Kenji Mizoguchi's "Gion bayashi" (1953)

English titles: A Geisha, Gion Festival Music


Tag Gallagher on Kenji Mizoguchi's use of space:

"Virtually every relationship in Mizoguchi is humiliating, hierarchal, enslaving, with space expressing the power of one person, the nullity of another: endless bowing and kowtowing and scraping across floors in self-abasement. And despite all these shots of people walking in rooms and passageways, we get no sense from Mizoguchi of what it is like to be in these houses, because these are sets, designs, formed of rectangles, cubes, lines and blocks, and their space is fictive, part of the nightmare of power. The grace of the architecture, the clear lines of buildings, the comforting sensation of a storybook Zen order radiated by structures, all are geometric forces of imprisonment and oppression, (...)"

You can read the full article, called Mizoguchi and freedom, here.