Ugetsu

Today, 7 November, is Lidong, the Start of Winter. A classical Chinese almanac defines the term: 'Li is the beginning; dong is the end; all things are gathered in and stored away' — the point in the year when whatever must be kept is brought indoors. Today pairs two films about boundaries. In Wings of Desire (1987), an angel voluntarily gives up eternity and folds himself into a body that can be cold and can be hurt. In Ugetsu (1953), a potter leaves home to sell his wares in a country at war, travels farther than he intended, and finds that returning is the hardest part. One contracts infinity into a finite life; the other folds half a lifetime into fog over a lake. Made 34 years apart at opposite ends of Eurasia, both ask the same question: with only one stretch of time, what is worth trading it for? What winter stores away is not only things, but time.

十六世纪，琵琶湖边的一个村子。战乱的军队随时会过境，一个陶工想趁乱把瓷器挑到城里卖个好价钱，妻子抱着孩子劝他别去；同行的内弟一心想当武士。渡湖那天，雾里漂来一条船，船上的人留下一句警告。影片从这里分成两条路：一条通向生意与奇遇，一条通向家里等的人。它不急着告诉你哪条更贵。

It won the Silver Lion at the 14th Venice Film Festival in 1953, on Mizoguchi's first trip outside Japan, and is credited with helping to popularise Japanese cinema in the West. Sight & Sound placed it in the critics' top ten in both 1962 and 1972 and 50th in its 2012 poll of the greatest films ever made. Rotten Tomatoes records a 100% approval rating across 30 reviews (average 9.40/10), and the Village Voice ranked it 29th among the 100 best films of the twentieth century in 2000. Donald Richie called it 'one of the most perfect movies in the history of Japanese cinema', singling out the long opening panorama that moves from lake to shore to village and the upward-tilting panorama at the end that answers it. Its standing rests equally on form. Mizoguchi told cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa that he wanted the film to unroll seamlessly like a scroll painting; Miyagawa kept the lighting low, filmed as near to sunset as possible and shot a large share of the film from cranes — he later claimed crane shots made up some 70 percent of it. Fumio Hayasaka's score draws on the geza music of Kabuki theatre, with the harp reserved for the presence of the supernatural. The screenplay takes two stories from Ueda Akinari's 1776 collection Ugetsu Monogatari and borrows the skeleton of an 1883 Maupassant short story for the samurai subplot. Screenwriter Yoshikata Yoda said that as the film developed, the question of how war makes women suffer kept surfacing until it became the dominant theme: a ghost story on the surface, a film about war and its cost underneath. This archive already holds Kurosawa's Rashomon in its 1950 slot; the two films face each other across the years in which Japanese cinema reached Western audiences.