Saturday, November 16, 2013 6:00 pm
Japanese Society
333 E 47th St, New York, NY
**Introduced by scholar Joel Neville Anderson
1952, 136 min., 35mm, B&W, in Japanese with English subtitles. Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. With Kinuyo Tanaka, Hisako Yamane, Toshiro Mifune, Yuriko Hamada, Jukichi Uno, Ichiro Sugai.
Richie introduced Kenji Mizoguchi to the world through a retrospective he helped put together at the Cannes International Film Festival in 1961. Set in feudal Japan during the Edo period, The Life of Oharu is one of the most devastating of Mizoguchi’s films about exploited, fallen women. Starring the amazing Kinuyo Tanaka as the eponymous Oharu, Mizoguchi chronicles her repeated humiliation and abuse as the victim of a patriarchal system that unequivocally places women as second-class citizens, suffering one disgrace after another until she is left with nothing. Featuring incredible black and white photography that is as beautiful as it is haunting, The Life of Oharu stands among cinema’s greatest achievements for its aesthetic beauty as well as the unflinching, poetic realism of its storytelling. Mizoguchi, whom Jean-Luc Godard called “the greatest of Japanese filmmakers, or quite simply one of the greatest of filmmakers,” considered the film his masterpiece.
Donald Richie on The Life of Oharu: “Based on a light and picaresque novel by the 17th-century writer Saikaku, the film takes a more serious view of the decline and fall of the heroine–from court lady to common whore. Yoshikata Yoda’s script, Tanaka’s performance as Oharu, Hiroshi Mizutani’s art direction and Ichiro Saito’s score–using Japanese instruments–help make this one of Mizoguchi’s most elegantly beautiful films.”
For more information, please visit:
http://www.japansociety.org/event/the-life-of-oharu