magiadoreal

opresented by The Japan Foundation “The great thing about Mizoguchi was his tireless effort to imbue every scene with reality.”—Akira Kurosawa Between the early 1920s and the year of his death, Kenji Mizoguchi (1898–1956) made more than seventy-five films (though many of the films are lost), moving easily across genres from samurai tales to contemporary melodramas. His mature style is evident beginning with his 1936 classic, Sisters of the Gion. A master of marrying form and content, Mizoguchi often employs elegant long takes and sequence shots. Well known for the one scene/one take method, his aesthetic is based largely on a strategy that gives each shot equal weight, in which the camera often moves in intricate relationship to its subject, kept at a distance from the actors without the use of close-ups. His thematic concerns deal famously with the subjugation of women in society, but also with the transience of life. Mizoguchi has the extraordinary ability to create worlds that