Sansho Dayu

By Dudley Andrew and Carole Cavanaugh

Book Overview

Kenji Mizoguchi's masterpiece Sansh Day (1954) retells a classic Japanese folktale about an eleventh-century feudal official forced into exile by his political enemies. In his absence, his children fall under the corrupting influence of the malevolent bailiff Sansho. In their study of the film, film scholar Dudley Andrew and Japanese literature professor Carole Cavanaugh highlight the cultural, aesthetic and social contexts of this film which is at once rooted in folk legend and a modern artwork released in the aftermath of World War II. This edition includes a new foreword by the authors in which they consider the film's contemporary parallels in modern slavery and children torn from their families by malevolent authorities.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1838719326
• ISBN13: 9781838719326
• Release Date: May 2020
• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.4" x 7.4"

Customer Reviews

Useful and Interesting

A short introduction to Kenji Mizoguchi's cinematic masterpiece Sansho Dayu, one of the very greatest films ever made. Contains two essays offering two different perspectives and evaluations. Carole Cavanaugh compares and contrasts the film with its literary sources and lauds Mizoguchi's version as a profoundly beautiful vision of indissoluble family ties and a trenchant critique of the Confucian militarism implicit in some earlier versions of the story. Dudley Andrew examines the socio-political aspects of the film's creation & international reception and criticizes what he perceives as Mizoguchi's bleak existentialist vision, quietism, and "inhuman humanism". Each essay contains much useful information and many interesting insights. The prose is clear but a bit stiff and academic.