The Instant Expert's Guide to Kenji Mizoguchi

No one can match Cinema Paradiso when it comes to the great films of yesterday and today. Our Instant Expert series guides users through the careers of the finest film-makers from around the world and recommends their most unmissable movies. In this issue, we pay homage to a genuine Japanese master, Kenji Mizoguchi.

Born in different centuries, yet just five years apart, Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu started directing in the silent era. Products of the 'zaibatsu' studio system, they served apprenticeships before making their first films and soon proved to be highly versatile, with pictures across the generic range. Yet, having mastered sound, Mizoguchi and Ozu refined their contrasting visual styles and honed in on themes that would remain relevant decades later.

Sadly, each died far too young. Moreover, fate has been unkind to the majority of their early outings. But Ozu and Mizoguchi survived falling out of favour with the angry young men of the 'nubero bagu' new wave of the 1960s to be ranked among the greatest directors of all time. So, who were these two Tokyoites, who are considered superior to Akira Kurosawa in the Land of the Rising Sun? We shall return to Ozu in our next Instant Expert's Guide. For now, we shall focus on his often overshadowed elder.

A Traumatic Youth

Born in the Hongo district of Tokyo on 16 May 1898, Kenji Mizoguchi was one of three children raised by roofing carpenter Zentaro Mizoguchi and his wife, Masa. When the Russo-Japanese War broke out in 1904, Zentaro tried to make a quick yen selling raincoats to the troops. However, the conflict ended before he could recoup his investment and Kenji was placed in the care of his sister, Suzuko, who had been a geisha in the capital's Asakusa red light district since she was 14.

In 1911, Mizoguchi was withdrawn from school and sent to live with an uncle in the northern city of Morioka. Unfortunately, he contracted rheumatoid arthritis and a year in bed left him with an uneven gait. Luckily, as Suzu had become the mistress of Viscount Matsudaira Tadamasa, she used her contacts to secure her 15 year-old brother an apprenticeship with a kimono designer.

As was often the case with Mizoguchi during this period, the job didn't last long and Susu had to help him land a place at the Aoibashi Yoga Kenkyuko art school. Following the death of their mother in 1915, Suzu bought a house to protect her brothers from their father, who would be the model for many unappealing characters in Mizoguchi's oeuvre. She also encouraged him to paint sets at the Royal Theatre before finding him a position as an advertisement designer at the Yuishin Nippon newspaper in Kobe.

Feeling homesick, Mizoguchi quit after a few months and returned to Tokyo, where a friend introduced him to Tadashi Tomishima, an actor at Nikkatsu's Mukojima film studio. As Mizoguchi fancied trying his hand at acting, Tomishima recommended him to director Osamu Wakayama.

As the studio had enough performers, Mizoguchi was apprenticed to director Eizo Tanaka, whose The Kyoyo Collar Shop (1922) did much to modernise Japanese films at a time when female roles were stilll played by male impersonators like Teinosuke Kinugasa, who went on to become a famous director in his own right. Indeed, Cinema Paradiso users can rent his masterpiece, Gate of Hell (1953), as well as Kon Ichikawa's An Actor's Revenge (1963), which Kinugasa co-scripted.

The Silent Years

During a strike at the studio in 1923, Mizoguchi made his directorial debut with The Resurrection of Love. Little is known about the film or many that followed it, as only six of the 55 features that Mizoguchi made between 1923-35 have survived.

Historians have pieced together his progress through contemporary reviews, as he learned his craft through a series of literary adaptations, melodramas and mysteries. Some, like Blood and Soul (1923), bore the influence of Expressionism (see Cinema Paradiso's article, 100 Years of German Expressionism ), while Foggy Harbour (1924) owed much to Eugene O'Neill's play, Anna Christie, which would provide Greta Garbo with her first talking role in Clarence Brown's 1930 adaptation.

Critic Tadao Sato has claimed that Mizoguchi's early works were influenced by the events of his troubled youth and the Shinpa style of stage drama that was more realistic than the traditional Noh and Kabuki forms. On the set, Mizoguchi was renowned as a perfectionist and a taskmaster, whose nickname was 'Kenji the Grouch'. But, after the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 had forced him to relocate to Nikkatsu's Kyoto studio, his private life intruded upon his work when lover Yuriko Ichijo slashed his back with a razor while he was shooting Shining in the Red Sunset (1925).

The front office was so outraged by the scandal that Mizoguchi was suspended for six months. But, while Ichijo turned to prostitution, he married chorus girl Tajima Chieko and reinforced his reputation with Passion of a Woman Teacher and A Paper Doll's Whisper of Spring (both 1926), which demonstrated a more mature style that was much praised when the films were screened in Paris and Berlin.

As Kyoto was the home of Japan's traditional arts, Mizoguchi underwent a crash course in Kabuki and Noh theatre and the various forms of music and dance. The fact that Japanese films were still silent hampered his development, however, and talkies only became the norm in the mid-1930s because the union representing the 'benshi' narrators who acted out the dialogue in movie theatres was so powerful.

