Mizoguchi Kenji

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mizoguchi Kenji

Mizoguchi, Kenji ( Japanese 溝口 健 二 ; born May 16, 1898 in Tokyo , † August 24, 1956 in Kyoto ) was a Japanese director .

biography

Born in Tokyo in 1898, Mizoguchi grew up in great poverty. He saw his older sister being sold as a geisha and his father abusing his mother. These childhood experiences are seen as the reason why he later made the suffering, oppression and exploitation of women the main theme of his cinematic work.

Originally a painter, Mizoguchi entered the film business as a performer of female roles (Oyama), soon became an assistant director and made his first own film, Ai ni yomigaeru hi , in 1923 . In the following three years alone he made over 20 films, but then began to look for absolute realism. He wanted to portray people and their lives as authentically as possible. During this creative phase, he mostly shot on location in slums, sometimes at great risk for himself and his film team. A number of left-wing propaganda films were made such as Tōkyō kōshin-kyoku (1929) or Shikamo karera wa yuku (1931), which were also commercially successful. However, only a few films have survived from this early phase. With Fujiwara Yoshie no furusato (1930) with the opera singer Fujiwara Yoshie in the lead role, who plays a singer who loses his voice, he shot the first sound film in Japan, although this was only partially set to music.

From the philosophy of his studio Nikkatsu , which based his films on a scenic narrative structure, Mizoguchi developed an aesthetic style based on long shots, for which he is famous to this day. He went so far as to shoot entire scenes in just one take. To prevent the films from appearing static, he used long tracking shots, pans and cranes. At the same time, he always tried to keep a certain distance from what was happening. On the one hand, this style is traced back to its roots as a painter, and on the other, it is seen as a transfer of traditional elements of Japanese theater. In particular his later films such as Musashino fujin were criticized for this aesthetic as old-fashioned, traditional and unsuitable for modern Japanese cinema.

A second trademark of Mizoguchi's films began to crystallize in the course of the 1930s: the preoccupation with the oppression and exploitation of women. In The White Threads of the Waterfall (Taki no shiraito), the young Taki falls in love with a man and supports him in his studies with borrowed money. However, the believer later turns out to be so intrusive that she has no choice but to kill him. During the trial it turns out that the judge is the very young man for whose training she borrowed the money. He adheres to his principles and condemns his patron to death, who can only escape this fate by biting off her tongue. He became famous for depicting the fate of women in 1936 with The Sisters of Gion , which was also his last film for Nikkatsu.

The move to the Daiei studio came at a difficult time in Japanese cinema. During the war, the government increased the pressure on the film industry to create a propaganda mood in favor of Japan. Mizoguchi was forced to focus his work on other subjects and turned to historical material such as The Tale of the Late Chrysanthemums , which is about the fate of a family of showmen in the Meiji period . As the war progressed, Mizoguchi found it increasingly difficult to evade censorship and the issues imposed, resulting in a number of low-quality, nationalist films. An exception is the film adaptation of the legend of the 47 ronin who committed suicide out of a sense of honor.

After the end of the war, Mizoguchi was able to return to his main topic, women. However, he now more often combined this leitmotif of his work with the tradition of historical material, the jidai-geki , which play a prominent role in Japanese film. The two masterpieces of this phase are undoubtedly Ugetsu - Tales under the Rain Moon and Sansho Dayu - A Life Without Freedom . In Ugetsu stories under the rain moon , he took up the theme of the fate of women , which was dear to his heart, in a historical context.

Mizoguchi Kenji died of leukemia on August 24, 1956, at the age of 58.

In 1982 ARD dedicated a film series to him in which seven of his films had their German premieres: The Immaculate Sword , The Victory of Women , The Love of Actress Sumako , The Flames of My Love , The Life of Mrs. Oharu , Utamaro and his five wives and two Geishas .

Filmography

Mizoguchi made nearly 90 films despite his untimely death. At this point, therefore, only a partial overview of his most important works is possible.

literature

  • Mark Le Fanu, Mizoguchi and Japan , London, British Film Institute, 2005, ISBN 1-84457-057-6
  • Yoshikata Yoda, Souvenirs de Kenji Mizoguchi , Paris, Cahiers du Cinéma, 1997, ISBN 286642-182-5

Web links

Commons : Kenji Mizoguchi  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Beauty and misery of women . In: Der Spiegel . No. 28/1982 , p. 134-135 ( digitized version ).
Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Mizoguchi is the family name, Kenji the first name.
personal data
SURNAME Mizoguchi, Kenji
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 溝口 健 二 (Japanese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese director
DATE OF BIRTH May 16, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Tokyo
DATE OF DEATH August 24, 1956
Place of death Kyoto