The Criterion Collection's release of Mizoguchi's 1953 masterpiece Ugetsu Monogatari (Tales of Moonlight and Rain), together with a 1975 documentary on the director by Kaneto Shindo, provides a rather contradictory new perspective on this key film in Japanese film history. On the one hand, the film is revealed to be even more beautiful than was apparent from the poor 16mm copies that many of us saw in film school. On the other, the many interviews with Mizoguchi's collaborators included in the Criterion package—which includes three separate interviews along with Shindo's documentary—make one seriously wonder how he managed to pull off such an achievement. The great director apparently never looked through the camera or contributed to the lighting design; he bullied the actors but never coached them; he rewrote the script on a daily basis; he delegated all the research and planning of the sets, insisting on changes only after everything was built—and he delegated all decisions about the magnificent score to the composer and his assistant directors. Nevertheless, within the culture of the Japanese studio system, Mizoguchi apparently wielded an authority based on a lengthy career of critically-endorsed filmmaking that enabled him to achieve the results on display in Ugetsu.

Winning the Silver Lion in Venice in 1953, Ugetsu confirmed the status of Japanese cinema in world film culture, following the European success of Kurosawa's Rashomon in 1951. As Tony Rayns notes in his voice-over commentary, Mizoguchi may well have been motivated to compete with Kurosawa, who was much younger, with far fewer films to his credit than Mizoguchi. With Ugetsu, Mizoguchi made some significant alterations to his signature slow-paced “scrolling” long takes, making a much more action-oriented, faster-paced film. Like Rashomon, Ugetsu is built from two short stories, from which a multicharacter plot is developed. The parallel action and multiplot construction may not pose the philosophical questions that Rashomon does, but Ugetsu demonstrates a similar narrative complexity in its smooth blending of reality and fantasy. Drawing on a variety of cinematic and performance techniques, Ugetsu follows Rashomon in its ‘modern' use of the medium in conjunction with a premodern story and setting.

The two original stories by Akinari Ueda on which Ugetsu is based have been newly translated and included in the Criterion package. Originally published in 1776 during the Edo period, the short tales are actually set in an earlier time, during the restless civil wars that preceded the stability of Ueda's own time. “The House in the Thicket” is about a man who leaves his wife for seven years while he travels to the capital to make money by selling silk. When he returns, he is greeted by her ghost, who brings out his feelings of grief, guilt and longing. One of the highlights of Ugetsu is Mizoguchi's rendering of this return in one long take in which Genjuro (Masayuki Mori) enters his former home, finds it empty, circles round the back while the camera pans back inside, enters again, and finds his wife Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka) seated by the hearth. It is a brilliant sleight-of-hand by which Mizoguchi and cameraman Kazuo Miyagawa produce the sense of the supernatural within the terms of a realist esthetic.

The second Ueda story, “A Serpent's Lust,” is about a man who is pursued and possessed by a seductive Demon Woman who poses as a princess. Mizoguchi and scriptwriter Yoshikata Yoda weave this into the first story by having Genjuro meet the mysterious Lady Wakasa (Machiko Kyo) during his seven-year absence from home. His romance with her, assisted by her faithful nurse Ukon (Kikue Mouri), is set in the beautiful architecture of a set modeled on the Katsura Imperial Palace. The Kutsuki Manor, as Wakasa's home is referred to in the film, is eventually revealed to have been merely a fantasy space into which Genjuro is summoned. Mizoguchi's compositions and Kyo's performance echo the style of the period, while the sets are adorned with the fabrics and objects of aristocratic life. Mizoguchi was notoriously exacting in his selection of props, and one of the pleasures of this new DVD is to be able to see the detail of the materials, not only in the Kutsuki Manor, but also in the kimonos and armor that also feature throughout the film. Once he learns he has been deceived, Genjuro eventually frees himself from the Demon with the help of a priest. Nevertheless, the passion of his relationship with Lady Wakasa is palpable, and is probably the closest Mizoguchi ever came to depicting a sexual relationship in his entire career.

The ethereal quality of the otherworldly romance in the Kutsuki Manor is contrasted with the brutal rape of Ohama (Mitsuko Mito), Genjuro's sister-in-law, who has accompanied the two men—Genjuro and his brother Tobei (Sakae Ozawa)—to the city. The only source for this subplot is a story by Guy de Maupassant, also included in the Criterion package, about a man obsessed with achieving the honor of a military decoration. He finally manages to win the Legion of Honor, only by blinding himself to his wife's affair with a government official. In Ugetsu, Tobei displays an unquenchable ambition to become a samurai, and he finally succeeds by stealing the head of a beheaded general, only to find that his abandoned wife has become a prostitute. The story of Ohama, who is gang-raped by a group of rowdy soldiers before falling to prostitution, is added to the source material, and is emblematic of Mizoguchi's trademark narrative of the fallen woman. She and Tobei are finally reunited at the end of the film and she persuades him to denounce violence. Returning to the village after seven years, he throws his armor into the river. The cunning wife of Maupassant's story is noticeably absent, perhaps because Mizoguchi's esthetic sensibility can only accommodate the extremes of the femme fatale (Lady Wakasa) and the poor abandoned wives.