Mizoguchi would be one of the first to experiment with sound in Hometown (1930). But he continued to make studies of female suffering like Song of Home (1925), Okichi, Mistress of a Foreigner (1930) and And Yet They Go On (1931). The latter caused something of a stir because it followed Metropolitan Symphony (1929) in echoing the left-leaning sentiments of the keiko-eiga or 'tendency' genre, the most famous of which is Sadao Yamamoto's Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937), which is available from Cinema Paradiso.

As a director for hire, however, Mizoguchi was also forced to make propaganda titles like Dawn in Manchuria (1932), whose imperialist message he found so distasteful that he quit Nikkatsu after 47 films to team up with leading star Takako Irie at Shinko to produce the much-admired drama, The Water Magician (1933).

The Emergence of a Master

Having grown tired of churning out Meiji (1868-1912) period pieces, Mizoguchi relished the chance to make a gothic saga (also known as Cascading White Threads) about how a circus performer is driven into a life of crime through her love for a penniless rickshaw driver. He followed this box-office success with another tale from a novel by Kyoka Izumi, The Downfall of Osen (1934), which confirmed Mizoguchi as a visual stylist with a social edge.

However, Shinko was too small to accommodate Mizoguchi's growing ambitions and he joined the newly founded Daiichi Film Company to make his first masterpieces, Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion (both 1936). The first of many pictures scripted by Yoshikata Yoda, these dramas reflected Mizoguchi's guilt at his mother's mistreatment at the hands of his father and his gratitude to the sister who had put herself out in order to give him a decent start in life.

Photographed by Miki Minoru in long, deep-focus takes, each feature exhibited a radical feminism that was at odds with the conservative nature of an increasingly militaristic state. Isuzu Yamada excels in Osaka Elegy, as a telephonist who is lured into an affair with her married drug company boss in order to pay off her father's debts and fund her brother's education. The Japanese Ministry of Affairs disapproved of this depiction of independent womanhood and had the picture withdrawn.

But Mizoguchi and Yamada returned with Sisters of the Gion, which takes place in Kyoto's brothel district where geisha siblings Yoko Umemura and Isuzu Yamada have very different attitudes towards the men they serve, even though they are treated with the same disdain. Unflinching in its assault on what we would now call toxic masculinity, this contentious drama led to a brush with the censor that limited its domestic release. However, it so raised Mizoguchi's profile that he was elected chairman of the Directors Guild of Japan.

This was a difficult time to hold such an office, however, as Japan and China were at war and films like The Straits of Love and Hate (1937), which was based on Leo Tolstoy's Resurrection, were frowned upon because a woman was seen to rebel against the patriarch keeping her from her child. Yet Mizoguchi was amenable to producing more conformist works, like Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (1939), in which a woman suffers to help her Kabuki actor lover find fame.

In the run-up to Pearl Harbor, Mizoguchi was coerced into celebrating macho heroism in 'national policy' pictures like The 47 Ronin (1941), a samurai saga that he consented to direct in order to prevent the struggling Shochiku studio from folding. However, he managed to slip in a subversive subtext that prizes the Bushido Code over tyrannical authority. Such political daring was missing from the remakes directed by Kon Ichikawa in 1994 and Carl Rinsch in 2013 (with Keanu Reeves in tow), but they are well worth seeing and Cinema Paradiso has them both available to rent.

The strain of bringing this sprawling story to the screen was exacerbated by the fact that Mizoguchi's wife descended into madness during the shoot after being diagnosed with congenital syphilis. Although she had not contracted the disease from him, he channelled his guilt into the dissertations on female emancipation that would dominate the last decade of his life.

The Mise-en-Scène Maestro

During the seven-year American occupation that followed the Second World War, Japanese cinema was subjected to strict checks to prevent the spread of militarist propaganda. Initially, historical pictures were frowned upon, especially if they featured heroic samurai. But, having proven himself to be an advocate of liberal democracy with Victory of the Women, Mizoguchi secured special permission, to make the jidai-geki, Utamaro and His Five Women (1946), which starred Minosuke Bando as Kitagawa Utamaro, the woodblock artist who had complex relationships with the 1790s women who inspired him.

The sequence in which paint is applied to the back of Toshiko Iizuka is justly famous for its sensuality, but there are so many memorable images in a film that hints at the fluid deep-focus elegance for which Mizoguchi would become celebrated (which owed much to his discovery of director William Wyler's pioneering collaborations with cinematographer Gregg Toland - see our Instant Expert's Guide). Kinuyo Tanaka fizzes as a feisty courtesan and she became Mizoguchi's muse over the next few years.

She is forced on to the streets in war-scarred Osaka in Women of the Night, which has a neo-realist feel and matches any of the postwar 'rubble films' produced in Europe, including Roberto Rossellini's Germany, Year Zero (both 1948). Then, in Flame of My Love (1949), Tanaka plays a Meiji-era wife who walks out on a hypocritical liberal politician.

