Blu-ray, DVD Release: The Life of Oharu

By
Laurence
– April 25, 2013Find Others: Blu-ray, DVD, Movie, New Release, NewsGet More: , ,

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: July 9, 2013
Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion

The Life of Oharu movie scene

Kinuyo Tanaka falls from grace in Kenji Mizoguchi's The Life of Oharu.

The 1952 drama The Life of Oharu is directed by Japan’s legendary Kenji Mizoguchi (Sansho the Bailiff).

The film is an epic portrait of an inexorable fall from grace, starring the great Kinuyo Tanaka (The Ballad of Narayama) as an imperial lady-in-waiting who gradually descends to street prostitution.

A peerless chronicler of the soul who specialized in supremely emotional, visually exquisite films about the circumstances of women in Japanese society throughout its history, Mizoguchi had already been directing movies for decades when he madeThe Life of Oharu. The movie proved to be the one that gained its director international attention, garnering him the Internatinoal Award at the 1952 Venice Film Festival and ushering in a new golden period for him.

Presented in Japanese with English subtitles, the Criterion DVD and Blu-ray editions of the film contain the following features:

• New high-definition digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• Introductory commentary by scholar Dudley Andrew
• Mizoguchi’s Art and the Demimonde, an illustrated audio essay featuring Andrew
• Kinuyo Tanaka’s New Departure, a 2009 film by Koko Kajiyama documenting the actor’s 1949 goodwill tour of the United States
• New English subtitle translation
• A booklet featuring an essay by film scholar Gilberto Perez

Buy or Rent The Life of Oharu
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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.