The value of people and things truly depends on their setting.

Mizoguchi Film of Rumor, Production Design and Emotional Register

by

Kato Mikiro
from:http://www.cmn.hs.h.kyoto-u.ac.jp/CMN3/text6.html

Let me begin with a native question: who is Mizoguchi Kenji? The auteurist critics, even Jean-Luc Godard, would not know who he is. Even the biographers who worked earnestly under the director, such as Shindo Kaneto and Yoda Yoshikata,*2 seem not to tell us who the director really was.

But let me answer the question tentatively: Mizoguchi Kenji is the name for a filmic existence who had good control of the quintessential elements in a film. A narrative film consists mainly of light, production design, actors and script. No other director seems to know better than Mizoguchi Kenji how these four elements should be integrated onto the silver screen. Indeed in any Mizoguchi film, a script is precisely translated into a beautiful three-dimensional set around which an actor moves, and on which light is shed to convey emotional emphasis. Space, motion and emotion are concisely and symbolically interrelated. As director, Mizoguchi Kenji accomplished such a filmic interrelation. And he considered production design to be the most important element. Okamoto ken-ichi, a lighting director*3 of Mizoguchi's films, once told me that Mizoguchi insisted on the authenticity of the set. Nevertheless, no critical studies seem to have ever tried to examine the importance of the set in Mizoguchi's films.

The present essay analyses how the production design in Mizoguchi's films functions in order to tell an emotional tale effectively. For convenience and economy of analysis, I mainly discuss Woman of Rumor, which, despite undeniably superb performance of the actress Tanaka Kinuyo, has enjoyed insufficient critical attention not only in the United States but also in Japan. Woman of Rumor is a late film, coming after Sansho the Bailiff and followed by Crucified Lovers (A Story by Chikamatsu). But Woman of Rumor is not less important than these two internationally acclaimed films. Indeed Woman of Rumor (1954) is more passionate than Jacques Doillon's La Pirate (1984) and even more precisely than Max Ophuls' Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948). Remarkably astounding is the authenticity and precision of the production design by Mizutani Hiroshi and the properties supplied by Kozu Shokai Co.,Inc. In the beautiful okiya (a kind of boarding house for geishas) set, the bustling mistress of the house (Tanaka Kinuyo) comes into conflict with her younger lover and her own daughter. The supertechnical combination of Miyagawa Kazuo's camera and Okamoto Ken-ichi's lighting captures this tense love triangle in an almost documentary-like style of detachment. Just as in his own Sisters of Gion, the screenwriter Yoda Yoshikata (whose family name is given as homage to an Oriental sage appearing in The Empire Strikes Back) vividly depicts women of firm determination whose attitudes toward life form a striking contrast to those of indecisive, irresponsible men in Kyoto.

Two examples would sffice to show how Mizoguchi Kenji minutely constructed the emotional aspect of Woman of Rumor through the production design. As the manager of geishas of the okiya, Tanaka Kinuyo sits behind the choba (cash desk) is half partitioned by shoji (a kind of paper screen) from the lobby (Fig.1). The shoji is lit up from the inside, so that we can faintly see the latticework of the partition through the fine paper. And this latticework is a basic visual structure of the film. Woman of Rumor is a narrative film whose events exclusively take place in an old traditional Kyoto wooden frame house. Therefore cross-stripes reappear again and again as tatami boarders, coffers, lattice doors and partitions, and even as tartan checks of kimonos. Among them, the latticework of the shoji which partitions the cash desk behind which Tanaka Kinuyo sits as the only legitimate subject is the main persistent sign of the woman of rumor. As a widow, she has managed the okiya without the economical help of men, but now she dreams of remarriage with her younger lover, a seemingly promising medical doctor. In the relatively dark lobby, characteristic of the structure of Kyoto houses,*4 the cash desk in a dim light emerges and asserts itself discreetly. The cash desk in a dim light, in so far as Tanaka has managed the okiya by herself, is as it were a small island in a dark sea (Fig 2). On the island, she seems safe and proud of herself. The cash desk persistently appears in the film; indeed it appears no less than fifteen times. The partitioned cash desk in a dim light is a vivid symbol of the independent but undeniably lonely life of a middle-aged widow, similar to the neon sign outside the restaurant Joan Crawford runs in Mildred Pierce (1945). Moreover, the fact that we can see the latticework through the thin paper screen produces a telling metaphor of film viewing: we, as spectators, see Tanaka's true feeling, her real emotion through the surface.

