11th Century Japan. A mother and two young children journey through the marshlands alone, until a kindly old woman offers them shelter for the night and promises to find them safe passage the next morning. What happens next is shocking and brutal.
The third of the great Japanese masters, Mizoguchi is a poet of suffering; temperamentally he falls midway between the restless dynamism of Kurosawa and the calm contemplation of Ozu. He is a pictorialist, renowned for his long, flowing takes, but watching Sansho the Bailiff (his 81st film, and his most acclaimed in the West) you’re as likely to be impressed by the harrowing tragedy that unfolds as the exquisite imagery. Based on a traditional Japanese fable, this is a film about the struggle between the powerful and the enslaved, and humanity’s capacity to endure and withstand oppression and injustice. (Not that compassion gets these characters very far.)
Sunday’s Pantheon screening will feature a 15-minute introduction by a local film scholar and be followed by an audience talkback.
The humanism in Mizoguchi and the Shakespearean sweep of time and society are akin to Renoir’s vision of life’s theater. Their language was the same: the way camera movements expanded consequence; spatial connections that spoke to likeness; and the suffering. Mizoguchi’s work of the fifties is the great tragic moment of cinema… This is a perfect film, one in which we never notice execution or exactness.
David Thomson
I have seen Sansho only once, a decade ago, emerging from the cinema a broken man but calm in my conviction that I had never seen anything better.
Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
Sansho the Bailiff is one of those films for which cinema exists—just as it perhaps exists for the sake of its last scene.
Gilbert Adair
Kenji Mizoguchi
Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshiaki Hanayagi, Kyoko Kagawa, Masao Shimizu, Eitarô Shindô, Atikake Kono
Japan
1954
In Japanese with English subtitles
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Credits
Producer
Masaichi Nagata
Screenwriter
Fuji Yahiro, Yoshikata Yoda
Cinematography
Kazuo Miyagawa
Editor
Mitsuzo Miyata
Original Music
Fumio Hayasaka
Art Director
Kisaku Ito, Kozaburo Nakajima
Also in This Series
The greatest films of all time.
Fantasia
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Image: © Disney, 1940
Breaking the Waves
Kicking off our 2026 Pantheon series of the greatest films ever made, Lars von Trier's 1996 masterpiece is a devastating melodrama featuring an indelible performance from Emily Watson as the woman whose love for her husband knows no bounds.
Antonia's Line
This month's Pantheon selection spotlights the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the Dutch feminist filmmaker Marleen Gorris, and her charming, vibrant tale of an emancipated farmer who refuses to conform.
Sansho the Bailiff
The third of the great Japanese masters (with Ozu and Kurosawa), Mizoguchi is a poet of suffering. There's plenty of that here in his exquisite telling of an ancient folktale about the enslavement of a woman and her two children.
The Leopard
Lampedusa's elegiac account of a 19th century Sicilian aristocrat, Prince Salina, fading into history is one of the pinnacles of Italian cinema, an epic which influenced the tempo and gravitas of The Godfather, Age of Innocence and The Deer Hunter.
Rear Window
James Stewart is the man who sees too much. "Jeff" Jeffries is a sports photographer waylaid by a broken leg, doomed to spend the summer in a wheelchair in his New York apartment. That's how he comes to witness a murder in the dead of night (or does he?).
Day of Wrath
Anna, the young second wife of a well-respected but much older pastor, falls in love with her stepson when he returns to their small seventeenth-century village. Stepping outside the bounds of the village's harsh moral code has disastrous results.
