Eternal Japan Cycle – The films of Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa at TAGV

After the recent revisitation of Yasujiro Ozu’s cinema in celebration of the filmmaker’s 120th birthday, TAGV, in partnership with Medeia Filmes, returns to the works of the other two great masters of Japanese cinema, with the screening of their most famous films: Kenji Mizoguchi (replacement The Sacrilegious Hero, in a restored digital copy, 50 years after its premiere in Portugal, where it was censored), and Akira Kurosawa, who, although younger, opened the door to the West to one of the richest cinematography in the world, when in 1951 he received the Golden Lion at the Venice festival.

Mizoguchi would be awarded the Silver Lion in the following two years, beginning the filmmaker’s enormous cult following. They are the great masters of this immense cinematography for which we have, since then, as Serge Daney wrote, “a devouring passion”. Mizoguchi, a leading director of the nouvelle vague (Godard called him “The best of the Japanese directors. Or, simply, one of the best directors in the world”), had the French critics at his feet, when in 58 the Cahiers included the Tales in the list of the best films of all time.

Kurosawa, perhaps the most popular in the West, between spectacularity and adventure, with a “hand on the Japanese past”, although with heterogeneous references, and an introspective, more intimate aspect, especially in his later works, was loved by directors such as Bergman or Fellini, or the Americans John Ford, Coppola, Scorsese, or Spielberg.