Movie Discussion: The Life of Oharu (1952) by Kenji Mizoguchi
Details
Mizoguchi’s personal favourite of all his films, The Life of Oharu is in many ways a summary work, the crystallization of his vision of a woman martyred by the callous whims of men and Japan's Meiji era as a dark cauldron of the repressive, misogynistic and feudalist spirits that linger, atavistically, in his contemporary films. Tanaka reveals incredible range in her depiction of a courtesan’s vertiginous fall from grace, a trajectory whose gleaming sharp edge revealingly eviscerates the seedy underbelly of rigid Meiji social structures and mores. The expressive camera movement so celebrated in Mizoguchi’s cinema is given a sublime showcase in the film, with almost operatically soaring movements comparable to the films of Ophüls and Murnau. By garnering the International Prize at the Venice Film Festival, The Life of Oharu brought Mizoguchi to international attention, and by coming the year after Rashomon captured the Golden Lion, helped propel Japanese cinema onto the world stage.
"A work of mature mastery, sorrowful and self-possessed, The Life of Oharu introduced an international audience to the art of Kenji Mizoguchi. It is an art both attached to tradition and radically original." (Criterion)
"No male director understood and revered women like Mizoguchi did, and with Life of Oharu he likens womanhood to a perpetual state of spiritual unrest." (Slant)
"A fierce denunciation of the subjugation of women, the power of wealth, and Japan's unjust though splendid traditions." (The New Yorker)
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Join the Toronto Philosophy Meetup to discuss the 1952 historical drama The Life of Oharu (Japanese: 西鶴一代女) directed, written, and produced by the great Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi, and based on a 1686 Japanese novel by Ihara Saikaku. The film was recently voted the 226th greatest movie of all time in Sight & Sound's international survey of filmmakers. We've previously discussed Mizoguchi's acclaimed 1953 film Ugetsu Monogatari.
Please watch the movie in advance (136 minutes) and bring your thoughts, reactions, and queries to share with us at the meeting. You can stream it with a viewing link to be posted on the main event listing here.
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We'll be joined by many other participants from the Toronto Philosophy Meetup at this meeting — https://www.meetup.com/the-toronto-philosophy-meetup/events/317030302/
Check out other movie discussions in the group, currently happening about 2 or 3 times a month.
This link here is a spreadsheet of the approximately 200 movies we've watched in this group and my ratings for each. You're invited to share your ratings too if you've watched a bunch of these movies with us. (I can add your list here if you send me a link. You can make your own list on sites like Letterboxd or by copying my spreadsheet and filling in your own values. Note that my list doesn't include every movie that Yorgo hosted on cause I didn't watch them all.)