Showing: kenji mizoguchi  
THE 47 RONIN: Part 1

47 samurai avenge the death of their lord in Kenji Mizoguchi's take on the famous historical event.

Kenji Mizoguchi Japan, 1941
DVD

THE 47 RONIN: Part 2

47 samurai avenge the death of their lord in Kenji Mizoguchi's take on the famous historical event.

Kenji Mizoguchi Japan, 1941
DVD

The Life of Oharu

This epic portrait of an inexorable fall from grace, starring the astounding Kinuyo Tanaka as an imperial lady-in-waiting who gradually descends to street prostitution, was the movie that gained the director international attention, ushering in a new golden period for him.

Kenji Mizoguchi Japan, 1952
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD

Osaka Elegy

Osaka Elegy established Mizoguchi as one of Japan’s major filmmakers. The director's often-used leading actress Isuzu Yamada stars as Ayako, a switchboard operator trapped in a compromising, ruinous relationship with her boss to help support her wastrel father.

Kenji Mizoguchi Japan, 1936
DVD

Sansho the Bailiff

Under Kenji Mizoguchi’s dazzling direction, this classic Japanese story became one of cinema’s greatest masterpieces, a monumental, empathetic expression of human resilience in the face of evil.

Kenji Mizoguchi Japan, 1954
DCP, 35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD

Sisters of the Gion

The independent, unsentimental Omocha and her sister, the more tradition-minded Umekichi, are both geishas in the working-class district of Gion. Mizoguchi's film is an uncompromising look at the forces that keep many women at the bottom rung of the social ladder.

Kenji Mizoguchi Japan, 1936
35 mm, DVD

A Story from Chikamatsu

One of a string of late-career masterworks made by Kenji Mizoguchi in the early 1950s, A Story from Chikamatsu is an exquisitely moving tale of forbidden love struggling to survive in the face of persecution.

Kenji Mizoguchi Japan, 1954
DCP, Blu-ray, DVD

The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum

This achingly gorgeous emotional epic from the incomparable Kenji Mizoguchi is one of the triumphs of Japanese cinema.

Kenji Mizoguchi Japan, 1939
DCP

Street of Shame

For his final film, Mizoguchi brought a lifetime of experience to bear on the heartbreaking tale of a brothel in Tokyo’s red light district, full of women whose dreams are constantly being shattered by the socioeconomic realities surrounding them.

Kenji Mizoguchi Japan, 1956
DCP, 35 mm, DVD

Ugetsu

By the time he made Ugetsu, Kenji Mizoguchi was already an elder statesman of Japanese cinema, fiercely revered by Akira Kurosawa and other directors of a younger generation.

Kenji Mizoguchi Japan, 1953
DCP, 35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD

Utamaro and His Five Women

In making a film based on the life of a renowned eighteenth-century painter and woodblock portraitist, the great Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi created one of his most autobiographical statements on the artistic process as well as another of his trenchant observations about the place of women in Japanese society.

Kenji Mizoguchi Japan, 1946
35 mm

Women of the Night

Filmed on location in Osaka, Women of the Night concerns two sisters—Fusako, a war widow, and Natsuko, having an affair with a narcotics smuggler—who along with their younger friend Kumiko descend into prostitution and moral chaos amid the postwar devastation surrounding them.

Kenji Mizoguchi Japan, 1948
DVD