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Kenji Mizoguchi
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.