"Filmmakers must study the film image and its potential for expression. This is our primary responsibility." – Kenji Mizoguchi

"What is beyond doubt is that Mizoguchi's art is based on the play of personal genius within the context of a dramatic tradition." – Jacques Rivette

Exalted by many among the Nouvelle vague, in particular Rivette, Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi's final film, completed just months before his death, interweaves portraits of five women working in “Dreamland,” a brothel in Tokyo’s notorious and then historic Yoshiwara red-light district.

Jacques Rivette characterised Mizoguchi's art as one of modulation, writing in reference to his use of the camera. that it was "placed always at the exact point so that the slightest shift inflects all the lines of space, and upturns the secret face of the world and of its gods."