The way that Ugetsu is structured around two couples is suggestive of the influence of American cinema. Although Tobei may be Genjuro's brother, their relationship is not as clear or as vital as the two couples that are torn apart by the invasion of the village by warring factions of soldiers. It is rare in Japanese literature or film before the Sixties to find the couple as the primary social unit. More often, it is the larger family circle, including parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Genjuro and Miyagi have a son who is little more than a toy child, signalling that it is the nuclear family that is destroyed by the outbreak of war. The quest for upward mobility and its perennial failure is of course a mainstay of Hollywood cinema, soon to become a common theme of postwar Japanese cinema, but not commonly found in class-bound prewar Japanese film or literature. Miyagi is killed by starving fighters, roaming about like the stranded Japanese soldiers in the South Pacific, and indeed Ugetsu is often read as an antiwar film.

Scriptwriter Yoshikata Yoda confirms (in Shindo's documentary) that Mizoguchi did not intend Ugetsu to be an antiwar film, although the chaotic situation that surrounds the characters, linking their various storylines, is certainly evocative of the previous fifteen years of Japanese history. From the beginning of the China war in 1937 (indeed from the early 1930s) to the end of the Occupation, the nation endured a series of shifting ideologies, material scarcity, economic collapse, national defeat, and foreign occupation. One could certainly interpret the departed soul of Miyagi as the loss of Japanese cultural integrity, lost through the greed for imperial power. By 1953, the nation was doomed to join the international community of industrial capitalism. The precious fantasy of cultural sovereignty was finally utterly ruined, like the bleak remains of the Kutuski manor when Genjuro awakes from his dream.

Although such allegorical readings may have been far from Mizoguchi's mind, the esthetic achievement of the film is very much in its depiction of instability. Kazuo Miyagawa, interviewed in 1992, notes that seventy percent of the film consists of crane shots. Indeed, the sense of chaos is felt in the constant movement of the camera: not only the sweeping overhead crane shots, but also the shots that hover ever so slightly before the unfolding action. The constant shift of setting and the lack of conventional reverse-field cutting add to the pervasive sense of instability. In addition, the film boasts a truly remarkable soundtrack composed by Fumio Hayasaka. Based on musical ideas from traditional theater, and performed mainly with drum, flute, and monk's chants, the score jettisons all conventions of ‘classical' film scoring for what Masahiro Shinoda describes as a truly avant-garde film score.

The interview with Shinoda (director of Double Suicide [1969] among other ‘New Wave' titles), was recorded in 2005, along with a separate interview with the first assistant director on Ugetsu, Tokuzo Tanaka. Like the interviews in Shindo's two-and-a-half-hour documentary, these additional ‘special features' are mainly about the challenges of working with Mizoguchi, and are generally more gossipy than analytical. It is nevertheless interesting that Shinoda and Tanaka offer two very different interpretations of the sexuality in Ugetsu. For Tanaka it is representative of “human greed,” which is indeed one of the film's themes. Shinoda, however, reads the sexuality as a challenge to social conventions, effectively situating Ugetsu as an important precursor to his own more radical filmmaking of the Sixties and Seventies. Because sexuality was brought to (and enforced in) Japanese cinema during the Occupation, its status in 1953 is still very ambivalent, and as these contemporary views indicate, still open to very different readings.

Shindo, who also established himself as a director during the 1960s with The Island (1960) and Onibaba (1964), won the top Kinema Jumpo prize in 1975 for Kenji Mizoguchi: The Life of a Film Director. The documentary is a treasure trove of interviews with nearly forty collaborators and friends of Mizoguchi, many of whom have subsequently passed away. Although at first it seems like a typical work of overblown hagiography, the portrait of the director that finally emerges is less than flattering. The anecdote that recurs most frequently, repeated by three different interviewees, is the story of the scar on Mizoguchi's back. Actress Urabe Kumeko was there when a prostitute named Yuriko Ichiro stabbed Mizoguchi after a lover's quarrel in the Thirties. Tokuzo Tanaka reports that Mizoguchi wore the scar like a badge of honor, boasting that, “You can't make movies about women without this scar.” Another assistant director, Seichiro Uchikawa, insists that this wound explains Mizoguchi's unique insight into the relationships between men and women.

