Fri 4 at 8:00 Morton 235

Utamaro & his Five Women

Japan, 1946, 95 mins, 16mm print
Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Cast: Kôtarô Bandô, Minosuke Bandô, Toshiko Iizuka


"Of all Japanese directors I have the greatest respect for Mizoguchi...With his death, Japanese film lost its truest creator." -Akira Kurosawa

This highly embellished account of the great Japanese printmaker plunges us into the demimonde of Edo in the late 1700s: a world of brothels, drinking parties, marketplaces, intertangled love affairs and violent outbreaks of passion. Mizoguchi portrays Utamaro's painting as an emotional process and as the only real connection between the strangely isolated artist and the passionate world surrounding him.

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