Ugetsu

With civil war under way in sixteenth century Japan, a potter and a farmer leave their village, one to make money, the other to become a samurai. Both leave their wives behind. The film holds ambition and a ghost story in the same narrative. The supernatural passage begins with no warning; the camera crosses into another world inside a single shot without a cut, and those transitions remain the most studied thing about it. Kenji Mizoguchi directed, with Machiko Kyo in the cast. It took the Silver Lion in Venice. Before watching: the women pay far more heavily than the men's ambition costs, and the film does not soften this. Wartime violence and rape are made plain, if not shown directly.