alr

Osaka Elegy
(Naniwa Ereji)

Screening on Film
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi.
With Isuzu Yamada, Seiichi Takegawa, Chiyoko Okura.
Japan, 1936, 35mm, black & white, 90 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.

Mizoguchi’s first collaboration with screenwriter Yoshitaka Yoda was a harshly realist critique of Thirties’ Japan as a soullessly capitalist society where human and mercantile values are savagely equated, and everything is ultimately reduced to a form of moneyed transaction. Mizoguchi would later claim his own despised father to be the inspiration for the miserly old man whose selfishness causes the ruination of his family and the degradation of his daughters. Mizoguchi and Yoda’s devastating indictment of Japanese patriarchy remained controversial and, in fact, was banned in 1940 by the Japanese military government.

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