Kenji Mizoguchi, Term Paper Example

The author of this book was born in a middle class family of three. The background of this family as portrayed by the author looks to be poverish. This can be observed when the family head who in this context is the father decides to lend away the authors sister at a fee due to financial strains. The author’s sister is later on sold to another family which really seems to bother the author of this book. In this framework art precision and sadness within the world are observed as the two identical themes of which ‘’Ugetsu’ tries to use in moving the audience in expressing his fantastic story, his fundamental concept is derived from the Akinari Ueda’s or Monogatari Ugetsu tale, or from the story from the famous story of pale and the mysterious moon after the rain (Jim, C. 2005).This stories depict a self centered potter who decided to depart from his homestead, and leave the wife alone in the village, yet there is war in option for town where he goes to trade his wares, while in the city, potter engage himself in a romantic affair with a women who is believed to be a witchcraft or bewitching in nature or just a ghost in the nature of a women. The roles played by these women having a love affair with potter are once more acted by the three of the most famous film actors in the Japanese culture, one of the three film players is named Masayuki Mori who has an ascetic appearance and is believed to be the husband who was killed in Kurosawa’s- Rashomon, he also called Genjuro the potter. Another player is Kinuyo Tanaka who acts as a prostitute in the Mizoguchi’s life history which is life of Ohara which is also referred as Miyagi in the play (Willis, 1995).. The third play makers is known as Machiko Kyo who is characterized as the victim ‘‘Rashomon’’ in the name of Lady Wakasa her most unforgettable action and character is her super naturalness ability, it was through this characteristic ability enables her to drive Genjuro into an idyll of aesthetical abnormality and erotic blesses that make him to shade tears, he asserts that in his life he has never thought of the pleasures that are inexistence. This tale appears to be simple and easy to be understood but its content is usually rich.  Genjuro whom the story is partly revolves about is believed to be talented in one way or another but he is suffering from a strange sense of greediness, this is an extremely severe weakness, as is the same man who decides to leave the wife and children peril so that he can fulfill his life dreams of becoming a Samurai, in the same way his friend Tobei did, in an attempt to fulfill this dream. In deed this drama is a feminist aromatic on its own. One the other hand, the subject of the story might be ghost especially when it depicts elements of supermalls. The story covers a sensible  period of time of which story on class and the agonies war in the society were told not forgetting tales on power and sexuality in the form of art of which tend to depict Genjuro to the sophisticated world but at the same time put his lovers in danger (Willis, 1995).

This poem makes a master piece of narration, ” a mystical tale of love, art and war set in 16th-century during the Japanese territory of which the author seems to repeat in his tales. The article can be termed as master piece because of its art of thrilling that is seen as the most beautiful of all the world’s black-and-white films. Frame by frame, shot by shot, it entrances in the way that poem articulates the readers and the audience in the tale of the moon after the rain where he tales of a selfish potter who left his wife, in this book is described by the author as being selfless in his home village since during the times of war he goes to sell the wares in the city. It is in this process of loneliness and disparity due to distance from his own wife that he establishes another relationship and gets in to an affair with a bewitching ghost in the city. The author describes the character Genjuro as a talented man whose greedy nature as reflected by the decision he made to live his wife and the child suffering in the village and instead left for the city in pursuit of his dreams (Bernard, 1972). This character may have not made the decision on his own but from the look of things, he might be borrowing a leaf from his other friends like Tobei who have also taken a foolishly step by leaving his family in the village for the city in the efforts of trying to be a samurai. His friend, who is something of a buffoon and with unrealistic thinking, has obsessive ambitions of becoming a samurai. How he practically works out to fulfilling the ambitions was the most amazing of all the things. His success strategy is therefore played for comedy (Jim, C. 2005). The potter became infatuated with an aristocratic lady who convinced him to buy the wares he was selling only but later on to find out for himself at last that the woman he was dying for she is not a human being but a ghost. The author reiterates that the supernatural is the stuff of the oriental legend, but in this case this character found it sits rather uneasily in what is after all a film where realism holds sway as much profound that all-ghost elements work in the same way like Stanley Kwan’s “Rouge”. Nevertheless there are some fine things in “Ugetsu” particularly the tracking shots of characters moving in counterpoint to tall spindly reeds by a lakeside, the strange encounter between two boats on misty water and the final landscape shot with the small boy. That “Ugetsu” is the work of a visual poet which is beyond this question.