If Woman of Rumor is a film melodrama, then why do we not take into consideration a deep emotional register under/behind the surface? A second example, the splendid sequence where Tanaka realizes the love triangle, will show how the production design functions as an emotional register in the film. During a Kyogen (Japanese traditional farce) performance whose theme is a making fun of love in old age, Tanaka overhears her young lover chatting with her daughter, and realizes that he seduced her daughter. At the moment she realizes his betrayal, Tanaka shows us a fearful face rimmed with a crooked stalk arranged for ikebana (Japanese traditional flower arrangement (Figs 3-4). This is the most astounding shot in the film, because it is the only shot where a crooked thing is shown to us emphatically except for the very first title shot of the film (Fig 5). Square patterns, as I discussed above, are the ruling visual motif in the film. Despite the rule, however, the film shows the woman of rumor rimmed with the crooked pattern two times: first, literally the title of Woman of Rumor; second, the referent (the woman who overhears the rumor) the title referred to at the very beginning of the narrative. In other words, Tanaka feels crushed at the betrayal, and the production design registers her emotional crisis through the prop (crooked stalk).

Before the betrayal, however, she was safe and proud of herself inside the latticework of the cash desk. Through the striking contrast between the cross and crooked patterns, we can grasp the emotional shift of the heroine. The total visual concept of the film is determined by Mizoguchi Kenji in collaboration with the production designer
Mizutani Hiroshi. A motion picture, by definition, must make visible the invisible, such as emotion. And Mizoguchi adopts this policy: the mise en scene by Mizoguchi rightfully includes the visual network throughout the entire film. In the name of Mizoguchi Kenji, we recognize a director who has a talent to register actors' emotion through the visible: production design.

NOTES

This paper was originally published in Gerald O'Grady ed., Mizoguchi the Master (Toronto: Cinematheque Ontario, 1996).

1 Japanese names are written in the standard Japanese form: family name before given name.

2 Shindo Kaneto, Aru Eiga Kantoku:Mizoguchi Kenji to Nihon Eiga (A Film Director: Mizoguchi Kenji and Japanese Cinema) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1976); Yoda Yoshikata, Mizoguchi Kenji no Hito to Geijutsu (The Life and Art of Mizoguchi Kenji) (Tokyo: Tabata Shoten, 1970).

3 The position of director of photography does not exist in the Japanese studio system; instead, the camera operator has almost the same power as the director of photography except for lighting, which is entrusted to the lighting director.

4 For a fuller discussion of the relationship between Kyoto and cinema, see Nakajima Sadao, Tsutsui Kiyotada, Kato Mikiro and Iwasaki Kenji, Eiga Roman Kiko (Kyoto, the Cine-city) (Kyoto: Jinbun Shoin, 1994). This book is written both in English and in Japanese.

Review of Ugetsu by Roger Ebert (2004)

Two brothers, one consumed by greed, the other by envy. In a time when the land is savaged by marauding armies, they risk their families and their lives to pursue their obsessions. Kenji Mizoguchi's "Ugetsu" (1953) tells their stories in one of the greatest of all films -- one which, along with Kurosawa's "Rashomon," helped introduce Japanese cinema to Western audiences. The heroes are rough-hewn and consumed by ambition, but the film style is elegant and mysterious, and somehow we know before we are told that this is a ghost story.

The opening shot is one of Mizoguchi's famous "scroll shots," so named for the way it pans across the landscape like a Japanese scroll painting. We see a village, the roofs of the rude houses weighed down by tree branches to keep them from blowing away in the wind. We meet Genjuro (Masayuki Mori), a potter, and his brother Tobei (Eitaro Ozawa), a farmer. Although gunshots on the wind suggest an army is near, Genjuro is loading a cart with bowls, cups and vases, packed in straw. His wife Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka) begs him not to risk a trip to the city at this time of conflict -- to stay home to protect her and their son. But he insists, and Tobei, filled with goofy excitement, insists on coming along, despite the protests of his wife Ohama (Mitsuko Mito).

