Fine films by a Japanese master

Japanese master filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi made more than 80 films during a 30-year career, which began in the 1920s, the early days of Japan's film industry.

Trained as a graphic artist, Mizoguchi began his career in advertising, but by World War II he was one of the two most prolific and dominant filmmakers in his country next to his more famous contemporary, Yasujiro Ozu.

But today his work has been all but ignored both in Japan and in the West, where he is best known for his 1953 masterpiece

Ugetsu

, the epic tale of two 16th-century peasants trying to make a fortune during a civil war.

This neglect is partly due to taste: Postwar audiences saw Mizoguchi as too traditional and unhip. And, sadly, because of the poor state of film storage and restoration in Japan, most of the director's body of work has simply been lost.

Mizoguchi, who started out making Japanese versions of German expressionist classics, considered his real career to have begun in the mid-1930s, when he started addressing social issues. He instituted a new realism in Japanese cinema with films that meticulously detailed the social upheavals experienced by the Japanese as the country shifted from feudalism to modernism.

Mizoguchi's "Fallen Women" from the Criterion Collection (

» READ MORE: www.criterion.com

; $59.96; not rated) brings together four of the writer-director's most powerful social documents of the status of women in Japan.

The series begins with 1936's

Osaka Elegy,

which established Mizoguchi's bona fides as a social-realist artist. It's a sometimes melodramatic tale of a young woman who tries to maintain a respectable life as a switchboard operator but whose life goes into a tailspin when she is forced to begin a liaison with her boss to help support her ailing father.

Also from 1936, the more poetic

Sisters of the Gion

follows the bleak lives of two sisters who work as geisha in a working-class neighborhood.

The last two films in the collection,

Women of the Night

(1948) and

Streets of Shame

(1956), which Mizoguchi completed shortly before his death, are made in the spirit of Italian neorealism and contain little of the melodrama that sometimes weighed down the earlier films.

Night

mercilessly deconstructs the social and financial chaos and confusion that befell Japanese society after the war. It's about two sisters and their younger friend whose lives are destroyed because they cannot find decent men to support them.

Shame,

the best film in the collection, and one of Mizoguchi's greatest achievements, is a deceptively simple story that chronicles the lives of the women who work in a brothel in Tokyo's red-light district. It was released during the heat of a national debate about the legal status of prostitution in Japan, and some credit it with inspiring a new anti-prostitution law.