Word: ugetsu
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Kurosawa. The festival of great Japanese films continues at the Park Square, the Kenmore remaining immobilised by an interminable run of the Monty Python film. Anyway this weekend features Rashomon and Mizoguchi's Ugetsu. Rashomon is set in something like 9th century Kyoto, and examines four people's subjective accounts of a murder. After that Park Square is showing Yojimbo (which Kurowasa made because he was so pissed off that the Americans copied Seven Samurai when they made The Magnificent Seven--so it's a parody). With it is another film starring Toshiro Mifune, Throne of Blood (a version...
Rashomon, 3:35, 6:40, 9:45, Ugetsu...
...MEDIEVAL peasants who are the heroes of Ugetsu (1953) don't have to be complicated to become tragic figures. Like Mizoguchi's other characters, they are creatures of emotion. Love-relationships and family ties move their lives, and the extraordinary personal loss that ends Ugetsu only increases the dominance of such deep relationships over the selfish emotions...
Long-take is only a convenient means to this unity, as we see in those sequences in Ugetsu that are composed of several shots. Scenes like Genjuro's flight from Lady Wakasa's mansion build emotionally the same way as single-shot sequences: namely, by setting a certain compositional order and then letting the scene's dramatic progress push it into new shapes-and then cutting to another shot that maintains the relationships connecting the characters...