Eclipse Series 13: Kenji Mizoguchi's Fallen Women (4-DVD)

Over the course of a three-decade, more than eighty film career, master cineaste Kenji Mizoguchi (Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff) would return again and again to one abiding theme: the plight of women in male-dominated Japanese society. In these four lacerating works of socially conscious melodrama - two prewar (Osaka Elegy, Sisters of the Gion), two postwar (Women of the Night, Street of Shame) - Mizoguchi introduces an array of compelling female protagonists, crushed or resilient, who are economically and spiritually deprived by their nation's customs and traditions. With Mizoguchi's visual daring and eloquence, these films are as cinematically thrilling as they are politically rousing.

Osaka Elegy (1936)
A critical and popular triumph, Osaka Elegy established Mizoguchi as one of Japan's major filmmakers. Mizoguchi's often-used leading actress Isuzu Yamada stars as Ayoko, a switchboard operator trapped in a compromising, ruinous relationship with her boss, who promises her recompense for her indebted, wastrel father. With its fluid cinematography and deft storytelling, Osaka Elegyushered in a new era of sound melodrama for Mizoguchi.

Sisters of the Gion (1936)
Sisters of the Gion, cited by preeminent Japanese film scholar Donald Richie as "the best Japanese prewar sound film," follows the parallel paths of the independent, unsentimental Omocha (Isuzu Yamada) and her sister, the more traditional-minded Umekichi (Yoko Umemura), both geishas in the working-class district of Gion. Mizoguchi's film is a brilliantly shot, uncompromising look at the mechanisms that keep many women at the bottom rung of the social ladder.

Women of the Night (1948)
After World War II, Mizoguchi felt compelled to make a film inspired by the current vogue of Italian neorealism, and he turned out one of the most emotionally and visually raw films of his career. Filmed on location in Osaka, Women of the Night concerns two sisters, a widow and the wife of a narcotics smuggler, whose precipitous descent into prostitution and moral chaos evokes the postwar degradation surrounding them.

Street of Shame (1956)
For his final film, Mizoguchi brought a lifetime of experience to bear on the poignant, heartbreaking tale of a brothel full of women whose dreams and aspirations are constantly shattered by the socioeconomic realities surrounding them. Set in Tokyo's Red Light District (the literal translation of the Japanese title), Street of Shame was so cutting and its popularity so great that when antiprostitution laws were passed in Japan just one year later, the film was deemed a catalyst.