This summer, along with many other movie fans who go to screenings at Toronto’s Cinematheque Ontario, I have been revisiting films by the pioneering Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956). It’s been a rich experience of the movie-maker’s art, but also, as I’ll explain presently, of architecture.
There is much to be moved and delighted by in Mizoguchi’s serenely passionate cinema. Take, for example, his deeply empathetic portrayals of women, whose oppression in modern Japanese culture he understood intimately and thoroughly. Mizoguchi, I think, preferred an older order of things, where knightly codes of honour and discipline governed the relationships among people; his brilliant two-part samurai epic, The 47 Ronin (1941-1942), is perhaps the most refined and serious celebration of such values in film history. (more…)
