15 Facts About Kenji Mizoguchi

Kenji Mizoguchi was a Japanese filmmaker who directed roughly one hundred films during his career between 1923 and 1956.

Kenji Mizoguchi's most acclaimed works include The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, The Life of Oharu, Ugetsu, and Sansho the Bailiff, with the latter three all being awarded at the Venice International Film Festival.

Together with Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, Mizoguchi is seen as a representative of the "golden age" of Japanese cinema.

Kenji Mizoguchi was born in Hongo, Tokyo, as the second of three children, to Zentaro Miguchi, a roofing carpenter, and his wife Masa.

Kenji Mizoguchi's return coincided with an onset of crippling rheumatoid arthritis, which left him with a walking gait for the rest of his life.

Kenji Mizoguchi enrolled for a course at the Aoibashi Yoga Kenkyuko art school in Tokyo, which taught Western painting techniques, and developed an interest in opera, particularly at the Royal Theatre at Akasaka where he helped the set decorators with set design and construction.

In 1920, Kenji Mizoguchi entered the film industry as an assistant director at the Nikkatsu studios in Mukojima, Tokyo.

Kenji Mizoguchi was a frequent visitor of the tea houses, dance halls and brothels in Kyoto and Osaka, which at one time resulted in a widely covered incident of him being attacked by a jealous prostitute and then-lover with a razor.

In 1932, Kenji Mizoguchi left Nikkatsu and worked for a variety of studios and production companies.

Kenji Mizoguchi himself named these two films as the works with which he achieved artistic maturity.

Kenji Mizoguchi returned to feudal era settings with The Life of Oharu, Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff, which won him international recognition, in particular by the Cahiers du Cinema critics such as Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, and were awarded at the Venice Film Festival.

Kenji Mizoguchi died of leukemia at the age of 58 in the Kyoto Municipal Hospital.

At the time of his death, Kenji Mizoguchi was working on the script of An Osaka Story, which was later realised by Kozaburo Yoshimura.

Kenji Mizoguchi was the equal of a Murnau or a Rossellini.

Kenji Mizoguchi is supreme in the realization of internal states in external views.