As gossipy and anecdotal as is Shindo's documentary, it provides a privileged view of the culture of film production that made the Japanese studio system so successful. The social protocols and hierarchies, not to mention the codes of gendered behaviour, enabled the system to function. Mizoguchi evidently relied on an assembly of actors and trusted technicians and craftsmen who were very accomplished at what they did, and worked extraordinarily hard to please the “Old Man.” The film also provides a little history of the cinema of the Twenties, including interviews with director Diasuke Ito and writer Matsutaro Kawaguchi, and revisits the sites of many of the studios, locations, and residences associated with Mizoguchi's long career. Shindo is particularly preoccupied with the Kyoto hospital where Mizoguchi died in 1956. Its emptiness and impenetrability come to stand in for the con-tradictions implicit in Mizoguchi's career.

Mizoguchi's womanizing was as notorious as his bullying of women on the set, and yet he thought of himself as someone who had a special insight into women's lives. Hisao Hoya says that Mizoguchi, emboldened by the spirit of democratic reform, told the prostitutes in a hospital he visited doing research for Women of the Night that he felt personally responsible for their plight. “It is men who are responsible for putting you here,” he announced to the women, who were anxious for an autograph from the great director. On the other hand, many of the actresses relate in detail how Mizoguchi pushed them to the edge in order to get them to perform as he wanted. Shindo is relentless in his interviews, and the back of his head appears in almost every frame of the film, although his face is barely glimpsed. It's an unusual technique, but it creates a sense of continuity and intimacy that finally pays off in his interview with Kinuyo Tanaka, the star of ten of Mizoguchi's postwar films. Many of the interviewees suggest, without hesitation, that Mizoguchi was in love with Tanaka. Despite his two wives and many mistresses, Tanaka is repeatedly said to be the real love of his life.

When Shindo confronts the actress with these rumors, she says she welcomes the opportunity to dispel them. She argues that Mizoguchi was not in love with her, but with the women she played in his films, women like Miyagi in Ugetsu , who are beautiful in their suffering. He was in love with a certain image of women, and besides, she says, he lacked humor and was too preoccupied with his art. He was a difficult man, and she could not see him as a good husband. Indeed, Koga Kogawa claims that most of Mizoguchi's women had bad lives, and were from poor backgrounds, women who perhaps didn't know better than to avoid him. In touristy snapshots from Venice, where Tanaka and Mizoguchi went in 1953 with Ugetsu, the two of them appear awkward together, more like acquaintances than friends. Tokuzo Tanaka says that, while Mizoguchi demanded many retakes from most of his actors, he usually let Kinuyo Tanaka get away with her first take, saying it was perfect every time. Clearly, there was some kind of chemistry at work, but one that mixed shyness and distance in larger parts than the complicity and mutual understanding that the term usually implies.

The interviews contained in this DVD package shed a great deal of light on the production of Ugetsu, and while they might break the spell of this mesmerizing film for some viewers, they also suggest how Mizoguchi's “special effects” were created from sheer human endurance and perseverance. The ghostly scene of the two families crossing Lake Biwa through shrouds of mist was shot in a studio-built pool in which assistant directors stood in freezing water pushing the boats through clouds of smoke that refused to waft as planned. Likewise, two anecdotes fill in the details of Mori's performance in the film's final scene of Genjuro's homecoming. Given minimal direction from Mizoguchi, Mori finally went to cameraman Miyagawa for help with the scene. In a very giggly interview, Miyagawa claims that he simply told Mori that he had a chest of drawers inside him, so he should start with the top drawer, which is precisely what the actor did. Kinuyo Tanaka reports that she and everyone else were extremely nervous about shooting this scene, in which the level of tension on the set was much higher than usual. In a daze, following the shooting of the famous scene, she saw Mizoguchi lighting Mori's cigarette, an act she had never seen the director perform for anyone. Indeed, for all the attention that Machiko Kyo and Kinuyo Tanaka have received for Ugetsu, Mori's central role is often overlooked. In fact it is arguably the tightly-wound energy of this actor (who died in 1973) that provides the film's central, sustaining momentum.

With all the materials added to this new release of Ugetsu, we can finally recognize its achievement within the context of modern Japan. As the trailer makes abundantly clear, with its overblown orchestral score, its “fierce and awe-inspiring” tone, and its exaggeration of the film's melodramatic and action elements—its sex and violence—Ugetsu is the product of a commercial industry. Mizoguchi's fidelity to period detail could only have been accomplished with the vast resources at his disposal at Daiei studio in Kyoto. He was bound for Venice, and determined to impress the world with his achievement, stopping at nothing to prove himself among the world's top directors. If his film tended to confirm an Orientalist conception of modern Japanese art, it was also open to a wealth of interpretation that is far from exhausted fifty-three years later.