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

September 29–December 1

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith

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 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

Peter Sellers wearing a large hat with "ME" embroidered on it, and gripping a Pilgrim-like collar

December 12

Carol for Another Christmas

December 13–16

Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy