KENJI MIZOGUCHI, TRAGIC POET OF THE JAPANESE CINEMA MAY 16 – JUNE 23

Start
16 May 2014
End
23 Jun 2014
Location
Harvard Film Archive 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

THE HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE PRESENTS

KENJI MIZOGUCHI, TRAGIC POET OF THE JAPANESE CINEMA

MAY 16 – JUNE 23

Harvard Film Archive
24 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
(617) 495-4700

General Admission Tickets $9
Non-Harvard Students, Seniors ,Harvard Faculty and Staff, $7
Harvard students free

Tickets go on sale 45 minutes prior to show times.
The HFA does not
do advance ticket sales.

More Information and Complete Film Schedule

Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1958) was a foundational figure of the Japanese cinema and one of its uncontestably supreme artists. Mizoguchi remains best known today for his late masterworks of the 1950s and especially The Life of Oharu, Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff, haunting visions of feudal Japan tragically shaped by the suffering heroines and inexorable tracking shots often declared the pillars of Mizoguchi’s cinema. Exalted by Godard, Rivette, Rohmer, the slow unspooling of time and space in Mizoguchi’s late films was celebrated as a sublime realization of the stylized realism preached by the spiritual father of the nouvelle vague, André Bazin. With their obsessively detailed attention to period costume, architecture and the traditional Japanese arts and literature from which they drew deep inspiration, Mizoguchi’s late films also branded him, internationally, as the most quintessentially Japanese filmmaker, an epithet still active, although also extended these days to Yasujiro Ozu. While indisputably a pinnacle of Mizoguchi’s cinema, the late films offer, however, only a partial portrait of a filmmaker whose larger career was notably volatile and defined by a mercurial, even impulsive, imagination that frequently pulled him in contradictory directions.

THE JAPAN SOCIETY OF BOSTON