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Synopsis
For a majority of film-goers, the names most usually associated with classic Japanese cinema are those of Kurosawa and Ozu. Yet during the early 1950s, at the same time that Kurosawa was becoming known to the public through the release of classics like Rashomon and The Seven Samurai, another Japanese director, Kenji Mizoguchi, quietly came out with a trilogy of films-The Life of Oharu, Ugetsu Monogatari and Sansho the Bailiff-that are the equal of Kurosawa's in mastery, and which by any account rank among the greatest and most enduring masterpieces of world cinema. As a storyteller, Mizoguchi was drawn to the plight and oppression of women throughout the ages- it was, for him, the 'subject of subjects'. So in addition to the movies just mentioned, he is remembered for a string of masterly contemporary films that examined, with unprecedented candour and ferocity, the conditions of life in Japanese brothels and geisha houses. Yet, as well as being a moralist. Mizoguchi was a stylist. His films are considered by critics to be among the most beautiful ever made, from a purely pictorial point of view.
Filmgoers who have responded enthuslastically in recent years to Chinese classics like Farewell My Concubine or to the colourful works of Zhang Yimou will be delighted to discover 'pre-echoes' of this cinema in such late films by this Japanese master as The Empress Yang Kwei Fei and Tales of the Taira Clan (both released in 1955) works in which colour, costume and decor are utilised with a rare and compelling relinement. Despite his extraordinary qualities as a film-maker, Mizoguchi and Japan is the first full -length study in English for over 20 years of a director whose work is as vibrant now as it ever was in its heyday, and whom the French film review Cahiers du Cinema recently hailed 'the greatest of all cineastes.' New & Used
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What Reviewers Are Saying
Le Fanu's love for Japanese cinema as a whole is advantageous ... Though he appreciates the uniqueness of Mizoguchi's art, Le Fanu is careful to situate it in a rich national tradition ... His book is beautifully written: its prose is clear, precise and jargon-free, offering an aesthetic interpretation, rather than a dissection of Mizoguchi's work along ideological or theoretical lines. * Times Higher Education * Le Fanu is a refreshing anomaly in contemporary academic film criticism. * Cineaste * I offer Le Fanu the highest compliment that can be paid a critic: his book made me want to rush out and screen every Mizoguchi film I could lay my hands on. * Sight & Sound * Like all critics worthy of the name, Le Fanu goes to great pains to retrace the spiritual path of the artist he is writing about, sharing with us his intellectual curiosity and in doing so displaying a profound knowledge of the arts and the history, the literature and the customs of Japan ... Le Fanu here makes a major contribution to our knowledge of this great Japanese master. * Michel Ciment, Positif * As the title indicates, the author sets Mizoguchi's films within the wider context of Japanese history, culture and society, of which he has acquired an astonishing knowledge ... [Le Fanu] wrote an earlier book on Tarkovsky, and this new work is even more impressive in its scholarship and attention to detail. * Talking Pictures * If you want to know more about Mizoguchi, I can make no higher recommendation than Mark Le Fanu's Mizoguchi and Japan. Le Fanu's writing is beautifully structured: he moves logically from topic to topic. He is logical because, after all, in film writing, to talk about one thing is usually to talk about everything. Mizoguchi and Japan, then, ends up inevitably casting its net wider, making it surely one of the best film books of the year. * Nocturnal Emissions * We have waited twenty years for a decent new book on the subject. We are fortunate to have got one as good as this. * Krazsna-Krausz Moving Image Book of the Year Award judging panel (shortlisted) *