Friday | May 23, 2014 7:00 pm

Sunday | May 25, 2014 4:00 pm

Sansho the Bailiff
(Sansho Dayu)

Screening on Film

Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi.
With Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshiaki Hanayagi, Kyoko Kagawa.
Japan, 1954, 35mm, black & white, 124 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
Print source: Janus Films

Sansho the Bailiff is both one of Mizoguchi’s most accessible works and one of his most sublime, a highpoint among postwar Japan’s jidai-geki films set in the medieval past. The narrative impassively follows two families caught up in sweeping cycles of rise and fall, betrayal and resignation, as Mizoguchi’s tracking shots both entrance with their majesty and shock with surprise. “Perhaps more than anything, this is a film about memory, and a film in which forgetting is the original sin. Working with master cameraman Kazuo Miyagawa (who also shot Rashomon and Floating Weeds), Mizoguchi creates an aestheticized world and a cosmic order which exists beyond the characters (and often in opposition to the suffering they undergo).” — Tom Gunning

May 16 – June 23, 2014

The Tales and Tragedies of Kenji Mizoguchi

March 6, 2007 – May 1, 2009

Masterworks of World Cinema

January 20–February 26, 2023

Kinuyo Tanaka—Actress, Director, Pioneer

September 6–November 7

Psychedelic Cinema

September 29–December 1

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith

October 18–November 3

António Campos and the Promise of Cinema Novo

sepia photo of Artie Freedman in silhouette with a video camera at show

November 8

Boston Punk Rewound / Unbound. The Arthur Freedman Collection

November 9–December 9

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

November 10–24

From the Jenni Olson Queer Film Collection

a mausoleum that looks like a miniature Spanish cathedral, next to a variety of others, against an evening sky

November 11

The Night Watchman by Natalia Almada

a double-exposed image that includes a 16th century Russian man being fed grapes by another amid decadent decor

November 23

Wings of a Serf

a close-up of a Bissau-Guinean woman wearing a scarf on her head and looking directly at the camera with a slight smile

November 25

Le Dépays + Sans soleil