Genjuro returns with treasure: gold coins, which he insists his wife weigh in her hand. He makes her a gift of a beautiful fabric, bought in the city, but doesn't understand when she says that the cloth means less than his love for her. All he can talk about is making more pots and more money. Blinded by the gold, he returns to his work with a frenzy.

Tobei sees a great samurai on their trip and tries to enlist in his army, but is turned away as a "dirty beggar" because he has no armor. Now the two men plan their next assault on the city, although when an army sweeps through on the night they have fired the kiln, they fear their work has been lost. Not so; the pots survive, and this time they think it will be safer to journey by boat across the lake to the city, instead of by land.

The famous lake scene is the most beautiful in the film. Shot partly on a tank with studio backdrops, it creates a world of fog and mist, out of which emerges a lone boatman who warns them of pirates. Genjuro returns to leave his wife and child on the shore, and continues with Tobei and Ohama. In the city, his work sells quickly, and he is invited to the castle of a beautiful noblewoman named Lady Wakasa, who admires his craftsmanship. She's played by Machiko Kyo, one of the greatest stars of the period, who was also the woman in "Rashomon."

Tobei wanders off from his wife and his brother. Time passes. He clumsily kills a samurai and steals the head of a foe that the samurai had killed. Presenting this trophy to the samurai lord, he is praised and given a horse, a house and men to follow him. Filled with pride, he brings his men for the night to a geisha house, only to find that his wife, raped by soldiers after he abandoned her, has become a geisha.

Elsewhere in the city, Genjuro visits a fabric shop and imagines his wife's joy when he brings her more beautiful dresses, but then Lady Wakasa appears, suggesting he may need a guide to her castle. He is mesmerized by her strange beauty; made up like a Noh heroine with smudges for eyebrows high on her forehead, her face shadowed by veils and a wide straw hat, she is like no woman he has ever seen.

At the castle, she drifts from behind screens and curtains and, regarding his simple pots, asks him, "How is such beauty created?" She praises and seduces him, and the critic Pauline Kael remembers she gasped with delight when he cried, "I never dreamed such pleasures existed!" Perhaps Genjuro should have taken warning when he heard the voice of the lady's dead father echoing through the room, and when her lady-in-waiting advised him, "Don't bury your talents in a small village! You must marry her!"

Mizoguchi (1898-1956) was famous for the theory that one scene should equal one cut, although sometimes he made exceptions. The great Yasujiro Ozu had the same theory, with the difference that Ozu's camera never moved in his later films, while Mizoguchi's style was constructed around flowing, poetic camera movement. Consider a scene where Lady Wakasa visits Genjuro as he is bathing in an outdoor pool, and as she enters the pool to join him, water splashes over the side and the camera follows the splash into a pan across rippling water that ends with the two of them having a picnic on the grass.

There is a crucial sequence when Genjuro goes back into the city, and on his return to the lakeside castle, is halted by a priest, who calls after him: "I see death in your face! Have you encountered a ghost?" He warns Genjuro against being "beguiled by a forbidden form of love."

Back at the castle Lady Wakasa begins to embrace Genjuro, but recoils, crying out, "There is something on his skin!" Indeed, the priest has covered Genjuro with symbols of exorcism, which seem to burn the noblewoman as if they are flames.

Lady Wakasa is of course a ghost (we never doubted it), and there is a haunting scene when Genjuro sees the castle as it really is, a burned ruin. There is a second ghost in the movie who we do not suspect, and the revelation in that case creates a touching emotional release. It comes toward the end, after both men have returned chastened to their village, and are forgiven by their wives for the male weakness of blinding ambition.

