Lecture/Screening class (3 hours)
Lecture with Alan Tansman, Director of the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley.
Mizoguchi considered The Life of Oharu his masterpiece, and critics have placed it among the greatest films of all time. Based on a seventeenth-century novel by Saikaku, The Woman Who Loved Love, it chronicles the decline of a beautiful court lady who is exiled, along with her family, for having loved a page. Sold by her father as a courtesan, she is gradually stripped of social respectability until she is reduced to prostitution and beggary. Mizoguchi was said to have aestheticized women’s suffering (his heroines lack the disillusionment of Naruse’s, the serenity of Ozu’s). The same cannot be said for the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka, Mizoguchi’s muse, however. Through all of Oharu’s degradations and transformations, Tanaka is the wick in the candle, keeping an epic tale of a woman being punished for her sexuality—right up until the last “incident in my lost life”—painfully on topic.
Part of In Focus: Japanese Classics at the BAM/PFA.
Free gallery admission with same-day film ticket!
show less
Lecture with Alan Tansman, Director of the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley.
Mizoguchi considered The Life of Oharu his masterpiece, and critics have placed it among the greatest films of all time. Based on a seventeenth-century novel by Saikaku, The Woman Who Loved Love, it chronicles the decline of a beautiful court lady who is exiled, along with her family, for having loved a page. Sold by her father as a courtesan, she is gradually stripped of social respectability until she is reduced to prostitution and beggary. Mizoguchi was said to have aestheticized women’s suffering (his heroines lack the disillusionment of Naruse’s, the serenity of Ozu’s). The same cannot be said for the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka, Mizoguchi’s muse, however. Through all of Oharu’s degradations and transformations, Tanaka is the wick in the candle, keeping an epic tale of a woman being punished for her sexuality—right up until the last “incident in my lost life”—painfully on topic.
Part of In Focus: Japanese Classics at the BAM/PFA.
Free gallery admission with same-day film ticket!
Lecture/Screening class (3 hours)
Lecture with Alan Tansman, Director of the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley.
Mizoguchi considered The Life of Oharu his masterpiece, and critics have placed it among the greatest films of all time. Based on a seventeenth-century novel by Saikaku, The Woman Who Loved Love, it chronicles the decline of a beautiful court lady who is exiled, along with her family, for having loved a page. Sold by her father as a courtesan, she is gradually stripped of social respectability until she is reduced to prostitution and beggary. Mizoguchi was said to have aestheticized women’s suffering (his heroines lack the disillusionment of Naruse’s, the serenity of Ozu’s). The same cannot be said for the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka, Mizoguchi’s muse, however. Through all of Oharu’s degradations and transformations, Tanaka is the wick in the candle, keeping an epic tale of a woman being punished for her sexuality—right up until the last “incident in my lost life”—painfully on topic.
Part of In Focus: Japanese Classics at the BAM/PFA.
Free gallery admission with same-day film ticket!
read more
Lecture with Alan Tansman, Director of the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley.
Mizoguchi considered The Life of Oharu his masterpiece, and critics have placed it among the greatest films of all time. Based on a seventeenth-century novel by Saikaku, The Woman Who Loved Love, it chronicles the decline of a beautiful court lady who is exiled, along with her family, for having loved a page. Sold by her father as a courtesan, she is gradually stripped of social respectability until she is reduced to prostitution and beggary. Mizoguchi was said to have aestheticized women’s suffering (his heroines lack the disillusionment of Naruse’s, the serenity of Ozu’s). The same cannot be said for the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka, Mizoguchi’s muse, however. Through all of Oharu’s degradations and transformations, Tanaka is the wick in the candle, keeping an epic tale of a woman being punished for her sexuality—right up until the last “incident in my lost life”—painfully on topic.
Part of In Focus: Japanese Classics at the BAM/PFA.
Free gallery admission with same-day film ticket!
show less
Date/Times:
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
4 Upcoming Events
2155 Center Street, Berkeley, CA 94720
The Best Events
Every Week in Your Inbox
From Our Sponsors
UPCOMING EVENTS
Great suggestion! We'll be in touch.
Event reviewed successfully.