This chapter is described as a romantic and feminist drama basing on the ghost story. This article or chapter makes the whole story of Mizoguchi to become a master of the periodic film, the tragic romance and the socially conscious topic in the movie. He had forged a style built on exquisitely composed and orchestrated but never precious long-take scenes and camera movement (Jim, 2005).

Although the author of article was not the first one to be shown in the west, but it this seems to be the first article to actually expose him to the different places of the world like the west. The popularity of the author faces a lot of criticism from other media productions. In another article, to the distant observer by Noel Burch’s, the article is written from the perspective of criticism in relation to Mizhouchis’ work (Bernard, 1972). Among other features in their literatures, their critical positions seem to agree to one point in application of the derogatory sense of the terms like aestheticism in relation to Mizhouchis literature work of the recent past. In another article “the life of uharu”, is also seen as the evidence of the literature of Mizhouchi’s withdrawal from the radical nature of his work during the early years of the 1930s with the retreat from the both the political and social viewpoints in the competition of the literatures which expresses the cyclical time (Jim, C. 2005).. The relation between politics and aesthetics seem to be incredibly with complex issues.

If there is any single thing Ugetsu appears to strengthen then are customary myths of woman, other aspects in the society holds true to the drastic spirit of Mizotheguchi’s previous experienced by Marxist basing on his feminist principles, the events of both Genjuro and Tobei are aggravated by the principles obligatory upon them by patriarchal capitalism. All of them tend to found out the accomplishment Genjuro obtained all the way through acquirement of material goods, for the case of Tobei, it is by the reputation of being a Samurai in order to make an impression to their wives, neither of whom demonstrate the minimum concern in such aspiration. The movie is a methodical critique of the type of male egoism which is demonstrated through greed and violence manner whereby it results in the devastation of human relations at all times at the expense of women shortcomings and thus encourage evolution patriarchal capitalist.

In the preface to the tales Akinari briefly expresses his views on the art of fiction. Praising Water Margin and The Tale of Genji -the most widely known works of Chinese and Japanese narrative prose — as monuments of creative imagination, he suggests that they are true to life because they embody deep feeling and evoke an intimate sense of the past. Without being explicit, he compares his own tales to these older masterpieces, inviting readers to enjoy what he has created. He points out that although his tales are somewhat fanciful in subject matter, they show a degree of unity, and he hopes that people will not be misled into thinking that his stories are literally true, so that he need not fear being punished, as Lo Kuan-chung and Lady Murasaki had supposedly been, for deceiving people (Willis, 1995).

The remarks in his preface reveal an interest in the theory of literature and the uses of fiction, one which lasted for the rest of his life. He first wrote of his views on this subject in the 1770s in an essay that does not survive. Later on, in 1793, when editing Kamo Mabuchi’s work on the Ise monogatari (The Tales of Ise), he told how the art of fiction had flourished in China and Japan. He explained that the objectives were the same both in Chinese narrative prose and in Japanese tales and romances. Writers had wishing to lament their personal unhappiness about the world they lived showing their feelings in the form of nostalgia in the past times. In his own words, ‘When an author sees the nation flourishing, he knows that it must eventually decay, like the bloom of a fragrant flower. When he considers what happens in the end to leaders of state, he privately laughs at their folly. He points out to the people who might seek longevity what finally became of Urashima Taro’s bejewelled box. He makes foolish men who struggle to collect rare treasures feel ashamed of themselves. He tries to avoid the desire for fame, composing his innocent tales about events of the past for which there are no sources. Akinari believed that literature is a vehicle by which to express in a highly sublimated form one’s discontent with society, and his views remind the Western reader of such works as Shelley (Bernar, 1972)

References

Ueda, A. (2005): Ugetsu, criterion collection publishers

Chambers, A and Ueda, A. (2009): tales of moonlight and rain. Colombia university press publishers

Mizoghuchi, K. (1993): ugetsu. Amazon publishers

McDonald, I.K. (1984). Mizoghuchi. Twayne publishers