Sansho the Bailiff

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sansho the Bailiff
VHS cover
Directed by	Kenji Mizoguchi
Produced by	Masaichi Nagata
Written by	Ogai Mori (story) Fuji Yahiro Yoshikata Yoda
Starring	Kinuyo Tanaka Yoshiaki Hanayagi Kyôko Kagawa Eitarô Shindô
Cinematography	Kazuo Miyagawa
Release date(s)	March 31, 1954 (Japan)
Running time	120 min.
Language	Japanese
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Sansho the Bailiff (山椒大夫 Sanshō Dayū) is a 1954 film by Japanese film director Kenji Mizoguchi. It is one of the latest films Mizoguchi made; he directed only five films more before his death in 1956. Alongside Ugetsu and The Life of Oharu it is often considered as his finest, the crowning achievement of his career.

Sanshô is one of Mizoguchi's jidai-geki films taking place in feudal Japan and does bear the Mizoguchian trademarks that explore the basic ideas of freedom, poverty and woman's place in society through powerful imagery and long and complicated shots (the director of photography for this film is the Mizoguchi regular Kazuo Miyagawa) and top-notch performances by the cast. Mizoguchi was regarded as a true perfectionist, and this film is also a showcase of his controlling and demanding vision and his films' formal beauty.

In the end of this film there is also one of the most famous panning shots in the history of cinema.

This is the last of the director's films to win an award at the Venice Film Festival, which brought him to the attention of Western critics and film-makers. Unfortunatally, like most of Mizoguchi's works the film has largly been forgotten by western critics, despite maintaining an extremely high rating on the Internet Movie Database [[1]]. New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane wrote in his September, 2006 profile on Mizoguchi, "I have seen “Sansho” only once, a decade ago, emerging from the cinema a broken man but calm in my conviction that I had never seen anything better; I have not dared watch it again, reluctant to ruin the spell, but also because the human heart was not designed to weather such an ordeal."^[1] The Criterion Collection will release Sansho on DVD in May.