost its truest creator.”