309 Ugetsu

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BWilson
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309 Ugetsu

#1 Post by BWilson » Sat Feb 12, 2005 2:18 pm

Ugetsu

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Having refined his craft in the silent era, Kenji Mizoguchi was an elder statesman of Japanese cinema—fiercely revered by Akira Kurosawa and other younger directors—by the time he made Ugetsu. And with this exquisite ghost story, a fatalistic wartime tragedy derived from stories by Akinari Ueda and Guy de Maupassant, he created a touchstone of his art, his long takes and sweeping camera guiding the viewer through a delirious narrative about two villagers whose pursuit of fame and fortune leads them far astray from their loyal wives. Moving between the terrestrial and the otherworldly, Ugetsu reveals essential truths about the ravages of war, the plight of women, and the pride of men.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration undertaken by The Film Foundation, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary by filmmaker, critic, and festival programmer Tony Rayns
Kenji Mizoguchi: The Life of a Film Director (1975), a 150-minute documentary by Kaneto Shindo
Two Worlds Intertwined, a 2005 appreciation of Ugetsu by filmmaker Masahiro Shinoda
Process and Production, a 2005 interview with Tokuzo Tanaka, first assistant director on Ugetsu
• Interview from 1992 with cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa
• Trailers
• An essay by film critic Phillip Lopate (Blu-ray and DVD) and three short stories that influenced Mizoguchi in making the film (Blu-ray only)

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FilmFanSea
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#2 Post by FilmFanSea » Sat Feb 12, 2005 5:55 pm

An impressive lineup (all courtesy of Janus Films):

UGESTSU (UGETSU MONOGATARI)
STORY OF THE LAST CHRYSANTHEMUM (ZANGIKU MONOGATARI)
LIFE OF OHARU (SAIKAKU ICHIDAI ONNA)
STREET OF SHAME (AKASEN CHITAI)
SISTERS OF THE GION (GION NO SHIMAI)
SANSHO THE BAILIFF (SANSHO DAYU)
OSAKA ELEGY (NANIWA EREJI)

Schedule in pdf format is here.

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Gregory
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#3 Post by Gregory » Sat Feb 12, 2005 6:27 pm

It's good to know that Janus has those. I wonder what the chances are that Rialto will re-release some or all of those across the country. I'm not sure how Rialto chooses its films, but they sure are heavy on French cinema.

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Brian Oblivious
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#4 Post by Brian Oblivious » Sat Feb 12, 2005 6:57 pm

That's cool and all, but those of us 500 miles to the north can see The Water Magician at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Februray 19. So there.

Actually, since I've never seen any of those in a cinema, I cross my fingers that this is a touring package that makes its way to the Bay Area.

rossbrew
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#5 Post by rossbrew » Sat Feb 12, 2005 9:06 pm

Looks like it may be time for a March roadtrip to LA...anyone wanna meet up?

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#6 Post by sherlockjr » Sat Feb 12, 2005 9:39 pm

Any implications for Criterion here?

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FilmFanSea
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#7 Post by FilmFanSea » Sun Feb 13, 2005 3:16 am

sherlockjr wrote:Any implications for Criterion here?
Criterion President Peter Becker said in a recent radio interview that the film he mosts wants to release on DVD is Ugetsu monogatari, so I'd expect it to be first out of the gate when the CC gets around to releasing some Mizoguchi ...

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Tribe
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#8 Post by Tribe » Sun Feb 13, 2005 3:54 am

Any implications for Criterion here?
Since Janus is releasing these they are all fair game for Criterion....doesn't mean it'll happen....but if anyone releases them on DVD, I think it's fair to say that they will be Criterions.

Tribe

sherlockjr
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#9 Post by sherlockjr » Sun Feb 13, 2005 9:58 am

Thanks for the responses. Ashamed to say it, but I've never had the opportunity to see a Mizoguchi film before. As a huge fan of Ozu and Kurasawa--even if the three directors are completely different--I'm really looking forward to seeing Mizoguchi's masterworks. (fingers crossed)

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Cinephrenic
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#10 Post by Cinephrenic » Mon Feb 14, 2005 5:21 pm


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Steven H
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#11 Post by Steven H » Tue Feb 15, 2005 2:21 am

I'm curious to hear what kind of prints these are. Perhaps newly struck with a nice little "Criterion Collection" shown at the beginning.

