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A retrospective of Kazuo Miyagawa’s work as cinematographer on the Criterion Channel

“The golden age of Japanese cinema would not have been the same without visionary cinematographer , as the Criterion Channel‘s now-streaming retrospective attests. Miyagawa, who over the course of his fifty-year career shot more than 130 films, brought his painterly eye to many of his country’s halcyon works of the 1950s, helping filmmakers such as Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, and Kon Ichikawa express their respective sensibilities on-screen.

One of Miyagawa’s biggest fans—John Bailey, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and an acclaimed cinematographer in his own right—pays tribute to the astonishing range and adaptability of his talent. Here, Bailey compares the “revolutionary” photography of Kurosawa’s kinetic, high-contrast Rashomon with Miyagawa’s more muted and dreamlike approach to Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu, nodding finally to some of the Ichikawa films (Odd Obsession, Conflagration, Tokyo Olympiad) that took the cinematographer into more expressionist and technologically sophisticated territory. To explore the riches in our thirteen-film retrospective, simply click here.”

About the author

Rouven Linnarz

Ever since I watched Takeshi Kitano's "Hana-Bi" for the first time (and many times after that) I have been a cinephile. While much can be said about the technical aspects of film, coming from a small town in Germany, I cherish the notion of art showing its audience something which one does normally avoid, neglect or is unable to see for many different reasons. Often the stories told in films have helped me understand, discover and connect to something new which is a concept I would like to convey in the way I talk and write about films. Thus, I try to include some info on the background of each film as well as a short analysis (without spoilers, of course), an approach which should reflect the context of a work of art no matter what genre, director or cast. In the end, I hope to pass on my joy of watching film and talking about it.

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