In what is perhaps the closest he came to filming an autobiographical statement about the making of art, Kenji Mizoguchi took as the subject of his first post-war film the rebel printmaker Utamaro, who broke with 18th-century tradition to form a supple, sensual art based on the lives of women in the geisha houses.
“Utamaro's rebellion takes both political and aesthetic form and Mizoguchi perceives each as integral to the other. Bright colors and fidelity to the details of ordinary life express the value Utamaro holds for the common person who never appeared in Japanese art.... His women are portrayed smoking, visibly aroused and enjoying sex, or in emotional outbursts.... And as he vows to ‘draw the beauty of women,' he speaks simultaneously for Mizoguchi, whose entire life's work can be seen as a tribute to woman and an impassioned unfolding of her persecution over centuries in a Japan demeaned by its feudal misogyny.” --Joan Mellen, “The Waves at Genji's Door”