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Ozu, Mizoguchi,

sad ironies of life. Earthquakes have permanently marked the life of the Japanese. The great earthquake of the first day of September 1923 that destroyed the city of Tokyo and killed over a hundred twenty thousand people, led to major changes in social and cultural life. One change relates directly to the movies, since they will promote large studies outside Tokyo, where studies are to produce films of varying quality and gender to such a level that will make Japan the country's largest film production in those years.


But we must go back a little further, to the final years of the nineteenth century. The violent opening of the Japanese government and society will be answered with an active campaign of "assimilation" of Western culture and technology, defining moment that has been portrayed in the arts and permanently marked to Japan today. The disappearance of the inbred shogunates kicking off the Meiji era, an era in line with Western expansionism. Japan took the onslaught and started getting all the devices that were populating the daily lives of Europeans and Americans. One was the cinematographer. One of our teachers, Mizoguchi, was a strong producer of silent movies and, thanks to his genius, will bring some changes to Japanese cinema as we shall see. The creation of large studies will be promoted after the great earthquake of 23, decentralizing production in other cities like Kyoto or Osaka. This period will generate two sides marked, a social, linked to the spread of leftist ideas the moment, another linked to the growth of a militaristic nationalist movement that will end sadly truncated as expansionist adventure pinnacle with two atomic bombs on two of its industrial cities. Then the American occupation will redefine the movie going to Japan and enter through the front door when a masterpiece of Akira Kurosawa was honored at the Venice Film Festival 1956: Rashomon.

This is the historical context that surrounds our teachers.

For Mizoguchi, an author of a life characterized by these dramatic moments, more intense and painful personal and family conflicts, they will do a filmmaker who is going to worry about portraying the dramatic changes Japanese society living and the difficult situation facing women in that society. From a young age had a strong artistic bent and had to deal with a bigoted father who rejected any intention of your child in their life choices. In ancient Japan there were certain jobs that were considered disreputable, especially those linked to the modern world. Mizoguchi's interest for wanting to work in film was a shameful action for him and for the family. Family crisis had forced his father to sell his daughter into the world of Geisha. Mizoguchi's older sister, seven years apart, will definitely make your life, and will be one of its most marked leitmotif of his films. Many of his eighty-five movies (of which only is survived thirty-one) deal with this issue, and even one of his masterpieces show us the painful world of strong women. He had a very eventful life seeing even involved in a mistress scandal that almost ended in an untimely death. Not only the physical wounds in the back of the knives are going to score, but his character will be transformed into a new director. All this happens in 1925, Mizoguchi becomes a director who we know as a teacher, demanding, detailed, often whimsical, but his staff was able to capture it as best he could offer in shooting in which engaged. Careful reconstruction of a time, asked all team members know the details of the situation that is represented. Antonio Santos, in his biography, tells us about the "volatility" of commitment that our director had in their commitment to their art in a way, was adapted to the social, cultural and political where he lived, and , although it worked and even filmed a movie that exalted the bellicose nature of the Japanese government during his period of employment with the Company Nikkatsu, the victorious Americans what became president of the company Shochiku. This last period of his life, will create masterpieces until his death on August 24, 1956, defeated by the leukemia.

Ozu's life was also quite busy. He fought in China (in the area of \u200b\u200bManchuria between 1937 and 1939 before the Second World War) and was captured in Singapore, a place which had been designed to work with the propaganda department of the army. He spent six months in prison and after release fully returned to the cinema in 1947. Director is considered the "most Japanese" (compared to Kurosawa, who was considered the most Western of all directors Nippon) and his work was concerned with the clash which meant the West with traditional Japan. His films speak of those hard meetings meant primarily for adults. His skill in the camera work was what most struck him in the film, as characters and scenes filmed at the height of a person sitting in the Japanese style, almost to the ground, the use tended to be discreet with medium shots and general and prospects could build a wall, a column or table, total discretion not to disrupt the drama that "running" in front of us. Ozu's work is known late because many people saw little attainable film production to western tastes, for that reason his work was little or no spread in the West and only 70, a decade after his death (he died of cancer in 1963) Ozu was discovered by European and American eyes. Both directors, with Kurosawa, dominated the landscape of film Japan in the 50 to 60. But there were other directors who gave a special vitality to the eastern school is surprising to our day with teachers like Kitano and Imamura, or the great Hayao Miyazaki.

OHARU LIFE (Saikaku ichidai ONNA) 1952 JAPAN Kenji Mizoguchi Blunt and surprising film about the study of a geisha and her life suffered during the seventeenth century, in a still medieval Japan and in which social stratification was virtually immovable, in a society as rigid and macho, women had little or no rights in the decisions that it would take for your life. The practice of selling daughters has been so widespread in our societies that is how we make sense of the reasons why the father of the bride gave the groom not only his daughter's virginity intact (through white dress ), but also paid the expenses of the wedding party, plus a feat that would allow in principle to keep the new union, especially the bride. Arranged marriages, sales of children were very frequent. Being very young, our director was helplessly witness the sale of her older sister, Suzu, to become geisha, this allows us to understand this frank and painful movie of a woman, the daughter of a merchant who tried to be free in love and fall into the lowest of social stratification, only appreciated by your body.

MONOGATARI TOKYO (Tokyo Story) 1953 JAPAN OZU Yasujiro This is one of the best films of Ozu, a simple story of an elderly couple who decide to go to visit Tokyo to see her eldest daughter. A series of unpleasant events are driven back, but on the way the wife dies. The old man has to face the loneliness and various proposals arise. This simple film is an extraordinary example of simplicity and observation, involving us, the viewers, as participants of the stories to put the cameras at the height of a person sitting at the table, recurring technique of our master, where there are dialogues or meetings. A film that shows not only the generational clashes, but cultural ones that afflicted Japan for many decades. These conflicts have to cause some movement conservatives who proposed a return to old traditions. One of these was the famous author Yukio Mishima.


Ugetsu monogatari (TALES OF THE PALE LUNA) Kenji Mizoguchi 1953 One of the masterpieces that opened the West to the movies Japan. Legend is based on a sixteenth-century namesake, the work of Ueda Akenari. The work focuses on two couples where the men decide to look for love, wealth and power. Abandoned women running each of them a sad fate between prostitution and death, so that is unknown to the wayward husbands were suddenly swept away by the madness of the civil wars that ravaged the area. The work itself is round, beautiful, poetic, a film with ghosts that come with the living, misty lakes, but there was a proposal that might have clouded this masterpiece: the end is a kind of redemption for both men, but had suggested that it ends with a more realistic final, showing the miseries of man in his lust, ambition and moral decay. Might have been more successful, as the world is. SANM

NO AJI (EL SABOR sake) 1962 Yasujiro Ozu Ozu Another beautiful film that shows us the sad reality of old age has to face loneliness and abandonment. A man sees his widowed daughter-aged matchmaker and proposes to marry knowing that this situation would lead to abandonment. Ozu is a master lays bare the deepest emotions, but everyday men. His films are not complicated, is simple. Demolish the simplicity ends, in this case, is what can happen in our homes: the man old looking to be about loneliness takes refuge in alcohol.




Bibliography:

JAPANESE CINEMA. Galbraith, Stuart, Duncan, Paul. Taschen, 2009

THE 100 BEST FILMS. Kobal, John. Alianza Editorial. 1995.

Mizoguchi, Kenji. Santos, Antonio. Cátedra.1993.