文章基本信息

标题：Poet of the Cinema
本地全文：下载
作者：Robin Wood
期刊名称：Movie: a Journal of Film Criticism
电子版ISSN：2047-1661
出版年度：2013
期号：4
出版社：University of Warwick
摘要：Thanks to the enterprise of the Gate Cinema, another film by Mizoguchi - The Life of O-Haru - has become available in this country. Mizoguchi died 20 years ago; of over 70 films attributed to him, this is only the third to receive a commercial release in London. Yet if the cinema has yet produced a Shakespeare, its Shakespeare is Mizoguchi. I understand that the Gate company intend to put a 16mm print of O-Haru into distribution; this means that although Mizoguchi films are virtually inaccessible to cin - ema audiences, four of them (all fine and characteristic works) can be booked by film societies and the teachers of those film studies courses that are proliferating all over the country. The four taken together offer a complex and coher - ent (if far from complete) idea of Mizoguchi's achievement. all are late works, the product of the last four years of his life; all are 'period' films, against which would need to be set the contemporary dramas in which he was equally pro - lific. It is as if we knew nothing of Shakespeare except Cymbeline , Pericles , The Winter's Tale and The Tempest : the comparison is not arbitrary, for it is the late plays of Shake - speare that, for English audiences, Ugetsu Monogatari and Sansho Dayu inevitably evoke, in their movement towards a quasi-mystical harmony and reconciliation. In particular, one might place beside the recognition scene of Pericles the final mother and son reunion of Sansho , set similarly against the background of the sea, which accumulates such complex resonances in the course of the film. The effect in Mizoguchi is bleaker, more qualified by a sense of loss, but there is a similar sense of moving beyond tragedy towards a total command of human experience