I learn from an article by Gary Morris in the Bright Lights Film Journal that Mizoguchi may have drawn on his own life in the story of "Ugetsu." When the director was a boy of 7, Morris writes, his father lost the family fortune in a reckless business venture. They moved to a poor district, and his 14-year-old sister Suzu "was put up for adoption and eventually sold to a geisha house." So perhaps the sins of the father were visited upon Mizoguchi's two heroes.

In a career that started in 1923, Mizoguchi ended with a series of masterpieces, including "Life of Oharu" (1952), "Sansho the Bailiff" (1954) and "Street of Shame" (1955), which in its consideration of geishas perhaps draws on the life of his sister. To enter his world, like entering Ozu's, is to find a film language that seems to create the mood it considers; the story and its style of telling are of one piece.

The characters in "Ugetsu" are down to earth, and in the case of Tobei, even comic, but the story feels ancient, and indeed draws on the ghost legends of Japanese theater. Unlike ghost stories in the West, Mizoguchi's film does not try to startle or shock; the discovery of the second ghost comes for us as a moment of quiet revelation, and we understand the gentle, forgiving spirit that inspired it.

Nor are Lady Wakasa's seduction techniques graphic; she conquers Genjuro not by being sexy or carnal, but by being distant and unfamiliar. Always completely cloaked, often hidden by veils, she enchants him not by the reality of flesh but by its tantalizing invisible nearness. I was reminded of Murnau's silent masterpiece "Sunrise" (1928), also about a country man who abandons his wife and child to follow an exotic woman across a lake to the sinful city.

The period detail is accurate and rich. The city marketplace, the headquarters of the samurai, Tobei's visit to a shop to buy armor and a spear, Genjuro's haste when he asks another merchant to watch his prized pots (for he must hurry after Lady Wakasa) -- all of these create a feudal world in which life is hard and escape comes through the silly dreams of men. Women are more cautious, and there is a blunt realism in the sequence where Miyagi, left behind, tries to protect and feed their son as armies loot and rape the countryside. At the end of "Ugetsu," aware we have seen a fable, we also feel curiously as if we have witnessed true lives and fates.

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-ugetsu-1953

More Comments:

Ugetsu uses woman’s fate to reveal the human cost of oppression. Thanks to her husband’s grotesque ambition, Ohama suffers rape and degradation as a prostitute. For Miyagi, family solidarity is everything, yet she is betrayed by her husband’s greed and inconstancy. She becomes a refugee mother in wartime, then a casualty of its violence. Both women, however, forgive their husbands, and help effect their redemption through fidelity and self-sacrifice. Ohama and Miyagi are just two of many sublime female sufferers in the Mizoguchi canon. Others can be found in The Life of Oharu(1952) and The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (1939).

Mizoguchi is revered for his subtle use of expressive devices embedded in Japanese cultural traditions. In the opening shot of Ugetsu, panning across a field creates the effect of unfolding an emakimono, or medieval Japanese scroll painting. The most famous proof of Mizoguchi’s visual mastery is the lake scene— beginning with a long shot that exquisitely blends boat and hovering mist. Ohama sings monotonously while a drum beats somewhere in the distance. These sounds add deft, suggestive touches to the scene in a way reminiscent of the supernatural moods created by Japanese suiboku-ga, monochromatic painting in India ink. A more violent effect is created when Ohama is raped by a gang of roving samurai. Her desperate, disheveled figure merges with the gloomy surroundings, evoking emotions further drawn by the chanting Noh chorus. Credit for these rich images must also go to cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, who worked on six other Mizoguchi films, including the last, Street of Shame (1956).

The influence of Noh drama on Mizoguchi also may be seen in the sinister Princess Wakasa, whose face is made up to resemble the most impassive and neutral Noh masks. Theater and religion come together in the final scene, whose pan of the village recalls the opening shot of the film. By then, the viewer is prepared for the broader symbolism ofUgetsu, animating the concept of mujo—the evanescence of all earthly things—so deeply rooted in Buddhism and so often a theme of Noh dramas.

Its perfect integration of thematic and aesthetic concerns marks Ugetsu as Mizoguchi’s finest achievement.

Keiko McDonald, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/966-ugetsu