Mizoguchi's life spanned the most important years of the development of the Japanese cinema. Although he made over 85 films in a career that stretched over 30 years, over 50 of them have been lost, primarily through studio fires, the ravages of war or poor preservation methods. Those that remain include leftist-inspired "tendency films", literary adaptations, historical dramas, proto-feminist critiques, Meiji-period pieces and--from the later stage of his career--works of a more transcendental and symphonic nature.Although there are relatively few connecting threads in Mizoguchi's varied
