Desperate prostitutes fight over customers in powerful STREET OF SHAME (courtesy Janus Films)
STREET OF SHAME (AKASEN CHITAI) (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1956)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, May 3, free with museum admission of $12, 7:00
Series runs May 2 – June 8
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
Made the same year Japan passed a major anti-prostitution law, Kenji Mizoguchi’s final film, 1956’s Street of Shame, is a brutally honest depiction of the decidedly unglamorous life of a group of courtesans at a Tokyo brothel. “Yoshiwara has been here three hundred years,” the Mamasan (Sadako Sawamura) says early on to a police officer. “Does an unnecessary business last so long?” Originally titled Red-Light District, the black-and-white film features an outstanding cast of women playing desperate geisha with serious family and financial problems that lead them to the embarrassment of trying to physically force men off the dark, dank street and into their rooms. Hanae (Michiyo Kogure) has to deal with aging, a baby, and a suicidal husband, Yumeko (Aiko Mimasu) doesn’t want her son to know what she does to earn money to attempt to give him a decent life, Yorie (Hiroko Machida) thinks a husband in a faraway village will gain her longed-for freedom, Yasumi (Ayako Wakao) has become a loan shark to her coworkers, and young Mickey (Machiko Kyō) is quick to share her opinions about the other women but not so quick to catch on to the debasement she is lowering herself to. The protofeminist director of such previous works as Sisters of the Gion, Osaka Elegy, Women of the Night, and The Life of Oharu as well as the brilliant two-part samurai epic The 47 Ronin, Mizoguchi spent much of his career — which included more than seventy films in thirty-three years, up to his death in 1956 at the age of fifty-eight — making films about the exploitation of women, partly influenced by having seen his sister sold into prostitution by their father. It’s a shame that Street of Shame, one of Mizoguchi’s best, also turned out to be his last, but what a way to go. Street of Shame is screening May 2 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s five-week tribute to the master auteur — who made more than eighty films, less than half of which still exist — which continues through June with the above-mentioned works as well as Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff, Utamaro and His Five Women, The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, and A Woman of Rumor.
We used to think that Aki Kaurismäki’s 
Based on the Russian novel Yama (The Pit) by Aleksandr Kuprin, protofeminist director Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sisters of the Gion offers a poignant look at the changing desires of women in twentieth-century Japan. In the Gion District, geisha have become one-man prostitutes, taking up with one wealthy patron at a time. When Furusawa (Benkei Shiganoya) loses his business, the bankrupt man turns away from his wife and instead goes to Umekichi (Yōko Umemura), who takes him in, believing that it is her responsibility. Her younger sister, Omocha (Isuzu Yamada), is furious, arguing that geisha, and women in general, should be more than just the playthings of men. She wants her sister instead to find a rich patron who can take care of her in style. Omocha is a manipulative woman, willing to lie to get what she thinks she and Umekichi deserve, but she is not doing it for evil reasons as much as she wants to change the plight of the geisha and give more power to women. But Umekichi cannot break free of the old-fashioned ways as Omocha plays games with successful businessman Jurakudo (Fumio Okura) and his assistant, Kimura (Taizō Fukami), devising a plot that threatens to tear everything apart. Mizoguchi fills Sisters of the Gion with long shots of narrow passageways as characters try to escape from their situations but are unable to. Made in 1936, just before a war that would change Japan’s views on houses of ill repute, the film is virtually timeless for most of its too-brief sixty-nine minutes, until one man decides to take actions into his own hands and suddenly cars and the nearby city shift the overall perspective. In the end, it’s about more than just money, although it’s definitely about that, but it’s also about respect, about common decency, and about humanity, as seen from all sides. Sisters of the Gion is screening April 4 with Yasujiro Ozu’s 1933 silent crime drama, Dragnet Girl, starring Kinuyo Tanaka, as part of Film Forum’s “5 Japanese Divas” series, featuring four weeks of films starring Yamada, Tanaka, Machiko Kyo, Setsuko Hara, and Hideko Takamine, who play strong, determined women in such classic works as Ozu’s Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953), Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another (1966), Mikio Naruse’s Okaasan (1952) and Flowing (1956), Akira Kurosawa’s The Idiot (1951) and Throne of Blood (1957), Keisuke Kinoshita’s Carmen Comes Home (1951) and Twenty-Four Eyes (1954), and Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953), Sansho the Bailiff (1954), and Street of Shame (1956), among others.