Friday | May 1, 2009 7:00 pm

Sansho the Bailiff
(Sansho dayu)

Screening on Film

Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi.
With Eitaro Shindo, Kinuyo Tanaka.
Japan, 1954, 35mm, black & white, 120 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
Print source: Janus Films

An intensely lyrical, uncompromising study of tragedy and psychic degradation, Sansho the Bailiff is among Mizoguchi’s great masterpieces. The story, set in eleventh-century Japan, concerns a mother and her two children, who are kidnapped and sold into slavery. After a decade of subjugation the son sets out about deposing the cruel bailiff who brought tragedy upon his family.

March 6, 2007 – May 1, 2009

Masterworks of World Cinema

March 5, 2007 – May 1, 2009

The Perverted Desires of Slavoj Zizek

May 16–June 23, 2014

The Tales and Tragedies of Kenji Mizoguchi

January 20–February 26, 2023

Kinuyo Tanaka—Actress, Director, Pioneer

July 5–October 27

Melville et Cie.

September 6–November 7

Psychedelic Cinema

September 16–23

Hamaguchi Ryusuke, The World as Stage

September 29–December 1

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith

October 3–7

The Shochiku Centennial Collection

October 18–November 3

António Campos and the Promise of Cinema Novo

November 8

Boston Punk Rewound / Unbound. The Arthur Freedman Collection

November 9–December 4

The Yugoslav Junction: Film and Internationalism in the SFRY, 1957 – 1988

November 10–24

From the Jenni Olson Queer Film Collection