Mizoguchi made films that seemed to come from the otherside of the grave. He viewed human passions with the stately, detached sympathyof someone who has seen it all, and his cinematic style, unfurling with theloveliness of a succession of magnificent Japanese prints, was the mostconsistently transcendental of any film director. Utamaro and His Five Women isperhaps the closest he came to an autobiographical statement about the making ofart. He took as his subject the great ukiyo-e (color print) artist Utamaro, whobroke with the conventional nature-subjects of the eighteenth century to form asupple, popular style based on the lives of geisha houses and sensuality.Mizoguchi portrays Utamaro as so absorbed in the act of vision that he can dolittle but watch helplessly (if compassionately) the thrashings and destructivelove affairs of the women who are his models.-Phillip!nbsp;Lopate