Kenji Mizoguchi / 沟口健二 · 1953
Ugetsu
雨月物語
Misty lake, back rooms, fields, and garden extend space through adjacent fragments rather than a total viewpoint. Overflow from the bath leads to fields and then to a meal months later. One line of the universe passes through the seductive ghost and returns to the dead wife's presence, joining living, dead, and social oppression.
Film details
- Original title
- 雨月物語
- Director
- Kenji Mizoguchi / 沟口健二
- Year
- 1953
- Region
- Japan
Film analysis: how shots organize concepts
Adjacent fragments and moving shots trace a line of the universe joining misty lake, desire, dead wife, and oppressed home without erasing differences.
- 01Mist limits the visible
A boat glides through mist as the shore disappears and another boat carrying a wounded man emerges.
Continuous movement connects mutually opaque spaces, placing living and death on one line. - 02Fragments extend time-space
Overflow from a bath cuts to fields and then to a garden meal months later, without explanatory dissolve.
Adjacent spaces bear the temporal leap, extending small form along heterogeneous vectors. - 03Movement recalls the dead wife
Genjūrō circles the empty house and finds his wife on re-entering; morning leaves only grave and child.
The walking line joins actual home to the dead's presence, returning desire's cost to social reality.
Close-reading questions
- 01The boat glides across the misty lake as shore disappears and another vessel emerges; how does a continuous journey become, through narrowed visibility, a space joining living and dead?
- 02Overflow from the bath cuts to fields and then to a meal months later: water flow → spatial progression → temporal leap. How is continuity built from adjacent fragments rather than dissolves?
- 03Genjūrō circles the empty house and finds his wife on entering again: walking line → absence → ghostly presence. How does a line of the universe reconnect desire, death, and home?
Analysis and scene sources
Shots and scenes
Primary texts, scholarship, and locators
Theory coordinate: Cinema 1, Minnesota 1986, ch. 11, pp. 193–195
- 01Cinema 1: The Movement-Image
Standard Minnesota English translation and a principal citation edition in Anglophone scholarship.
Open the atlas source record →
Viewing gateways and editions
- Verified complete Bilibili carrier: 雨月物语.1953.BD1080p.中文字幕bilibili.comOpen film page ↗
- Page access
- Accessible when checked
- Version extent
- Recorded as a complete version
- Source type
- User-uploaded page
Edition note: Chinese-subtitled single-part film · 1:37:12.
Link checked: 2026-08-25