Quotes about Mizoguchi

Submitted by kenji on Sat, 03/19/2005 - 04:44
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  • "The eye of a painter and the soul of a poet" (Macmillan Encyclopedia).
  • "The Japanese director i admire the most" (Akira Kurosawa)
  • "Now that Mizoguchi is gone, there are very few directors who can see the past clearly and realistically" (Akira Kurosawa)
  • "You can compare only what is comparable and that which aims high enough. Mizoguchi, alone, imposes a feeling of a unique world and language, is answerable only to himself..." (Jacques Rivette)
  • "To prefer Kurosawa to Mizoguchi is to be totally blind, but to love Mizoguchi alone and not Kurosawa is to have only one eye." (AndrĂ© Bazin)
  • "One of cinema's very greatest masters" (Geoff Andrew, Directors A-Z)
  • "For some he became the supreme filmmaker, the cinematic Shakespeare, realising to its fullest the potential of film as an art form" (Robin Wood)
  • "The greatest movie i have ever seen" (Robin Wood on Sansho the Bailiff)
  • "No praise is too high for him" (Orson Welles)
  • "In Mizoguchi's cinema, everything is beautiful: the landscapes are breathtaking; the faces are photogenically eloquent; the camera movements are fluid and complex; the black and white (more precisely, black and silver) cinematography is subtle and dense of texture; the compositions are so precise it's as if space itself were being cut along a dotted line... One of the greatest practitioners of pure mise-en-scene the cinema has ever known and the master of the heroically sustained long take." (Gilbert Adair)
  • "This Mizoguchi fellow was really something special" (1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die)
  • "A director for all seasons, whom Kurosawa, much better known in the West, freely acknowledged was his master. I cannot tell you how important Mizoguchi was to my film-going experience. He made me realise what the art of cinema could achieve. And his films will live with vibrant life for as long as anyone watches other than Hollywood movies." (Derek Malcolm, A Century of Films)
  • One of the "exalted figures who soar above the earth... such an artist can convey the lines of the poetic design of being. He is capable of going beyond the limitations of coherent logic, and conveying the deep complexity and truth of the impalpable connections and hidden phenomena of life" (Andrei Tarkovsky)
  • "One of the director's most awesome achievements" (Bloomsbury Foreign Film Guide, on Sansho the Bailiff)
  • "An emotional impact that has seldom been equalled" (Bloomsbury Foreign film Guide on Ugetsu Monogatari)
  • "He has no superior at the unfolding of narrative by way of camera movement and he was a great director of actresses... he is supreme in the realisation of internal states in external views" (David Thomson, Biographical Dictionary of Film)"
  • "Mizoguchi's cinema is dynamic and obsessively fluid: his tracking and crane shots have a naturalism that one rarely encounters elsewhere... Form and content are indivisible" (Adrian Turner, quoted in John Kobal's Top 100 Movies)
  • " He loads the air with sumptuousness. Every image adds to the richness. His flowing camera continually finds unexpected levels and perspectives." (Eric Rhode, A History of the Cinema)
  • "His absolute mastery of decor, the long take, and the moving camera make Mizoguchi one of the great mise-en-scene directors of the international cinema" (David Cook, A History of Narrative Film)
  • "He omits a note so pure that the slightest variation becomes expressive" (Philippe Demonsablon)
  • "Kenji Mizoguchi is to the cinema what Bach is to music, Cervantes is to literature, Shakespeare is to the theatre, Titian is to painting: the very greatest" (Jean Douchet)
  • "With Mizoguchi, form and idea, atmosphere and feeling are indivisible... his films are assembled out of images of breathtaking exactness...a world which irresistibly captures and enfolds the spectator" (David Robinson, The Times)
  • "What he conserves becomes in his hands an inexhaustible resource. ...Let every young filmmaker take any late Mizoguchi film and watch... we could do worse than to treat this oeuvre as an Academy for the Study of Staging" (David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, 2005)
  • "The master among masters in the Japanese film world...to talk about this man is at the same time to talk about the path upon which the Japanese film has progressed" (Tadao Sato)
  • "The three-clawed fiend" (faithful scriptwriter Yoshikata Yoda)
  • "This man they call Mizoguchi is an idiot" (Mizoguchi himself)
Author Comments: 

Don't just take my word for it!