Word: ugetsu
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...Ugetsu (Daiei). Five Japanese films have won grand prizes at International Film Festivals in Cannes and Venice since the war: Rashomon was the first to be shown in this country; Ugetsu is the second, and in many ways it is a jewel of intenser ray than Rashomon. Rashomon was orgiastic, almost Western in its rage for the things of the world. Ugetsu is contemplative in the midst of violence, wholly Oriental in its lidded introspection. As a result, its beauty and its meaning are more remote from Western audiences, but not too remote...
...story of Ugetsu comes from a Japanese classic, written in 1768 by Akinari Ueda. In the closing years of the 16th century, in a time of civil war, a country potter sees his chance to get rich quick selling pots in the city at war-inflated prices. The trip to the city, through a countryside full of marauding soldiery, is insanely dangerous. Halfway, the potter sends his wife and son back home alone. In town the pottery sells merrily, but no sooner is the money in hand than the potter begins to dream of luxury...
...Ugetsu is intended not as a story of real life, but as a fateful legend of the soul. Therefore, the actors keep closer than they did in Rashomon to the old symbolic style. If the greedy peasants grunt and draggle their arms like apes, it is not to say that the Japanese ever did so in real life, but rather that they assumed such attitudes in their hearts. In these terms, the painted mincing of the Lady Wakasa (Machiko Kyo, the rape victim in Rashomon), the snuffling animality of the potter (Masayuki Mori, the husband in Rashomon), the abstract dutifulness...