SOURCE: "Mizoguchi and Modernism: Structure, Culture, Point of View," in Sight and Sound, Vol . 47, No . 2, Spring, 1978, pp. 110-18.

In the following essay, Cohen discusses Mizoguchi's place in the Japanese modernist movement, stressing the necessity of critical contextualizing when analyzing the artistic efforts of other cultures.

It is twenty-two years since Donald Richie and Joseph Anderson's first major article on Kenji Mizoguchi appeared in Sight and Sound; and twenty since Anderson stated: 'The Japanese cinema has been established as long as the cinema has existed anywhere. In the past thirty years or so it has been much in need of discovery.' In the light of recent structural criticism in Screen which claims to have found traces of modernism in the films of Ozu, there is a touch of déjà vu. Mizoguchi, like Ozu, made fully matured films before World War II , and both directors have been considered...