Friday | May 16, 2014 7:00 pm

Sunday | May 18, 2014 5:00 pm

Ugetsu
(Ugetsu Monogotari)

Screening on Film

Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi.
With Masayuki Mori, Kinuyo Tanaka, Machiko Kyo.
Japan, 1953, 35mm, black & white, 96 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
Print source: Janus Films

Not only does Ugetsu remain Mizoguchi’s best-known work in this country, it was instrumental (with Rashomon) in introducing Japanese cinema to American audiences. The film is an excellent entryway into the master’s films, with its parallel stories of women confounded by social mores and the greed and ambition of the men they love. Just as the screenplay adds a bit of Guy de Maupassant to the source material (a collection of stories by Ueda Akinari published in 1771), so the film introduces a note of the fantastic into its tales of lives cast into turmoil by civil war in 16th-century Japan.

May 16 – June 23, 2014

The Tales and Tragedies of Kenji Mizoguchi

March 13–28, 2020

A World Viewed. Celebrating Stanley Cavell’s Life in Film

January 20–February 26, 2023

Kinuyo Tanaka—Actress, Director, Pioneer

August 21–October 19

The Cold Heart is More Precious than Diamonds. The Cinema of Graham Greene

September 11–October 30

João César Monteiro, Poet-Provocateur

September 12

Marathon '77 All-Night Movie Marathon

September 18–November 15

Marie Antoinette and Friends, Three Films by Sofia Coppola

September 19–December 12

Nostalgia, A Harvard Undergraduate Cinematheque Program

September 27–28

The Adventures of Lotte Reiniger

October 2–18

The Human Condition

October 23–November 20

Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945 – 1960

November 6–9

Visions of a City, Or A Weekend in San Francisco