Notes on Burch Ch. 21

Passages adapted directly from To the Distant Observer with special reference to comments about Sisters of Gion

Diegesis refers to the fictional world of the narrative. It includes all the events that that are presumed to have occurred and actions and spaces not shown on screen.

The mode of representation of mainstream realist cinema is centered on the actions of human characters in the diegetic world. In other words, it is anthropocentric and character-based. As with many of the norms of mainstream cinema, this may seem to be a natural, or necessary part of telling a story. Hollywood realist cinema subordinates all aspects of film production and style to smooth continuity, the illusion of depth, and the centering of the human narrative. It is precisely to question that sense of naturalness that Burch takes up the study of Japanese film.

Mizoguchi takes great pleasure in the "long shot." By the time of Sisters of Gion, Mizoguchi’s mature systemics in all its pertinent traits was in place. They are: long takes, systemic rejection of editing in general, of the reverse-field in particular, and of the close-up. (224)

The long shot has its origins in western cinema but is preponderant in Japanese cinema…We have outlined the historical process by which the codes of narrative editing supplanted the primitive single-take sequence in dominant western cinema during the second decade of the century. But the long-take reemerges. But in the 1930s the majority of directors abandoned the long take in favor of a refined master-shot system which was more economical and better adapted to the needs of canned theater. . .Although Mizoguchi’s own approach ultimately converged with that of western academic filmmakers, it is, in Sisters of Gion, radically at odds with it.

The dominant western approach to the long take has been aimed at integrating the succession of frames, the movements that link them, as ‘organically’ as possible into the diegesis, in terms of both external, physical, and ‘inward,’ or psychological, narrative movement. It has always been considered particularly important to reconstitute the whole ‘expressive’ range of shot sizes, as they figure in the editing codes, per se..The Sisters of Gion does not completely eliminate close-ups. On the whole, however, the film does tend to turn its back on the linear deployment of the visual signifiers so essential to the western mode.

e.g. the scene in which Omocha gets rid of her sister’s ruined merchant friend. The entire sequence is shot with a fixed camera placed at the inner end of the sitting room. The characters. . .occupy only the lower left-hand quarter of the screen. The relationship of sound (dialogue) to picture is totally different from those we find in the dominant western system be it edited, reverse-field variant or the ‘Bazinian’ single-take sequence, with the subtle displacement/variation of the codes that it implies. The pro-filmic space depicted here offers a complex iconographic syntagma, i.e., a large section of the room equipped with specific artifacts, etc., and these signifiers are at all times simultaneously represented on the screen. The actors’ movements and gestures, however ‘expressive’, are at all times meshed with a set of visual signs which the eye must also sort out and decipher, all the more so as in this shot—as so often in Mizoguchi—the characters are not centered, "there is too much room over their heads" as a western studio cameraman might put it. This is a decisive factor, for these relatively small, distant figures are thereby designated as part of a framed totality, one which includes and is visually dominated by a profusion of other signs. The whole procedure, the distance, the de-centering, underlines, moreover, the ultimately non-anthropocentric quality of Mizoguchi’s mature style. Most important is the fact that no editing pattern, in either a narrow or an extended sense, reinforces the semantic pattern of the dialogues as they unfold over the low table; picture and text become virtually detached from one another. To all intents and purposes we are watching a slide show, or again, the doll (i.e., puppet or bunraku) theater.

As for the role of camera movement, in what may both literally and figuratively be called a distancing system, it does, in several instances, serve simply to maintain distance. The camera movement serves to maintain both distance and the de-centered composition which is its essential complement. (224-227)

Let us recall that it is Burch's contention that the modes of representation of Hollywood realist cinema were developed in order to support a method of storytelling that strives for maximum diegetic effect in a linear, character-centered narrative. He brought up three "axes" which can be seen as choices with which the emerging cinema was faced as it developed its norms of representation.

oThe first axis is "continuity/ discontinuity", and Hollywood realist cinema emphasizes continuity in order to achieve its goals of maximum story illusion.

oThe second axis is "surface/ depth", and again, we examined several devices which realist cinema uses to promote the illusion of a three dimensional story space on the two dimensional screen.

oBurch identifies a third axis along which Hollywood realist cinema based its mode of representation, the Axis of Centering/Decentering.

Insofar as a mode of representation constantly directs attention to the human center of interest of a linear narrative, i.e., to the part of the diegetic world containing the most important information for the progress of the narrative, it may be said to be "centering" the narrative information. As you may expect, since Western cinema [Hollywood Realist Cinema] stresses the linear comprehension of a character-based narrative, it will work for a high degree of centering.

The mode of representation of mainstream realist cinema is centered on the actions of human characters in the diegetic world. In other words, it is anthropocentric and character-based. As with many of the norms of mainstream cinema, this may seem to be a natural, or necessary part of telling a story. Hollywood realist cinema subordinates all aspects of film production and style to smooth continuity, the illusion of depth, and the centering of the human narrative. It is precisely to question that sense of naturalness that Burch takes up the study of Japanese film.

Lest there be any misunderstandings, I claim that the Mizoguchi of Sisters of Gion, Tale of Late Chrysanthemum's and possibly, too, other films of that period, is no doubt the greatest of all Japanese directors, in the way that we Westerners judge such matters.

Mizoguchi was throughout his career a master of dramatic narrative in a sense that Ozu was not. And judged according to the stylistic criteria of dominant criticism, The Life of a Woman or Sansho the Bailiff are no doubt in all respects the equal of Sisters of Gion. . .But from our theoretically oriented standpoint the importance of these early films is incomparably greater; their superior internal rigor is due in large part to the director's fidelity to the otherness of his native culture--just as his ultimate decline must be understood within the context of Japan's historical situation and that of her cinema after the 1945 defeat. (246)