A Film Canon

On the one hand, Street Of Shame culminates the social realist trend in Mizoguchi's body of work. Originally intended to be a semidocumentary take on Tokyo's red light district - the literal translation of the title - the narrative turns on a series of frank, straightforward depictions and discussions of the financial straits that have driven four women into prostitution, and their various attempts to escape. This documentary quality is enhanced by the topical backdrop of Japan's first Anti-Prostitution Bill - and Mizoguchi's sympathies are encapsulated in the most pervasive identification of prostitution with business in his career (or, alternatively, disassociation of prostitution from the aestheticised geisha). Nevertheless, his fascination with female suffering as an aesthetic experience simultaneously culminates his fantastic proclivities, particularly in his Expressionist delineation of the brothel 'Dreamland', and its surrounding alleyways; a lurid, tipsy, hallucinatory world whose threatening ambience precludes the need for his characteristic tracking-shot, and ultimately becomes continuous with the horror of lost virginity. The common denominator between these two modes is an exquisite deep-focus that continually relegates figures to the middle distance, with ominous darkness or blackness intervening.