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souvenir
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#12 Post by souvenir » Tue Aug 23, 2005 8:51 am

Image Entertainment wrote:The great Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi draws on sources from both East and West for this, his crowning achievement. Set in sixteenth-century Japan, a period of bloody civil war, the film is equally rooted in the postwar psyche of 1950s Japan. Focusing on an ambitious potter haunted by a beautiful ghost and a farmer who dreams of becoming a samurai, the film offers a commentary on the delusions of lust and power, the folly of war, and the stoic suffering of women. Renowned cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa helps Mizoguchi seamlessly interweave the supernatural with reality, resulting in one of the most beautiful films of all time. Criterion's double-disc edition will feature audio commentary by critic Tony Rayns, a two-and-a-half hour documentary on Mizoguchi by Kaneto Shindo, a new interview with director Masahiro Shinoda on the film, new interviews with first assistant director Tokuzo Tanaka and Miyagawa on their work on the film, trailers, a booklet featuring the original stories on which the film was based, and more.

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Caligula
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#13 Post by Caligula » Tue Aug 23, 2005 10:13 am

A two disc-er no less!

Sure glad we didn't have to wait until 2006 for this.

Roger Ebert's Great Movie Review
Two brothers, one consumed by greed, the other by envy. In a time when the land is savaged by marauding armies, they risk their families and their lives to pursue their obsessions. Kenji Mizoguchi's "Ugetsu" (1953) tells their stories in one of the greatest of all films -- one which, along with Kurosawa's "Rashomon," helped introduce Japanese cinema to Western audiences. The heroes are rough-hewn and consumed by ambition, but the film style is elegant and mysterious, and somehow we know before we are told that this is a ghost story.

The opening shot is one of Mizoguchi's famous "scroll shots," so named for the way it pans across the landscape like a Japanese scroll painting. We see a village, the roofs of the rude houses weighed down by tree branches to keep them from blowing away in the wind. We meet Genjuro (Masayuki Mori), a potter, and his brother Tobei (Eitaro Ozawa), a farmer. Although gunshots on the wind suggest an army is near, Genjuro is loading a cart with bowls, cups and vases, packed in straw. His wife Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka) begs him not to risk a trip to the city at this time of conflict -- to stay home to protect her and their son. But he insists, and Tobei, filled with goofy excitement, insists on coming along, despite the protests of his wife Ohama (Mitsuko Mito).

Genjuro returns with treasure: gold coins, which he insists his wife weigh in her hand. He makes her a gift of a beautiful fabric, bought in the city, but doesn't understand when she says that the cloth means less than his love for her. All he can talk about is making more pots and more money. Blinded by the gold, he returns to his work with a frenzy.

Tobei sees a great samurai on their trip and tries to enlist in his army, but is turned away as a "dirty beggar" because he has no armor. Now the two men plan their next assault on the city, although when an army sweeps through on the night they have fired the kiln, they fear their work has been lost. Not so; the pots survive, and this time they think it will be safer to journey by boat across the lake to the city, instead of by land.

The famous lake scene is the most beautiful in the film. Shot partly on a tank with studio backdrops, it creates a world of fog and mist, out of which emerges a lone boatman who warns them of pirates. Genjuro returns to leave his wife and child on the shore, and continues with Tobei and Ohama. In the city, his work sells quickly, and he is invited to the castle of a beautiful noblewoman named Lady Wakasa, who admires his craftsmanship. She's played by Machiko Kyo, one of the greatest stars of the period, who was also the woman in "Rashomon."

Tobei wanders off from his wife and his brother. Time passes. He clumsily kills a samurai and steals the head of a foe that the samurai had killed. Presenting this trophy to the samurai lord, he is praised and given a horse, a house and men to follow him. Filled with pride, he brings his men for the night to a geisha house, only to find that his wife, raped by soldiers after he abandoned her, has become a geisha.

