Jean-Luc Godard: S and D

See, I read that and my knee-jerk reaction is that I wish there were still Mizoguchi fans squaring off against the Kurosawa army in any tangible sense

Mizoguchi is oft canonized and criterionized still.

I don't begrudge Godard or Truffaut not knowing a lot of Japanese cinema - I'm sure it was pretty difficult to see stuff beyond Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa - it's accepting the framing of "well here's two directors from Japan, we must face them off against each other" that I find questionable.

xpost Hear hear! Team Mizoguchi all the way.

xpost
To be slightly fair to Godard and Truffaut, it was pretty difficult to see most Japanese films outside of Japan until well into the 1960s (the first international Ozu retrospective, for example, didn't take place until 1963). Kurosawa was always something of an exception.

If the S&S polls teach us anything is that once more films become available in the first place the stuff that was there before is seen in a different way.