MIZOGUCHI: THE MASTER
The films of Kenji Mizoguchi, along with those of Kurosawa and Ozu, are perhaps
the most celebrated works of Japanese cinema throughout the world. In the years
since his death in 1956, his reputation as one of the master directors of world
cinema has continued to grow. Few critics today would neglect to include at
least one Mizoguchi film on their short lists of "best films of all time,"
and audiences the world over return again and again to his films, discovering
something new in them with each re-viewing.
Kenji Mizoguchi’s life closely parallels the development of cinema in Japan:
born in 1898, only a year or two after the introduction of the first Kinetoscope
and Vitascope films into Japan, Mizoguchi entered the film industry in the early
1920s, just as filmmakers were breaking away from the conventions of Japanese
traditional theater to establish themselves as independent artists. Though Mizoguchi
made eighty-five films during his thirty-three years as a director (1923-56),
his exalted international reputation rests on a relatively small number of works.
Only about a dozen of his films are in regular distribution outside Japan, and
of these fewer than half are seen with any real frequency. Among them, the three
masterpieces that brought international acclaim to Mizoguchi by winning top
awards at the Venice Film Festival in three consecutive years -- The Life
of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu (1953), and Sansho the Bailiff (1954)
-- continue to fascinate us with their extraordinary artistry.
If there is a single theme uniting all of Mizoguchi’s films, a "red
thread" running through his entire body of work, it is his sympathy for
individuals, particularly women, who are victimized by society. His very first
film, The Resurrection of Love (Ai ni Yomigaeru Hi), a story of two impoverished
sisters in love with an artist, has been described as "a portrayal of the
poor so devastatingly realistic that it proved unacceptable to the censors"
when it was made in 1923. Much the same could be said of his very last film,
the 1956 Street of Shame (Akasen Chitai), a sensitive portrayal of the
hardships suffered by prostitutes, made at the time of a national debate over
a new anti-prostitution law. In all his films, Mizoguchi’s compassionate
humanism hovers like a protective angel over the women oppressed by society
as he investigates with remarkable delicacy the nuances of human relationships.
And in each film, regardless of whether it is a medieval ghost story, an adaptation
from Maupassant or Eugene O’Neill, or a domestic tragedy unfolding in the
back alleys of modern Osaka, the viewer is enveloped in an atmosphere perfectly
attuned to the subject at hand. Transcending mere accuracy in selecting and
decorating his settings, Mizoguchi seems almost to control the textures and
vapors and aromas that draw the viewer totally into the worlds he created on
film.
The words of Akira Kurosawa, spoken in eulogy at Mizoguchi’s funeral, serve
as eloquent commentary of the admiration of one Japanese film master for another:
"Mizoguchi’s greatness was that he would do anything to heighten
the reality of every scene. He never made compromises. He never said that
something or other ‘would do.’ Instead, he pulled or pushed everyone
along with him until they had created the feeling which matched his own inner
image. He had the temperament of a true creator. Mizoguchi pushed and bullied
and was often criticized for it. But he held out, and in doing so he created
masterpieces.... Directors like him are especially necessary in Japan, where
this kind of pushing is so resisted. Of all Japanese directors, I have the
greatest respect for him..... With the death of Mizoguchi, Japanese film has
lost its truest creator."
If Mizoguchi was the poet of women, he was also the poet
of houses, rooms, landscape and urban vistas. His period detail and sumptuous
camera style lent his stories a fantastic naturalism, heightened by an almost
musical editing style. He was capable of everything from waspish comedy
to tenderness to epic battle scenes. He was a director for all seasons,
and Kurosawa - far better known in the west - freely acknowledged Mizoguchi
as his master
.
Sisters of Gion (1936)
The women who embody Mizoguchi's ideal often live in a time
too far in the past to be role models for today, a quirk of which Mizoguchi
seems to have been aware. He once said of himself that he portrayed "what
should not be possible as if it should be possible," a statement that
most aptly describes the virtues of his period heroines. . .Mizoguchi's ideal
postwar women show the same self-sacrificing characteristics, but they move
yet farther into the past while developing a spiritual power to transcend
their physical suffering. . .In all of these paragon portrayals, the vision
of society remains the same. The dramatic form is tragic, and spiritual success
brings death and worldly defeat. . .The other side of the paragon is the rebel.
She is often a prostitute or geisha or similar social outcast, and most often
a contemporary woman. She resents the abuses of fathers, employers, and men
who buy her and leave her, and attempts to lash back. But her solitary, proud,
spiteful opposition does nothing to change the system, and in fact she usually
subscribes to its corrupt values, using seduction, deceit and financial exploitation
as her methods for revenge. She has nothing spiritual with which to replace
the consuming love relationship, and in rejecting it she condemns herself
to a life of self-seeking bitterness. She often appears with a meek woman
counterpart who underscores the unviability of either stance in the modern
world. . .
Omocha (literally "toy'), the modern geisha is Sisters
of the Gion (1936), resents the way men treat women as objects and mocks
her older sister's devotion to a bankrupt former patron. Setting out to beat
men at their own game, she deceives and ruins a sincere young store clerk
and has his employer provide her with what she wants: money, pretty clothes
and fancy restaurant meals. But as surely as her sister's old patron returns
to his wife and a new business opportunity, the clerk takes revenge on Omocha,
and she ends up in a hospital bed decrying the institution of geisha while
her abandoned sister sits sobbing at her side.
Audie Bock, Japanese Film Directors, pp. 42-43.