Ugetsu
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
Ugetsu (1953), aka Ugetsu Monogatari, is one of acclaimed Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi's most renowned films. It is fundamentally 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 in wide-screen, as well as obfuscating elements like fog and silence. The Village Voice listed Ugetsu at #29 on their 100 best films of the 20th Century. It is based on the 1776 collection of ghost stories Ugetsu monogatari, written by Ueda Akinari (1734-1809).