Elsewhere in the city, Genjuro visits a fabric shop and imagines his wife's joy when he brings her more beautiful dresses, but then Lady Wakasa appears, suggesting he may need a guide to her castle. He is mesmerized by her strange beauty; made up like a Noh heroine with smudges for eyebrows high on her forehead, her face shadowed by veils and a wide straw hat, she is like no woman he has ever seen.

At the castle, she drifts from behind screens and curtains and, regarding his simple pots, asks him, "How is such beauty created?" She praises and seduces him, and the critic Pauline Kael remembers she gasped with delight when he cried, "I never dreamed such pleasures existed!" Perhaps Genjuro should have taken warning when he heard the voice of the lady's dead father echoing through the room, and when her lady-in-waiting advised him, "Don't bury your talents in a small village! You must marry her!"

Mizoguchi (1898-1956) was famous for the theory that one scene should equal one cut, although sometimes he made exceptions. The great Yasujiro Ozu had the same theory, with the difference that Ozu's camera never moved in his later films, while Mizoguchi's style was constructed around flowing, poetic camera movement. Consider a scene where Lady Wakasa visits Genjuro as he is bathing in an outdoor pool, and as she enters the pool to join him, water splashes over the side and the camera follows the splash into a pan across rippling water that ends with the two of them having a picnic on the grass.

There is a crucial sequence when Genjuro goes back into the city, and on his return to the lakeside castle, is halted by a priest, who calls after him: "I see death in your face! Have you encountered a ghost?" He warns Genjuro against being "beguiled by a forbidden form of love."

Back at the castle Lady Wakasa begins to embrace Genjuro, but recoils, crying out, "There is something on his skin!" Indeed, the priest has covered Genjuro with symbols of exorcism, which seem to burn the noblewoman as if they are flames.

Lady Wakasa is of course a ghost (we never doubted it), and there is a haunting scene when Genjuro sees the castle as it really is, a burned ruin. There is a second ghost in the movie who we do not suspect, and the revelation in that case creates a touching emotional release. It comes toward the end, after both men have returned chastened to their village, and are forgiven by their wives for the male weakness of blinding ambition.

I learn from an article by Gary Morris in the Bright Lights Film Journal that Mizoguchi may have drawn on his own life in the story of "Ugetsu." When the director was a boy of 7, Morris writes, his father lost the family fortune in a reckless business venture. They moved to a poor district, and his 14-year-old sister Suzu "was put up for adoption and eventually sold to a geisha house." So perhaps the sins of the father were visited upon Mizoguchi's two heroes.

In a career that started in 1923, Mizoguchi ended with a series of masterpieces, including "Life of Oharu" (1952), "Sansho the Bailiff" (1954) and "Street of Shame" (1955), which in its consideration of geishas perhaps draws on the life of his sister. To enter his world, like entering Ozu's, is to find a film language that seems to create the mood it considers; the story and its style of telling are of one piece.

The characters in "Ugetsu" are down to earth, and in the case of Tobei, even comic, but the story feels ancient, and indeed draws on the ghost legends of Japanese theater. Unlike ghost stories in the West, Mizoguchi's film does not try to startle or shock; the discovery of the second ghost comes for us as a moment of quiet revelation, and we understand the gentle, forgiving spirit that inspired it.

Nor are Lady Wakasa's seduction techniques graphic; she conquers Genjuro not by being sexy or carnal, but by being distant and unfamiliar. Always completely cloaked, often hidden by veils, she enchants him not by the reality of flesh but by its tantalizing invisible nearness. I was reminded of Murnau's silent masterpiece "Sunrise" (1928), also about a country man who abandons his wife and child to follow an exotic woman across a lake to the sinful city.

The period detail is accurate and rich. The city marketplace, the headquarters of the samurai, Tobei's visit to a shop to buy armor and a spear, Genjuro's haste when he asks another merchant to watch his prized pots (for he must hurry after Lady Wakasa) -- all of these create a feudal world in which life is hard and escape comes through the silly dreams of men. Women are more cautious, and there is a blunt realism in the sequence where Miyagi, left behind, tries to protect and feed their son as armies loot and rape the countryside. At the end of "Ugetsu," aware we have seen a fable, we also feel curiously as if we have witnessed true lives and fates.

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Gordon
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#14 Post by Gordon » Tue Aug 23, 2005 10:25 am

Yes! Yes! Yes!

What a great surprise. I thought that we'd have to wait until mid-2006 for this. Great news.

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shirobamba
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#15 Post by shirobamba » Tue Aug 23, 2005 10:27 am

:P =D> \:D/

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Michael Kerpan
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#16 Post by Michael Kerpan » Tue Aug 23, 2005 11:01 am

Just one question. A NEW interview with Miyagawa?

Hasn't Kazuo Miyagawa been dead for several years?

;~}

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Cinephrenic
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#17 Post by Cinephrenic » Tue Aug 23, 2005 11:36 am

They might have recorded a interview back before 1999 when they had done some with him on Rashomon. They probably get all the interviews of likely films they will release while they can. Criterion's idea of "NEW" might be current instead of interviews conducted in the time frame of the movie (1950's or in the later years). This is all a guess though.

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kieslowski_67
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#18 Post by kieslowski_67 » Tue Aug 23, 2005 11:49 am

This can easily be the Criterion's release of the year.

It has to be a 2 disc set since the retail price is #39.95.

And, of course, since this is the Image website, it lists the movie's tech specs as WIDESCREEN format. :oops:

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Cinephrenic
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#19 Post by Cinephrenic » Tue Aug 23, 2005 12:06 pm

I wouldn't be worried about that. This film can't be widescreen unless Image-entertainment bought Criterion as well.

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Steven H
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#20 Post by Steven H » Tue Aug 23, 2005 12:31 pm

I think I just heard thousands of Mizoguchi fans sigh with relief. Thank goodness they've got the short stories translated and included (I always wanted to read these, does anyone know if they're available online?) and the Shindo documentary. If I didn't know beter, I'd say this sounds like a three disc release.

Peter Becker should've gone one better and laced every disc with Mizoguchi's DNA (did anyone read about that pen you could buy with Abraham Lincoln's DNA in it? What would you rather have? "Director approved" or "DNA included"? Not to be off topic, but still... odd.)

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godardslave
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#21 Post by godardslave » Tue Aug 23, 2005 1:03 pm

souvenir wrote:Criterion's double-disc edition will feature audio commentary by critic Tony Rayns, a two-and-a-half hour documentary on Mizoguchi by Kaneto Shindo, a new interview with director Masahiro Shinoda on the film, new interviews with first assistant director Tokuzo Tanaka and Miyagawa on their work on the film, trailers, a booklet featuring the original stories on which the film was based, and more
now we know why it took some time. Criterion are definitely worth waiting for. 8-)

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#22 Post by Sai » Tue Aug 23, 2005 1:38 pm

audio commentary by critic Tony Rayns
Fuck yeah.

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godardslave
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#23 Post by godardslave » Tue Aug 23, 2005 1:57 pm

kieslowski_67 wrote:And, of course, since this is the Image website, it lists the movie's tech specs as WIDESCREEN format. :oops:
as long as image dont have access or permission to start screwing up cirterion's own website, which is much more accurate and beautifully presented, things will be ok.

PROTECT YOUR INDEPENDENCE, CRITERION!! =D>

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Michael Kerpan
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#24 Post by Michael Kerpan » Tue Aug 23, 2005 1:58 pm

The Shindo film bio is nice in that it gives us a chance to seem old time actors and actresses -- but it really isn't a very good piece of work. Lots of fawning, lots of glossing over certain unsavory aspects of Mizoguchi's personal behavior and -- to top it off -- Shindo's unpleasant badgering of Tanaka over her refusal to marry Mizoguchi (choosing instead to go into directing despite his strong disapproval).

Between this film and his script for a sleazy docu-drama about Tanaka (in dishonor of the tenth anniversary of her death), I really find it hard to be objective about Shindo.

;~}

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#25 Post by King of Kong » Tue Aug 23, 2005 8:21 pm

As Mr Burns would say, "Egg-cellent".

This is the best news I've heard all week.

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