Opting to freelance rather than commit to a single studio, Mizoguchi turned to a 1930s novel by Junichiro Tanizaki for Miss Oyu, in which Tanaka plays a widowed mother who condemns younger sister Shizu (Nobuko Otowa) to a loveless marriage after the family of Shinnosuke (Yuji Hori) opposes their own match. Also in 1951, Mizoguchi and Yoda took a further dig at bourgeois morality in The Lady of Musashino, another shomin-geki ('bourgeois drama') that also turns on an impossible romance, as Michiko Akiyama (Tanaka) discovers that her vulgar professor husband, Tadao (Masayuki Mori), is having an affair with Tomiko (Yukiko Todoroki), the wife of her wartime profiteer cousin, Eiji (So Yamamura).

The reputation of these films has grown over the years, especially after the young critics at Cahiers du Cinéma caught sight of the sinuous long takes executed by cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, which they compared favourably to the work of Christian Matras on Max Ophüls's mise-en-scène masterpieces La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1951), Madame De... (1953) and Lola Montes (1955). At the time of their release, however, they were considered old-fashioned and Mizoguchi (who had converted to Buddhism in 1950) was written off by the reviewers bowled over by such bold Akira Kurosawa landmarks as Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952) and Seven Samurai (1954).

Ironically, it was Kurosawa's favourite actor, Toshiro Mifune, who helped Mizoguchi return to the front rank with The Life of Oharu (1952). Based on Saikaku Ihara's 1686 tome, Five Women Who Loved Love, the flashbacking story centres on Oharu (Tanaka), the daughter of a proud Kyoto samurai who forces her to become a courtesan after he disapproves of her romance with lowly page, Katsunosuke (Mifune).

Superbly designed by Hiroshi Mizutani and earning its director an award at Venice (see A Brief History of the Venice Film Festival ), this treatise on patriarchal cruelty has drawn recent criticism for pictorialising female suffering. But, even though it was only a modest success in Japan, Masaichi Nagata, the chief of Daiei Films, was so delighted with its overseas impact that he gave Mizoguchi the creative freedom to tackle topics of his choosing in his now trademark lucid style.

He consolidated his position with A Geisha, an adaptation of a novel by old friend Matsutaro Kawaguchi that returns to the Gion district of Kyoto to chronicle the relationship between eager 16 year-old trainee geisha Eiko (Ayako Wakao) and her embittered mentor, Miyoharu (Michiyo Kogure). But he would create his finest work with Ugetsu (both 1953), a visually striking take on an Ueda Akinari ghost story that harks back to Japan's 16th-century civil war to explore how potter Genjuro (Masayuki Mori) and his brother-in-law, Tobei (Sakae Ozawa), are respectively led astray from wives Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka) and Ohama (Mitsuko Mito) by the spectrally mysterious Lady Wakasa (Machiko Kyo) and the allure of samurai glory.

The winner of the Silver Lion at Venice, this combination of visual beauty and moral outrage was followed by a second success with Sansho the Bailiff (1954). Drawing on a short story by Mori Ogai and designed to appeal to Western audiences, the action takes place in 11th-century Japan and follows the misfortunes of siblings Zushio (Yoshiaki Hanayagi) and Anju (Kyoko Kagawa) after they fall into the enslaving hands of the sadistic Sansho (Eitaro Shindo) after their father is banished by a feudal lord and their mother, Tamaki (Kinuyo Tanaka), is sold into prostitution.

The narrative is gruelling, but Kazuo Miyagawa's camerawork is almost balletic and dazzles much more than the colour that Mizoguchi employed on Princess Yang Kwei-fei and Tales of the Taira Clan (both 1955), his only excursions away from monochrome. Indeed, the gloomy greys were much more suitable for The Woman of Rumour (1954), a gendai-geki ('contemporary drama') that plays on Mizoguchi's contention that 'women have always been treated like slaves'. Set in the Kyoto geisha house run by Hatsuko Mabuchi (Kinuyo Tanaka), the drama turns around the growing realisation that her doctor lover, Kenji Matoba (Tomoemon Otani), is falling for her daughter, Yukiko (Yoshiko Kuga), who has returned from Tokyo after a broken romance.

Death and forbidden love are also central to The Crucified Lovers (1954), an adaptation of a 1715 play by Chikamatsu Monzaemon that accompanies Osan (Kyoko Kagawa), the young wife of a miserly scroll maker, and his apprentice, Mohei (Kazuo Hasegawa), after they are forced to flee Kyoto after being falsely accused of committing adultery, a crime that is punishable by crucifixion. Although not rated among Mizoguchi's best work, this proves deeply moving, as the fugitives try to resist the feelings that will condemn them.

A crushing sadness also informs Street of Shame (1956), Mizoguchi's last gesture of gratitude towards his sister, which was released in the same year that a law was passed outlawing the purchasing of sexual favours. This sojourn in the Dreamland brothel in Tokyo's Yoshiwara district proved to be his swan song, however, as the hard-drinking director succumbed to leukaemia at the age of 58 on 24 August 1956.

Onetime colleague Kaneto Shindo memorialised him in Kenji Mizoguchi: The Life of a Film Director (1975), which did much to revive interest in Mizoguchi's canon after he fell from favour during the 1960s. But such was his visual inventiveness, thematic consistency, humanist compassion and political commitment that he deserves to be lauded and watched 65 years after his death.