Jean-Luc Godard on Kenji Mizoguchi:
"Gallantry and metaphysics
If poetry is manifest in each second, each shot filmed by Mizoguchi, it is because, as with Murnau, it is the instinctive reflection of the film-maker’s creative nobility. Like the director of Sunrise, the director of Ugetsu Monogatari can describe an adventure which is at the same time a cosmogony.
His heroines are all the same, strangely resembling Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. The most terrible adventures befall them, one after the other. And if Mizoguchi shows a marked predilection for brothels, he refuses — unlike Kurosawa, who is merely a more elegant Ralph Habib — to become trapped by the false glitter of the picturesque. When he re-creates old Japan, he goes beyond tinsel and anecdote to give us the unvarnished truth with a mastery equalled only by a Francesco, giullare di Dio. Never have we seen, seen with our own eyes, the Middle Ages exist with such intensity of atmosphere.
A revolutionary technique of simplicity
Efficacity and sobriety are the characteristics of great film-makers. And Kenji Mizoguchi does not belie this rule. As Philippe Demonsablon pointed out in a pertinent article on The Life of O’Haru, his art is to abstain from any solicitation irrelevant to its object, to leave things to present themselves without intervention from the mind except to efface its traces, thus increasing a thousandfold the efficacity of the objects it presents for our admiration. It is, therefore, a realist art, and the mise en scéne will be realist.
This simplicity is not without paradox, for it must achieve its austerity through an accumulation of matter. The compositions are guided initially by the laws of movement. But there is no Baroque embellishment, no purpose other than to allow the substance itself to reach us. No image is comic, tragic, fanciful, erotic in itself, and yet is all these things at once. Mizoguchi’s art is the most complex because it is the simplest. Camera effects and tracking shots are rare, but when they do suddenly burst into a scene, the effect is one of dazzling beauty. Each crane shot (here Preminger is easily outstripped) has the clean and limpid line of a brush-stroke by Hokusai."
— Godard on Godard: Critical Writings by Jean-Luc Godard, edited by Jean Narboni and Tom Milne (1972; Da Capo Press edition, 1986)