Ugetsu

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Ugetsu

Directed by	Kenji Mizoguchi
Produced by	Masaichi Nagata
Written by	Matsutarō Kawaguchi Akinari Ueda Yoshikata Yoda
Starring	Masayuki Mori Machiko Kyō Kinuyo Tanaka
Music by	Fumio Hayasaka
Distributed by	Daiei
Release date(s)	Mar 26, 1953 Sept 7, 1954
Running time	94 min
Country	Japan
Language	Japanese
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IMDb profile

Ugetsu (雨月物語, Ugetsu monogatari^?) aka 'Tales of the Pale and Silvery Moon After the Rain' is a 1953 film by Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi. The film, set in Medieval Japan, stars Masayuki Mori and Machiko Kyō, and is inspired by stories by Ueda Akinari and Guy de Maupassant. It is Mizoguchi's most celebrated film, regarded by critics as a seminal masterwork of Japanese cinema.

Ugetsu is a ghost story, in which a peasant craftsman in Medieval Japan is undone by his greed. Typical of Mizoguchi's films, Ugetsu is politically oriented toward the ways women suffer at the hands of men; also typically, it features stunning visual arrangements and meticulously orchestrated long takes, as well as obfuscating elements like fog and silence.

Ugetsu won the Silver Lion Award for Best Direction at the Venice Film Festival in 1953. The film has made multiple appearances in Sight and Sound magazine's top ten critics poll of the greatest movies ever made, which is held once every decade. In 2000, The Village Voice newspaper ranked Ugetsu at #29 on their list of the 100 best films of the 20th century.

[edit] Availability

On November 8, 2005, Ugetsu became available for the first time on Region 1 DVD when The Criterion Collection released a 2-disc edition of the film, which includes numerous special features such as a 150-minute documentary on Mizoguchi directed by Kaneto Shindo. The boxset also includes a booklet with an essay and three short stories from which the film draws inspiration: Akinari Ueda's "The House in the Thicket" and "A Serpent's Lust", and Guy de Maupassant's "How He Got the Legion of Honor".