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A male director's
relationship with his actress is almost always imbued with
myth. Kenji Mizoguchi's (1898-1956) collaboration with
Kinuyo Tanaka (1909-1977) is no exception. Stories revolving
around the private life of their romantic relationship tend
to fall into cliché, crediting Mizoguchi with
Tanaka's "rebirth" as a great actress with The life of
Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna, Japan 1952).
Tanaka's single-minded, passionate devotion to her
occupation is often compared to Mizoguchi's almost sadistic
attitudes toward actors and the eccentricity of his
perfectionist approach to filmmaking. Thus, romantic rumours
are sublimated into Romantic myth. It might be
tempting to look at artists in Mizoguchi films as Mizoguchi
substitutes - characters such as Hogetsu Shimamura (So
Yamamura), the theater director in The love of Sumako the
actress (Joyu Sumako no koi, Japan 1947); or
Utamaro (Minosuke Bando) in Utamaro and his five
women (Utamaro o meguru gonin no onna, Japan
1946). We might then superimpose their romantic and
aesthetic relations to such characters as, for example,
Sumako the actress or Okita the model onto the "real life"
story of Mizoguchi and Tanaka. In spite of many anecdotes
which address this off-screen life, however, Tanaka's
on-screen acting is rarely discussed. Do we really know
Tanaka and Mizoguchi? The most fascinating aspect of the
penultimate scene of The life of Oharu is the way in
which Tanaka scurries through the palace, chasing after her
son. How can we account for the fascination generated by her
steps? Another common
presupposition is that Mizoguchi took on the role of
transformer while Tanaka played the transformed. But isn't
the reverse possible? Tanaka plays the heroine in as many as
fourteen of Mizoguchi's films.
[2]
Isn't it reductive to frame the long career of an
accomplished actress as a matter of her merely being the
docile object of Mizoguchi the Pygmalion? Tanaka made her
film debut at the Shochiku studio in 1924 and soon became a
star. Her critically acclaimed performance as a young
married woman in Heinosuke Gosho's The neighbor's wife
and mine (Madamu to nyobo, Japan 1931) not only
secured her popularity as a talkie actress (contrary to the
studio's worries about her accent), but also symbolically
inaugurated the standardisation of sound in the Japanese
cinema. It is true that throughout the late 1940s, as Tanaka
herself entered her late thirties, she had to struggle to
outgrow her old star image as the "eternal girl" (mannen
musume), and that Mizoguchi films from this period, by
casting her in challenging roles, might have provided her
with the chance for a breakthrough. But the fact is that
Tanaka had been recognised as a talented actress long before
meeting Mizoguchi, and was an independent woman who, after
her visit to Hollywood in 1949, left Shochiku to work
freelance, providing her with the leverage to choose her
directors and the films.[3] I would like,
however, to transpose the issue from a question of who
influenced whom - which seems to me in any case extremely
difficult to substantiate - to an interpretive hypothesis
based on a reading of the film texts themselves. I argue
that some properties of Tanaka's acting effect, or interact
with, Mizoguchi's style. The period of their extensive
collaboration, from 1944 to 1954, occurs during a phase of
Mizoguchi's own stylistic transformation. A certain rupture,
or rather a gradual shift, in the use of camera movement in
relation to depth of field and actors' movement has been
observed in Mizoguchi's postwar films. His systematic
manipulation of off-screen space for its own sake and use of
depth of field and plan-séquence, the sum of
which dominates actors' movements, culminate in the late
1930s films such as The story of the last
chrysanthemums (Zangiku monogatari, Japan 1939)
and The loyal forty seven ronin (Genroku
chushingura, Japan 1941). Later, the strict use of these
formal properties gradually diminishes and leads to more
subtle camera gestures of the camera in the '50s. My goal in this
paper is to analyse Tanaka's acting in relation to
Mizoguchi's mise en scène. Hence, my subject
is not Tanaka the actress in general, but Tanaka as she
appears in these particular films. In Section 1, I will
examine critical discourses about Mizoguchi's
transformation, and factors which may have contributed to
the change of his film style. In Section 2, I posit the
register of power relations as the framework for my analysis
of Tanaka's acting and Mizoguchi's mise en
scène. My intention is not to discuss the general
field of representation of women in Mizoguchi's films, but
to consider how his films and her acting manifestly come
into shape as multiple power relations visible on the
screen. Sections 3 to 6 will be devoted to analyses of
films. There I will confine my discussion to Tanaka's acting
in three films: The love of Sumako the actress,
Miss Oyu and The life of Oharu. The seduction
of Kudo (Eitaro Shindo) by Omocha (Isuzu Yamada) in
Sisters of Gion (Gion no shimai, Japan 1936)
is also considered in order to define "prewar
Mizoguchi". It seems clear
that Mizoguchi's films underwent a change at a certain point
in his postwar career. Even a casual Mizoguchi watcher might
notice changes in a number of aspects. Beginning with The
life of Oharu, Mizoguchi tended to draw his subjects
from a world of Japanese tradition, and many of his films,
whose settings are placed in the pre-modern eras, fall into
the category of the period film (jidaigeki). This can
be accounted for not only by Mizoguchi's inherent
preferences, but also by his self-Orientalising gestures, as
it were, and aspirations for recognition in the West. It was
particularly fortunate that his inclination for "Japanese"
subjects coincided with the major Japanese studio Daiei's
ambition to develop overseas markets. Moreover, from a
thematic perspective, Tadao Sato's remark on women in
Mizoguchi films sums up the general critical
"impression": Even though a
woman's devotion to her lover/husband/father/brother is
clearly the main theme consistent throughout his entire
career, the sublimation of women's love to more spiritual,
religious transcendence notably colours many of the '50s
films. What Audie Bock describes as "a spiritual power to
transcend their physical suffering" resonates with Sato's
comment. [5]
In the later years of his life Mizoguchi's
belief in Buddhism deepened, and he might have consciously
or unconsciously tried to redeem his real-life abuse of
women in his films. Moreover, irrespective of such
biographical stories, this reading is undoubtedly relevant,
if we watch Mizoguchi's films at the level of the messages
he intended to express. I will not, however, delve into the
"transcendent" or "spiritual" Mizoguchi here.This is
because, firstly, in the three modern dramas
(gendaigeki) made after Oharu, i.e., A
geisha aka Gion festival music (Gion
bayashi, Japan 1953), A woman of rumour and
Street of shame (Akasen chitai, Japan 1956),
women's transcendence over earthly social relations is
ambiguous or almost non-existent. Second, and more
significantly, because I believe that in order to reread
Mizoguchi films as possible social criticism it is necessary
to bracket off the unambiguous messages Mizoguchi and
screenwriter Yoshikata Yoda manifestly convey, messages
which can be easily criticised from today's point of view as
a clumsy disguise of patriarchy. As I will elaborate later,
what could solicit feminist readings of Mizoguchi films
resides not in their transparent messages like "awaken
women's liberation from feudal fetters" (The victory of
women, My love has been burning and
Sumako), or the "eulogy of modern romantic love free
from feudal society" (The crucified lovers), but in
opaque signs disseminated in multiple layers of the
texts. Finally, and most
importantly, Mizoguchi's film language underwent a
significant transformation. Here, I would like to emphasise
two cinematographers [6]
who were, in my view, instrumental in the transformation of
Mizoguchi's style: Minoru (Shigeto) Miki in the '30s and
Kazuo Miyagawa in the '50s. It should be noted, however,
that it is extremely difficult, and perhaps misleading, to
try to detect the "author" of this or that aesthetic aspect
of a shot or sequence. On one hand, the cinematographers
tried to follow the Mizoguchian aesthetic which the director
had created in his previous films.
[7]
On the other hand, it is well known that while shooting
Mizoguchi never looked through the viewfinder, and placed
his entire trust in the cinematographer. Therefore, what I
attempt to do is not dig out an "author", but rather
introduce the cinematographer as an analytical frame to
define one period of Mizoguchi mise en scène,
as I do with Tanaka. Miyagawa, who
photographed most of Mizoguchi's films made in the '50s at
the Daiei Studio, [8]
seems to have consciously contributed to, or played a
crucial role in, the transformation of the director's style.
He recalls: "When Mizoguchi lost his enthusiasm for depth of
field, he started telling stories 'laterally,' with the help
of pans or traveling shots. You know, in Japan, there are
stories drawn on scrolls which unfold horizontally.
Mizoguchi tried to find an equivalent to these, first in the
screenplay, and then in the camera work."
[9]
Miyagawa's words testify to Mizoguchi's shift from the depth
of field to lateral traveling. Furthermore, his
emphasis on the suppleness and smoothness of camera
movements and his reference to the painted hand-scroll
coincide with Noël Burch's arguments - albeit
ironically. Burch, though appreciating the sophistication
and grace of Mizoguchi's 1950s films, dismisses their camera
movements as "the long take à la Wyler". Yet
Burch does not simply condemn the loss of the early
Mizoguchi's rigour and systematic application of long takes
and the depth of field.; rather, he deprecates the seamless
(i.e., "Western") property of the late Mizoguchi's
découpage: What Miyagawa
meant by "hand-scroll" (emakimono) is this smooth
flow of images. In this light, Burch's observation is
perfectly in accordance with the cinematographer's
intention, even though his evaluation is negative. Moreover,
the subtle difference between Burch's use of the
"hand-scroll" device and Miyagawa's is troubling, for this
figure was, to my knowledge, originally passed on by
Miyagawa via Mizoguchi's own words: Considering this
claim alongside Miyagawa's above statement in the
Cahiers interview, it is likely that Mizoguchi meant
by a "hand-scroll" not so much high-angle camera positions
and travelling/crane shots as smooth continuity, which might
go hand in hand with those techniques. At the same time,
Burch employs the figure of the hand-scroll to refer to the
'30s Mizoguchi camera movement and its effects. For Burch,
hand-scroll shots serve to highlight two distinctive devices
of Mizoguchi films: lateral traveling shots which pass and
penetrate partitions; and higher-than-eye-level camera
angles. The former achieves a fusion of two contradictory
aspects of space, which is to say, successive stages versus
steady flow; the latter results in an "ambiguous
presentation of the depth/surface relationship."
[12]
Here my aim is not to censure Burch's use of the
hand-scroll trope for its divergence from Mizoguchi's
intentions but, by examining the trope, to open up a
possibility of scrutinising how Mizoguchi's camera did, or
did not, undergo a shift. In fact, Burch's analysis of
Mizoguchi's travelling and high camera positions is
certainly productive not only in terms of Mizoguchi '30s
films but also the '50s work. Burch postulates
that The love of Sumako the actress is the last work
in which Mizoguchi displayed his innovative prewar style.
This observation takes on further significance in relation
to the cinemaphotography, for Sumako is also the last
collaboration of Mizoguchi and Shigeto Miki, the
cinematographer who shot most of the existing prewar
Mizoguchi films. [13]
When Mizoguchi began their collaboration, Miki had already
made a number of successful works as a cinematographer,
including Roningai (Japan 1928). Cinematographer Kozo
Okazaki, [14]
who began his career at the Shinko Kinema's Oizumi studio as
an assistant, describes Miki's work with Mizoguchi in an
interview with Tadao Sato: "[I]t is Miki who created
the picture which accorded with Mizoguchi's mise en
scène, by using a 25 mm wide lens, which has a
deep focal length". Then, in response to a question
concerning the date of Mizoguchi's turn to the deep focus,
Okazaki answers: Probably because
the late Miki worked on relatively low budget B-sword dramas
and yakuza films in the Toei studio which were not taken as
"artistic" (regardless of their high quality), and because
in his lifetime (1902-1968) the early Mizoguchi films he
photographed had not yet enjoyed wide recognition across the
world, Miki's work did not circulate as widely as
Miyagawa's. Furthermore, his first two films with Mizoguchi
were lost. Comparing The white threads of cascades
(Taki no shiraito, Japan 1933) to The downfall of
Osen (Orizuru Osen, Japan 1935) however, it
becomes clear that while in the second almost all the
properties of the prewar-sound Mizoguchi, such as distant
camera, deep staging and long take, are introduced, the
first manifests silent cinema aesthetics, such as
kaleidoscopic montage. Mizoguchi's films
are almost always about women. It is, however, arguable that
Mizoguchi strongly gravitates not toward women's beauty or
their sorrows but toward women in social relations, and in
particular to hierarchical power relations between the
sexes. Mizoguchi's view is succinctly illustrated in a 1952
interview: "In the first place, I have long thought that
after Communism solves the problems of class, male-female
problems would remain." [17]
Here his reference to Communism, though seemingly casual,
reveals that he considered the male-female relation to be
something like class relations, i.e., a historically
specific hierarchical system that serves as mode of
exploitation. Sato accurately points out Mizoguchi's
profound obsession with "the high/low positions in human
relations" and maintains: Sato's
observation is helpful in mapping out hierarchical
power/romantic relations in the Mizoguchian world. In
effect, modern romantic love, which theoretically bases
itself on human equality in bourgeois society, is what his
films often eulogise as an abstract ideal, but rarely
realise in a concrete form. It is symptomatic that both of
the films which preeminently foreground romantic love,
The story of the last chrysanthemum and The
crucified lovers, deal with love between servant and
master. Needless to say, inter-class romance has been the
privileged theme of melodrama, literature and film since the
nineteenth century. In this regard the two films share
rather conventional plots. Yet, while according to the
modern romantic mandate love transcends the class difference
between the lovers, and thereby generates two equal, loving
individuals, romantic love in these films never overcomes
the preexistent hierarchy. On the contrary, hierarchy is
ceaselessly re-inscribed into the acts of love. Otoku is
legitimised as Kiku's wife in her death bed; Osan and Mohei,
bound on a horse's back together, are led to the scaffold as
equal criminals. To my mind, however, it is not so much that
Mizoguchi tried to offer a critical exposition of the feudal
society which would not allow the lovers to be equal
individuals until their death, as that his films, or his
mise en scène, could never do away with
hierarchy. This raises a
further question: how are power relations actually
registered in Mizoguchi's films? Sato tries to answer this
question, as he implies in his use of the words "looking
up/down" in the above excerpt, by focusing on his preference
for high angles. According to Sato, in Mizoguchi films a
character's domination over another is represented through
acts of looking up/down, which work together with low/high
angles. He takes as an example the scene in Ugetsu in
which Princess Wakasa (Machiko Kyo) reveals her true nature
to her lover, Genzaburo (Masayuki Mori). In fact, the
threatening ghost princess' back is captured by the high
angle camera placed behind her, in connection with the shots
of her face from the point of view of Genzaburo who sits
petrified on the floor. Sato argues that here Mizoguchi
registers the princess' supernatural, social domination over
the potter by spatial construction through the respective
camera positions. [19] The matter is,
however, more complex than Sato suggests. First and
foremost, the analytical breakdown of space in this example
is rather exceptional in Mizoguchi's repertory of spatial
constructions. What marks his films is, as I will examine
later, the camera that captures both the oppressor and the
oppressed within a single frame. Therefore, it is not always
valid to claim that the camera angles formally lay out the
power relations between characters in the space. Secondly,
but of equally significance, unless the camera position is
firmly motivated by a character's psychology (as is the case
with POV shots), it is highly questionable whether we could
uncritically ascribe this or that camera movement and
position to any anthropomorphic meaning, especially in
Mizoguchi's case. It is also misleading to regard high-angle
crane shots as Mizoguchi's dominating gaze at actors or
people in the real life. By doing so, we would assume the
identification of author with film-narrator too
easily. Setting aside
camera movements, is Sato's related remark that the
characters' positions in space reflect their status in the
diegetic hierarchy relevant? In his sophisticated analysis
of A geisha, entitled "Oga to kenryoku [Lying
down and power]", Hisaki Matsuura dissects its intricate
fabric of power relations by reversing Sato's schema.
Matsuura points out that in A geisha, "by placing
those with the upcast look in the throne of power, contrary
to the common idea, Mizoguchi constructs a thoroughly tense
filmic space which naive psychological readings can never
penetrate." [20]
To put it more concretely, the rules of the game he deduces
from A geisha are: the dominator occupies the lower
position, especially by lying down, while the oppressed
occupies the higher position. Presumably Matsuura is
alluding to the "naive psychological readings" of Sato, and
as far as A geisha is concerned, his analysis is
detailed and convincing. The power relations in A
geisha, mediated by money and sex, are certainly
inscribed by the reversed high/low dynamics in a number of
scenes, such as when the government official Kanzaki (Kanji
Koshiba) brazenly remains lying on a futon when Miyoharu
(Michiyo Kogure) is brought to sleep with him against her
will. Although Matsuura's rules are not always applicable to
every Mizoguchi film, his "Lying down and power" offers a
significant perspective lacking in Sato. Space in Mizoguchi
films is always loaded with tense power relations, and the
relations are registered by the dialectic of camera and
acting, determined not by conventional, anthropomorphic
camera positions, but the intrinsic norms of the Mizoguchian
world. What marks
Tanaka's acting? How does it interact with the camera
movement, and Mizoguchi's mise en scène? To
examine these points, I will focus on "seduction" scenes
from Sisters of Gion, The love of Sumako the
actress, Miss Oyu and The life of Oharu.
There are several reasons for chosing this particular motif.
First of all, it seems likely that male/female power
relations are highly legible as they become crystallised in
seduction scenes. Also, since in these films sexual politics
is always interwoven with a socio-economic hierarchy,
seduction can never be purely romantic. Secondly, but
equally importantly, in seduction scenes where tension has
to be enacted, the four points that I consider crucial
properties of Tanaka's acting are most relevantly mobilised:
her smooth, prompt and light way of walking; fluid but
restless gestures; inclination to avoid eye contact; and
ambiguity in facial expressions. Sisters of Gion
serves to clarify the difference between Isuzu Yamada's
acting and Tanaka's. Finally, each seduction scene has its
own distinctive reason for being included in this analysis.
To wit: Sisters of Gion exemplifies Mizoguchi's films
in the prewar-sound era; Sumako is a transitional
piece which shows how Tanaka acts in the Mizoguchi-Miki
space, i.e., his prewar-sound style; Miss Oyu,
Mizoguchi-Tanaka's first collaboration with Miyagawa,
reveals her peculiar acting in its seemingly seamless
découpage; and Oharu posits a
culmination of the Mizoguchi-Tanaka collaboration. Whereas
the development of my discussion follows chronological
order, I do not thereby mean either to subscribe to the view
which accounts for a transformation of the director's
mise en scène as a "maturing process" or
"evolution", or to evaluate late Mizoguchi at the cost of
early Mizoguchi. The above four
properties of Tanaka's acting were exploited by other
directors to different ends. For example, Keisuke
Kinoshita's The army (Rikugun, Japan 1944)
capitalises on Tanaka's smooth, prompt steps and ambiguity
in facial expressions (points 1 and 4 of the above schema)
to bring the film to its truly melodramatic climax. The
mother (Tanaka) runs, searching after her son who is about
to be sent to the China front. After she finally discovers
her son, lateral travelling shots capture her plowing her
way through the excited crowd in order to keep up with her
son marching in the army procession. It is well known that
this sequence was criticised by the Home Ministry's censor
for failing to glorify the war, and yet it was too ambiguous
to be banned. Tanaka's acting, in cooperation with the
overwhelming effect of the travelling camera, hinges on her
command of multi-layered expressions rather than enigmatic
opacity. Accompanied by non-diegetic music with patriotic
lyrics, she registers a variety of emotions which have at
last broken through the repression of "selfless devotion to
the state", solely by means of a sequence of facial
expressions and the act of running: anguish, joy, affection,
ecstatic delight, despair and anxiety. In this sense, she
puts her expressive capacities on full display in order to
create another layer of meaning that is not verbally
articulated, but presumably legible to the spectator. In
other scenes of The army, Tanaka's fluid, relentless
gestures (point 2) contribute enormously to embedding the
role of a hardworking woman into everyday details of a lower
middle-class milieu in Hakata (a large city in the Kyushu
island located south of the Japanese mainland). Her
inclination to avoid eye contact (point 3) also works to
inscribe her character's modest personality, as in other
Kinoshita films. What I would like to stress is that the
four properties of Tanaka's acting in The army are
not organised into the pattern characteristic of her work
with Mizoguchi. Tanaka's acting
in Ozu's postwar films, such as A hen in the
wind (Kaze no naka no mendori, Japan 1948),
The Munekata sisters (Munekata kyodai, Japan
1950) and Equinox flower (Higanbana, Japan
1958) marks a stark contrast both twith Kinoshita and
Mizoguchi: she looks into the camera, as Ozu's other actors
do. (Particularly memorable is the "staggered/diagonal
(sujikai)" [21]
exchange of direct addresses to the camera in A hen in
the wind, between Tanaka and her mirror image at the
moment when she makes up her mind to turn to prostitution.)
Tanaka's look in Ozu's films leads us issues of culture and
film. Although Ozu is sometimes alleged to be the "most
Japanese" of directors, looking into the eyes (a conduct
with which his films played a game) was not a broadly
endorsed practice, and was sometimes even taken as
embarassing in Japanese society.
[22]
This suggests that both Tanaka's tendency to avoid eye
contact and contemporary everyday custom are utterly
transformed by Ozu's film language. Likewise, whilst
Tanaka's acting and Mizoguchi's mise en scène
are embedded in, and make use of, multiple facets of
Japanese society (from architecture to manners which tend to
clearly register the person's social status), neither of
them can be reduced to mere typologisation. My goal,
therefore, is to show as a working hypothesis that the
Tanaka-Mizoguchi collaboration produced a form of staging
specific to Mizoguchi films. In scrutinising
Mizoguchi's staging, Jean Douchet's schema, which can be
called the "V diagram ", is a splendid tool. Douchet's
diagram is, as far as I know, the only attempt at
schematising actors' movements in Mizoguchi's films in terms
of their relation to the camera.
[23]
This schematic exposition, based on his recognition of
Mizoguchi as "un cinéaste du désir" ("a
filmmaker of desire"), does not end up in the gratuitous
geometric pattern that its name might suggest, but offers a
hermeneutics of actors' movements. His complicated account
of the diagram is worth quoting: My interpretation
is that the two axes of the visible V on the screen should
be conceived not as static lines, but as vectors always in
motion. In other words, the two vectors on the screen are
not the fixed orbits of the actors' movements, but
ceaselessly self-modifying vectors. (In this sense, the
formation of the vectors is not determined by a particular
environment, such as the corner in a room where two actors'
vectors inevitably or naturally make a V shape.) When the A
vector is assigned to a male and the B vector a female, as
Douchet explains, the Mizoguchian actors' choreography of
desire comes into sight. Although Douchet
himself does not acknowledge any fundamental shift or
rupture in Mizoguchi's filmography,
[25]
in my view the V diagram is particularly relevant to his
postwar work. While Yamada's acting in Sisters of
Gion cannot be explicated by the diagram, the first
three aspects of Tanaka's acting style listed above, i.e.,
her movement and way of looking, are in operation within the
V schema. Tanaka tries to move away with her smooth, light
footsteps, meanwhile avoiding eye contact. Ambiguity of
facial expression (point 4) also works to activate the
diagram, but only indirectly. As I will discuss
periodically, the very ambiguity of what the character knows
about the other, and what s/he her/himself desires
facilitates and perpetuates the slippage of the two vectors.
These vectors can neither merge into one nor stop moving,
because the aggressive one desires to know the other's
desire which s/he her/himself does not know, and thus the
former's desire becomes indiscernible from his/her desire to
know. What is
especially extraordinary about Tanaka as an actress is her
ability to consummately play not only roles of the
oppressed, but also the oppressor. In effect, many women in
Mizoguchi's films, not exclusively played by Tanaka, occupy
the position of the oppressor or the dominator. Therefore,
while power relations in Mizoguchi films are almost always
gendered, it is not that the role of the oppressor is always
assigned to the male and the oppressed to the female, as
Douchet maintains. The cruelty of the Mizoguchian world
resides in its continuous rearrangement of the oppressed and
the oppressor; in other words, the power relations do not
establish themselves as a stable hierarchy, but organise
themselves as a set of multiple
micro-politics. [26] The successful
opening of Ibsen's A doll's house as a historical
marker in the development of Shingeki [modern
theater] forms the backbone of The love of Sumako the
actress. Sumako Matsui (Tanaka), who has just been
"discovered" by the director Hogetsu Shimamura (So Yamamura)
among his drama students, makes her debut as the first star
actress in the modern Japanese theater, playing Nora in
Ibsen's play. That night, Sumako and Hogetsu stroll along
the street together with Kichizo Nakamura (Eitaro Ozawa).
Slightly drunk, they remain in an excited, opening night
mood. After Nakamura leaves Hogetsu and Sumako, the actress
invites the director to her place. The seduction in
question takes place in a shot-sequence. Throughout the
first half of the sequence, Tanaka's restlessness goes to an
extreme within the depth of field. At the beginning, Miki's
camera is positioned in Sumako's small garden, displaying a
wooden fence. We can discern Sumako and Hogetsu through the
slits of the fence. Sumako says, "Why don't you drop in? I'd
like to hear more of Magda's story", and Hogetsu agrees. The
camera promptly dollies left, following their movement,
although their figures are barely recognisable because of
the fence. This tantalising of the viewer's perception is,
needless to say, characteristic of Mizoguchi's films,
especially those from the late '30s. Then Sumako enters
frame from the left, and Hogetsu follows her. Although the
hydrangea between the actors and the camera partially
obstructs the viewer's sight, Sumako races toward her room,
and the camera keeps up with the figures by panning. Saying
to Hogetsu, "Please come in," Sumako flies into her room,
turning on the light in the middle of the background. The
camera stops moving, and distantly frames her room obliquely
from outside left. After the light is turned on, we gain a
clear view of the whole field thanks to deep
focus. While Hogetsu
still stands at the threshold, Sumako quickly turns to the
foreground, puts a tray away, and then goes right to the
corner in the background to remove her kimonos from a
hanger, saying, "Oh, my goodness! It's really messy, you
know, because I've been very busy with the theatre". The
camera moves slightly forward, as Sumako throws her kimonos
into a closet and brings a cushion for Hogetsu. Meanwhile,
Hogetsu moves slightly to screen left, finds leftovers on a
small table, and teases her by saying, "Oh, you have such a
nice meal". Sumako immediately comes to the table, saying,
"My goodness! Don't look at such a thing, Professor
Shimamura!" then goes behind the shoji screen at the left
edge of the frame, carrying the leftovers away, and
returning quickly to the frame. Hogetsu moves screen right,
and the camera adjusts the frame to his positioning. Sumako
turns to Hogetsu's back, suggesting he take his haori jacket
off, helps him do so, and hangs it on the hanger in the
background. Throughout the
flow of movement, Tanaka never halts. No doubt, as the
uplifting, suspenseful non-diegetic music suggests from the
outset, this is a banal, but obviously tense situation: a
man visits a woman's room for the first time. Furthermore,
their relationship in the public sphere is one of theatre
director/actress, as well as professor/student, which
certainly emphasises the soap operatic tension between the
two. While her actions could simply be summed up as an act
of cleaning, firmly motivated by the character's psychology
and verisimilitude, her restless acting contains a certain
excess. The extreme fluidity with which she moves on from
one action to another suggests an air of choreography. The
choreography of two actors embodies the V diagram, albeit
not in its perfect form. Clearly it is Sumako who takes the
active part, though without being aggressive. Up to this
moment, however, the two actors are positioned in different
sections of the field, and Sumako's and Hogetsu's vector
always form an angle of around forty five degrees: in
reaction to Hogetsu's movement toward the little table in
the left foreground, Sumako moves to the right background;
when she returns to the table and chides him, he walks right
into the middle of the field as if she had pushed
him. In the second
half of the sequence, the tempo of the actors' movements
slows down but tension is maintained, or rather enhanced.
Screen right, in the middle of the field, Hogetsu (using a
round fan) sits down with his back to the closet, and seems
relaxed. Sumako also sits down across from him, and fans
him. This is the first time they occupy the same section of
the field. Asked by Sumako to continue his story about the
heroine of their next play, Hogetsu starts talking with his
body thrust forward. The two look at each other, but soon
Sumako turns her gaze away and brings an ashtray close to
him. Then Sumako stands up, and exits frame left. Hogetsu
lies down, talking to Sumako, "Oh, I remember an interesting
line of hers . . . " As he lies down, the camera makes a
subtle pan right to adjust the composition, and the shoji
screen which used to be visible at the right edge leaves the
frame. "'I'll sing, and beat them by singing. I'll beat all
of them by my song.'" While Hogetsu is reciting the
heroine's line, Sumako re-enters the frame, and sits down at
Hogetsu's feet. Hogetsu continues: "'I'll have my own way by
my song. This is my way of singing.'" Sumako says, "She
sounds just like me," pouring water into a glass. Around
here, the non-diegetic music's melody gradually approaches
exaltation. Sumako reveals her passion for theatre,
occasionally casting glances at him: "You know, my feeling
when I entered your drama school was just like that." She
offers the glass to Hogetsu, putting it beside him. She
starts fanning him, looking at him, but suddenly pauses her
action, startled. She withdraws her body, and absentmindedly
keeps fanning him. Hogetsu gets up, calling her name,
"Sumako!" The music disappears, and the camera slightly
rearranges the frame to the left. The above actions
take place in depth of field, so it is hardly possible for
the viewer to see the actors' facial expressions. Hogetsu's
face, especially as he lies down, sinks into the darkness,
and it is not clear what makes Sumako pause. Here,
Mizoguchi's mise en scène and Tanaka's acting
reach extreme subtlety. This is an exceptionally
sophisticated representation of male desire in a love scene,
since Sumako explicitly recoils at the sight of man's desire
expressed in his eyes, or on his face, even if his face is
not revealed at all. This motif can be construed firstly as
the reverse of the Mizoguchi-Tanaka mandate, "not to look
into the eyes", which will be reasserted between Sumako and
Hogetsu in the rest of the sequence. Secondly, a somehwat
"reflexive" property of Tanaka's acting is condensed here. A
number of actors, and staff, recollect that in his notorious
rehearsals Mizoguchi reiterated this somehow enigmatic
phrase: "Are you reflecting?" This sounds more nonsensical
in the Japanese original than in English, since the Japanese
verb for "reflect", hanshasuru, does not cover the
meaning of "to express" or "to speculate." The actors seem
to have interpreted this phrase as "Can you express the
character's psychology?" which could be right, since
sometimes Mizoguchi added the word "feeling" to the phrase,
although he did not answer "whose" feeling the actor should
"reflect". Regardless of
what Mizoguchi actually meant, however, the word
"reflection" can be employed as a hermeneutic label for the
property of his actors' performance on the screen (as might
be the case for Douchet's essay title). Mizoguchian actors,
Tanaka in particular, reflect the other's desire, and
thereby shape her/his recoil with productive passivity.
Through the act of reflection, Mizoguchi gives desire an
articulation beyond the dichotomy of the desiring subject of
the gaze (and of POV), and its object. Until Hogetsu
calls out her name for the second time, he and Sumako keep
looking at each other. Only the slight tinkling of a wind
chime is audible. Sumako stands up and walks to the corner
background with her back to the camera, i.e., she averts her
eyes from Hogetsu. Along with her move, the camera shifts
the frame to the left. Hogetsu, gazing at her back, stands
up and repeats, "Sumako." She turns to him, murmuring,
"Please, don't. You and I are. . . ," and comes to the
foreground. Hogetsu folds his arms, and the camera moves a
little bit backward left. Although Sumako's face is directed
toward Hogetsu, their gazes do not meet since his is cast
toward the corner. Here the V shape plainly appears, Sumako
being the active vector, Hogetsu the passive. While Hogetsu
expresses his self-destructive, fatalist determination to
risk his social status as a
professor/husband/father/son-in-law, Sumako walks ahead like
a somnambulist. Hogetsu states that he had not known any joy
until he met her. Sumako looks back, but Hogetsu does not
move his gaze from where he fastened it. She leans on the
shoji screen in the left foreground, the lamp hung in the
middle of the field creating a back light around her head.
As Hogetsu says, "Neither my art, nor my life could be
animated without you," Sumako slowly collapses to her knees.
The camera pans left a little to capture her through the
shoji screen, and the sequence fades out. I would like to
draw three points from this seduction sequence. First, this
sequence, particularly its second half, bears a close
resemblance to the "Kishibojin temple tea house" sequence in
The story of the last chrysanthemum, in which Kiku
(Shotaro Hanayagi) proposes to Otoku (Kakuko Mori).
Certainly part of the resemblance is derived from the common
situation of the two sequences: a man from a higher social
class confesses his love to a woman from a lower class,
putting his social position at risk. More importantly, with
the same cinematographer and the same set designer (Hiroshi
Mizutani), the camera's movement and angle are quite
similar: both sequences begin with a traveling shot through
obstacles, and the couple inside is captured from the
outside via deep focus. Furthermore, the woman's reaction to
the man's confession is almost the same: she stands up,
walks, leans on the shoji screen, and collapses, although
the front and the back are reversed. But this similarity
illuminates the crucial difference between the two sequences
in terms of relations between the camera and the actors'
performance. In The story of the last chrysanthemum,
or rather in Mizoguchi-Miki prewar films in general, the
actors' movement through sections of depth of field is more
restricted, and when it happens, it is definite and
significant. In Sumako, the heroine ceaselessly
moves, and even in the second half she walks through the
field and returns. Second, this
seemingly banal, soap operatic sequence contains ambiguity.
It is certainly a seduction, but by whom? Perhaps Hogetsu is
the subject of the seduction, and Sumako the object. To some
extent, however, it can be said that Sumako, by inviting him
to her place, staged the seduction. She also always controls
the field of action in the first half, and by acknowledging
the presence of his desire through her "reflection", in
effect, facilitates his enactment of desire in the second
half. This ambiguity of seducer and seduced is
characteristic of such scenes in Mizoguchi. Third, although
Tanaka dominates, the social hierarchy between the two is
registered in every action. To put it another way, while the
Mizoguchi-Tanaka collaboration creates a form of domination
which is not necessarily a crude translation of the social
hierarchy, it is also obvious that Tanaka's efficient and
tactful gestures fit the role of cleaning and serving.
Together with the honorific expressions in the Japanese
dialogue, Tanaka's restless gestures and movements compared
to Hogetsu's slow, contained gestures eloquently enunciate
the characters' positions in the social
hierarchy. In this section,
a seduction sequence in Sisters of Gion is analysed
in order to spell out how Yamada's acting differs from
Tanaka's in relation to Mizoguchi's mise en
scène and Miki's camera. The sequence of the
seduction of Kudo (Eitaro Shindo) by Omocha (Yamada) has
attracted scholarly attention for its conspicuous use of
long take and depth of field. Burch points out: "Here, then,
camera movement serves to maintain both distance and the
de-centered composition which is its essential complement.
More importantly, we begin to see here that Mizoguchi's
systemics often involves as well a particular kind of
'montage within the shot.'" [27]
Donald Kirihara focuses on the crosscutting between the
inside where Omocha and Kudo are talking and the outside
where the clerk Kimura (Taizo Fukami) is trying to overhear
their conversation, in order to argue that this seemingly
classical device functions on the contrary to draw the
viewer's attention to itself and to "block out" the smooth
deployment of the conversation. Consonant with Burch's view
of "montage within the shot", Kirihara maintains that the
long-take shot in the sequence has an obscuring effect on
the spatial construction of the diegetic world.
[28] I agree with
Burch and Kirihara's observations, but I cannot dismiss
Yamada and Shindo's acts as illegible or dissolved into the
setting. My focus here will be basically confined to the
last shot of the seduction sequence. Three criteria are
transferable from my hypothesis about Tanaka's acting: way
of walking; gestures; and eye contact. To begin with, let me
examine a couple of key moments of Yamada's action. The
high-angle camera with a deep-focus lens frames Omocha and
Kudo sitting in a room. Omocha faces Kudo, who is on her
oblique right, with his back to the entrance. His flattery
("A pretty girl and not popular?") enhances Omocha's
confidence. She casts a quick glance screen left, i.e.,
toward the area around a brazier (naga hibachi, also
used as a tea table), saying, "Talking with you, I forgot to
offer tea." Then she gets up, walks, and sits down at the
naga hibachi. The camera keeps capturing her and Kudo
by tracking backward. Omocha occupies the foreground with
her back to the camera, and Kudo remains in the background.
She opens a bottle of beer, and calls him over to the
naga hibachi. This is the "montage within the frame"
that Burch and Kirihara discuss, and it is an efficacious
device not only because it manipulates the spatial
construction in a purely formalist way, but also because it
enables the camera to display the seduced and the seducer in
a single frame. From the perspective of acting, Omocha's
move to the naga hibachi is not gratuitous
choreography but the clever tactic of a seducer, aiming to
"complete her conquest" [29]
by making the man "spontaneously" fall into the
trap. Indeed, Kudo
happily joins her, sitting down to face her. Following him
down, the camera moves slightly to adjust the frame.
Omocha's action at the naga hibachi is carefully
calculated, and supported by confidence: she lights a pipe
and gives it to Kudo and changes her seat in front of him to
his side, but this increase in intimacy happens only after
he is persuaded to "listen to her talk." She eventually
cheerfully declares, "I chose you as my patron! You don't
mind?" While Kudo does not answer, perhaps in order to
conceal his joy, she takes his haori jacket off, puts it
somewhere off-screen, returns, and lures him to stay there
and relax, by helping him with a gown (tanzen). As
the two stand up the camera rises a little and the image
fades out. Thus, she finally conquers. Omocha's aggressive,
but calculated actions punctuate their dialogue. It is true that
Omocha's seduction scene differs from Sumako's in terms of
situation: a clever, cynical geisha's seduction of a rich
merchant, with the aim of making him her patron; and a
clumsy, serious-minded actress' seduction of a drama
professor, out of romantic love. This difference, however,
seems to be connected with some profoundly different
characteristics in the acting itself. It would be impossible
for Tanaka to play this sort of manipulative seducer. This
speculation seems to be confirmed by the fact that Oharu was
transformed from an amorous seducer in Saikaku Ihara's
original to the perpetually seduced in The life of
Oharu. In terms of actors' movement in depth of field,
although Omocha and Kudo traverse the space, their movements
are more linear, and they never enact the V diagram. The
dialectic of acting and camera in '30s Mizoguchi is
determined not by choreography of desire but by "montage
within the shot" and drastic changes of composition via
camera movement. One of the
possible factors that may affect the acting/camera relations
in Sisters of Gion is Yamada's look, which is of
crucial significance in comparison to Tanaka's acting. In
shots preceding the last long take, Omocha and Kudo look at
each other during their conversation. Even though their act
of looking is not represented by shot/reverse shots, the
viewer can clearly recognise that they exchange glances. To
take an example, in the third indoor shot of the sequence,
Kudo rebukes Omocha for having lured his formerly upright
employee into corruption. Omocha daringly gazes at him,
saying contemptuously: "Is that so? He's upright?" If this
had appeared in one of the late Mizoguchi films, this kind
of "rebuke" scene might be organised as a disconnection of
glances to set the V diagram going. In this long take,
Omocha's seduction is successfully staged not only by her
gestures and canny talk, but also her seductive glances.
While Kudo is complimenting her beauty, she responds to his
gaze of desire by glancing back. After they move to the
naga hibachi area, her victory is achieved through
the flirtatious act of looking. Isuzu Yamada is
an actress who is extraordinarily gifted at "looking". The
first half of The downfall of Osen is marked by
Yamada's trenchant glances. In the family dinner scene in
Osaka elegy, her glances (which her family never
returns) inscribe her solitude. In Sisters of Gion,
her confident act of looking, together with Shindo's gaze of
desire, function to rivet their movements. On the other
hand, Kinuyo Tanaka is an actress who tends to reflect or
deflect the look. In a couple of particular cases in
Mizoguchi, however, her look works as the pivot of a film's
whole structure, as my next analysis elaborates. Miss Oyu
is among Mizoguchi's most underrated films. Why has this
exquisite work, to which the complete "all star staff" of
late Mizoguchi rallied for the first time, been dismissed?
[30]
Mizoguchi himself, who tended to swallow contemporary
critics' evaluation of his work, regarded it as a product of
his slump. [31]
The grounds for the underestimation seem to converge on two
interrelated factors: the original novella, Jun'ichiro
Tanizaki's masterpiece Ashikari, was considered too
"literary" to adapt into a film; and the persona of Kinuyo
Tanaka was quite divergent from Tanizaki's heroine. The
screenwriter Yoshikata Yoda recollects the most agonising
aspect of the adaptation: since the heroine Oyu is such a
well-bred, unknowing woman, her role in the development of
the story inevitably becomes a passive one. Yoda adds, "What
was also troubling was that Ms. Tanaka was not like Oyu. It
is not at all that she was not so beautiful as Oyu, but that
Ms. Tanaka's cleverness consists of her smart, sensible
awareness of everyday life matters. We could not kill this
quality". [32]
Yoda is probably right in that the knowing quality Tanaka's
acting expresses itself even when playing Lady Oyu.
[33] Perhaps the best
way to appreciate the film is to forget aboutits literary
source. When we put aside the original novella, Miss
Oyu emerges in a new light. This is a cruel film about
the power relations among a beautiful widow (Oyu), her
submissive sister (Oshizu), and the brother-in-law who is in
love with her (Shinnosuke). The "seduction" scene, which is
Mizoguchi-Yoda's original idea, happens between Oyu (Tanaka)
and Shinnosuke (Yuji Hori). The story takes place in an
upper-middle class milieu in Osaka in the Meiji era. At a
tea ceremony arranged for him by his aunt, Shinnosuke
mistakes the beautiful Oyu for the modest Oshizu (Nobuko
Otowa) as his prospective partner, and falls in love with
her at first sight. He soon learns the truth, but cannot
stop his attraction to Oyu. Her husband died young, but she
still lives in her in-laws' home with their child.
Shinnosuke is hesitant to marry Oshizu and the marriage
arrangement remains in the air. One summer afternoon,
Shinnosuke by chance finds Oyu suffering from heatstroke on
a bench by the street. He takes her to the house of an
acquaintance, and takes care of her. He sends for a doctor,
but the doctor tells him she will be all right if she lies
quietly. In the meantime Oyu's family members are worried
about her disappearance. The house's owner is out, and
Shinnosuke is left with the still sleeping Oyu. The following
analysis seeks to draw attention firstly to the issue of
ambiguity in Tanaka's acting, and secondly to the V diagram
which acts in conjunction with Miyagawa's camera. What is
remarkable in this enactment of the V diagram is that the
woman, Tanaka, occupies the vector of the oppressor. The
seduction scene, consisting of six shots, can be broken down
into three segments, which I will examine in the order they
occur: the expression of Shinnosuke's inner conflicts; Oyu's
coming to consciousness; and Oyu's persuasion of
Shinnosuke. Shinnosuke sits
fanning the sleeping Oyu. She lies in the foreground with
her head screen left; Shinnosuke is positioned behind her,
at quite a close distance. The clear view of a corner of the
room in the background indicates the use of deep focus.
Shinnosuke's face is large enough for the viewer to read an
explicit expression of agony. The non-diegetic music
(Japanese flute) further evokes the tension of the scene.
Then Shinnosuke abruptly tries to bend over Oyu's body, but
immediately recoils from her, turning right with his back to
the camera. The shaking Shinnosuke makes another quick turn
forward screen right; along with his turn, the camera
swiftly tracks forward, and frames him alone in a full shot
size. This smooth reframing, probably aimed at dealing with
the compositional distance between Shinnosuke and Oyu
created by his turn, is adept but somewhat
conventional. Shinnosuke takes
a cigarette box out of a sleeve of his kimono. Holding a
cigarette in his mouth, he tries unsuccessfully to strike a
match with his quivering hand. He tries another, but again
fails. With an unlit cigarette in his mouth, he turns to
Oyu, and the cigarette drops. He tries to bend over Oyu
again, but ends up retreating, turning backward right as he
had done in his first attempt. In this series of actions,
the camera follows Shinnosuke's attraction to Oyu with an
unobtrusive crane, capturing the two in a single image, and
then frames Shinnosuke in the center, without any cutting.
The desperate Shinnosuke casts a quick glance at Oyu, but
eventually escapes to the veranda (engawa), and sits
down. He turns his face again to Oyu, but lowers his
shoulders. The point I would
like to make here is about the "unambiguity" of Hori's
acting. Every action he performs in this long take (whose
actual length might not be noticed because of the seamless
reframing of the camera) registers one single thing: the
agony of a man who is split between his desire for the woman
he loves and social/moral mandates. Everything, especially
his handling of cigarettes, is legible, univocal,
unambiguous and transparent in terms of meaning - perhaps it
is so well articulated, or rather overdone, as to border on
caricature or stereotype. I am not saying that Hori's acting
is one-dimensional in comparison to other Mizoguchi actors.
Referring to this scene, Shigehiko Hasumi has remarked that
in Mizoguchi's mise en scène generally,
ambiguity is the privileged property of women's acting,
while men's acting is inclined to be univocal, sometimes
almost caricatural. [34]
Hori's turns to some extent suggest a nuance of gratuitous
choreography yet, partly owing to Miyagawa's human-centered
camera movement, his expressions hardly offer multiple
possibilities for interpretation. The following
shot is a medium close-up of Oyu. At first, with her eyes
closed, she seems to be peacefully sleeping. Then, she
slowly opens her eyes without moving any other part of her
body, and looks screen right. Curiously enough, this shot
retroactively creates for the viewer the illusion that the
previous shot of Shinnosuke's back was issued from Oyu's POV
since, at its end, the camera's position and angle can be
roughly identified with Oyu's look. Then, however, Oyu's
"genuine" POV shot is cut in. This is Shinnosuke's back, a
little tighter than, but shot from almost the same angle as,
the end of the long take; Shinnosuke seems to have slightly
changed his posture and position. This chain of shots is
singular in a number of respects. Firstly, even for '50s
Mizoguchi, so close a shot as the one of Oyu's bust is quite
exceptional. Secondly, a POV shot is rare in Mizoguchi
films. Thirdly, and most importantly, how should we
interpret Oyu opening her eyes? This action is highly
ambiguous. At this moment, it is obvious that Oyu does not
try to let Shinnosuke know of her coming to consciousness;
she neither speaks nor moves. Furthermore, her slow, calm
way of opening her eyes without even blinking makes the
viewer doubt if she has really been asleep. The next shot
further deepens this doubt. The first frame is of Oyu's
waist, shot from a high-angle, behind her neck. Oyu, quietly
breathing, gazes screen right at Shinnosuke. Then, as she
turns her head around to the viewer's side, the camera (in
accordance with the movement of her head) gradually tracks
backward, framing Shinnosuke's back at the veranda in the
background and Oyu in the foreground with a clear deep-focus
view. Oyu momentarily fixes her look, moves her slightly
widened eyes from left to right, and finally raises her head
upright. After a deep breath, Oyu begins to speak calmly:
"Oh, have I been asleep here?" Oyu's silence and
eye movements before she speaks out seem to reveal that she
is aware of Shinnosuke's affection for her. It is
impossible, however, to know "in fact" whether Oyu is awake
during Shinnosuke's agony, and whether, if so, she keeps
silent for a while so as not to embarrass him, or to let
something happen. Rather, it is important to acknowledge the
ambiguity of Oyu's look, thereby to scrutinising how this
ambiguity functions in the romantic power relations among
Oyu, Shinnosuke and Oshizu, as well as the ways these
relations are registered. Throughout the many
Mizoguchi-Tanaka collaborations, Tanaka's act of looking is
rarely represented by a POV shot, but at least two POV shots
ascribed to her play crucial roles: one is this shot in
Miss Oyu; the other is Oharu's look at Buddhist
sculptures, with which the flashback begins. In both cases,
Tanaka's expressions flesh out the character as a locus of
intense subjectivity but resist any reductive reading of
content. The shot
continues. Oyu, raising her torso, thanks Shinnosuke for
taking care of her, tells him that she has to hurry home,
and gets up. The camera keeps framing the two until Oyu gets
up, and then Oyu, fixing her kimono, exits the frame screen
left. It should be stressed that, throughout these actions,
Oyu's glance and Shinnosuke's do not meet, partly because
they are separated in the foreground and the background. The
following shot, the final one of the sequence, displays Oyu
fixing her sash in a plan américain. Asked by
Shinnosuke where she planned to go, Oyu replies that she was
heading to his place, and comes up to him, looking in his
direction. The camera smoothly follows her steps and
contains Oyu and Shinnosuke standing on the veranda in a
single image. While this time they look at each other, the
difference of height between their positions will soon
contribute to creating a disjunction of glances. Oyu says to
him, "Some time ago, Osumi [their go-between] came
over, and told me that you said you wouldn't marry", and
sits down. The camera lowers slightly. When Oyu asks, "Is
that true?" Shinnosuke sits down too, with downcast eyes,
and then the choreography of domination begins. In the rest of
the sequence, Oyu plays the part of the oppressor, trying to
persuade Shinnosuke to marry Oshizu, her favorite little
sister. Given that Oyu might already be aware of
Shinnosuke's love for her, this is obviously a conscious act
of control. Oyu asks him, "Shinnosuke, do you dislike
Oshizu?" and he tries to look up to her, saying, "No, not at
all", but immediately turns his eyes away. Here Oyu occupies
the aggressive vector by gazing at Shinnosuke, and he the
passive vector by always avoiding her gaze. The angle
between the two vectors is around sixty degrees, which is
maintained by the perpetual rearrangement in relation to
their movements. Oyu attacks him, demanding, "If you don't,
please marry her." Shinnosuke casts
a quick glance at Oyu, turns away, walks screen right into
the small garden, and then enters the next room. The camera
tracks laterally in order to capture him through a partition
and reed screen. Then Oyu enters from screen left and
ambushes Shinnosuke in the next room. Oyu (crossing the
frame from left to right in the foreground) and Shinnosuke
(moving right to left in the background) momentarily
intersect each other. Eventually both of them settle down in
the next room. Oyu is at Shinnosuke's right, looking screen
left; Shinnosuke looks down right. She starts speaking,
turning her gaze to him: "I have a closer relationship with
Oshizu than with any other sister of mine. Oshizu visits me
almost everyday so that I don't feel lonely. I don't want
Oshizu to be married to the kind of man who wouldn't allow
me to visit her at their home." Oyu glances down once, but
generally keeps looking him in the eyes, while Shinnosuke
always averts his look. Oyu's line, "You won't mind no
matter how often I may come by, will you?" drives Shinnosuke
to abruptly turn screen left, towards her, calling her name,
but he eventually turns away in the opposite direction, with
his back to the camera. Pushed to confess, he says, "No, of
course not. I really want to do whatever makes you happy."
Oyu directs her body to him, then crawls up and tries to
look him into his eyes, insisting that therefore he should
marry Oshizu. Shinnosuke keeps avoiding her look, by turning
left, but at last says yes. Further bending her body so as
to look at Shinnosuke, she finishes the victim off: "Are you
sure?" Shinnosuke says yes again, and shrinks. The sequence
ends with a dissolve. This is, though
relatively short, a typical example of late Mizoguchi
choreography. It is especially noteworthy that neither the
actors' turns nor the upward/downward movements are
psychologically motivated. The V diagram holds sway over
their movements, while Miyagawa's camera keeps action
flowing gracefully. As for power relations, the sequence
organises itself on the basis of a carefully calculated
allocation of knowledge to the two characters and to the
viewer. Dominique Païni, drawing attention to Oyu's
POV, remarks: "Hereafter the spectator knows that Oyu knows,
and that she lies and especially lies to herself in refusing
the necessity and the obligation of desire."
[35]
I would argue that Oyu does not refuse her desire, but seeks
to fulfill it in another form. Shinnosuke has to fall prey
to Oyu, precisely because she knows, and can pretend not to
know, his love. One can agree
that Tanaka was miscast as Oyu. Or, to put it differently
and more precisely, the gap between the star image supported
by her acting style and the role was so large that a number
of details in the film (such as the one where the supposedly
childlike Oyu tickles Shinnosuke in front of Oshizu) become
awkward and even clumsy. In relation to the seduction
sequence, however, this miscasting works productively. The
opacity of Oyu's look embodies the result of this miscasting
- a knowing actress plays an unknowing lady. One can compare
this disjunction to James Naremore's fine-grain analysis of
Lillian Gish's performance in True heart Susie (US
1919). Naremore mentions a shot in the classroom in which
Gish betrays a mature, knowing face in order to point out "a
polar opposition" that her acting brilliantly conveys. "Her
performance ranges between innocence and experience, between
stereotypical girlishness and wry, sophisticated maturity -
the latter quality giving True heart Susie much of
its continuing interest." [36]
Throughout the film, Gish carefully crafts this balance to
make the country maiden Susie more complex and interesting
than a stereotype. In fact, Tanaka,
a clever actress whose prewar star image was that of a
"maternal child woman" like Gish (albeit lacking in the
latter's fragility), does a similar balancing act in roles
more fitting for her. On the other hand, the fissure which
Tanaka's opaque look opens up in the Oyu character is
neither properly developed nor mended by the other parts of
the film; it keeps threatening to pull the film into
contradiction. But I believe this makes Miss Oyu
intriguing rather than defective. Since Tanaka's Oyu
inevitably appears to be aware of Shinnosuke's love, the
supposedly unknowing Oyu's persuasion of him can read as an
enactment of the sadistic drama of domination. In other
words, the vacillation between knowing and unknowing confers
upon the sequence the cruel dynamic of romantic power
relations. The life of
Oharu consists of a chain of seduction scenes. This
structure of narrative development is closely related to
Tanaka's acting. It is tempting to say that her "reflective"
acting demands not love scenes but seduction scenes in which
desire takes shape in the V diagram. Here I will take up
Katsunosuke's seduction of Oharu as the high point of this
choreography of desire. Although the
seduction scene gives the impression of being shot in a long
take, in effect it is broken down into three shots. The
first shot begins on the back of the sitting Katsunosuke
(Toshiro Mifune). The camera turns around and follows him
walking to the room in which Oharu (Tanaka) settles. He
kneels down, and opens the shoji screen, calling her name.
Inside the room, Oharu stands, wearing a kimono like a veil.
Katsunosuke is positioned screen right in the foreground,
and Oharu screen left in the background. When he mentions
the letter he has sent to her, she throws him a glance, but
quickly turns away again. Considering the vertical and
horizontal gap between their positions, the V is produced in
a "three dimensional" form. In response to Oharu's
dismissive answer that she burned the letter from him, a
low-class samurai, without reading it, Katsunosuke raises
his head. The cut is made on this action. The second shot
is taken from the inside, from an angle approximately ninety
degrees left of the previous camera position. This cutting
is a blatant violation of the one hundred and eighty degree
rule, and can be classified as donden (or "sudden
reverse" cutting), even though the shift is not as large as
180 degrees. This donden reverses the background and
the foreground of the previous shot, but maintains the V
vectors of the actors. Oharu and Katsunosuke get into an
argument over the superficial elegance of the aristocrats
around Oharu. Whereas the seemingly offended Oharu turns
away and moves, avoiding Katsunosuke's gaze, Katsunosuke
keeps up with her every move by opening shoji screens.
Katsunosuke at last steps into the room, and demands that
she admit whether she has refused him because of his class
or because of his personality. Since he approaches her,
Oharu turns her body away and tells him that she hates him
as a person. As she turns, Oharu's face is revealed to the
viewer for the first time in the sequence. Oharu orders him
to leave, and states that she will wait for Katsunosuke's
master. Significantly, it
is precisely when she tries to exercise her power as an
aristocrat that Oharu takes her kimono-veil off and gazes at
Katsunosuke. This time it is Katsunosuke, who has taken her
into the inn under his master's name, who must avert his
eyes. Here the aggressive vector and the defensive one are
completely reversed. In addition, at the level of historical
referents, the kimono-veil was reprotedly worn by
upper-class women in order to screen out such gazes. It is
remarkable how splendidly it functions in Mizoguchi's films.
Oharu's act of taking the kimono-veil off registers her
willingness to occupy the aggressive vector as the subject
of looking. Katsunosuke
discloses the truth that his master won't come since he told
her a lie. Learning this, Oharu turns and breaks into a run
in order to escape to the outside. Katsunosuke catches up
with her at the threshold and swiftly steps down to the
ground. The third shot is juxtaposed by cutting on
Katsunosuke's stepping action. The angle of this shot is
ninety degrees right of the second shot. Katsunosuke,
kneeling on the ground, apologises and declares his love.
Oharu passes in front of him and stops. She reveals that she
has in fact read his letter, and laments that their romantic
relationship is forbidden by the class system. However, what
should be noticed here is not her social criticism per se,
but the fact that, in disclosing her affection for
Katsunosuke, she keeps avoiding his look. Even when he holds
her tight and tries to make her turn to him, showing his
determination to run away with her, she does not look at his
face. Oharu frees
herself from Katsunosuke, and starts staggering, with her
back to the camera, but it is no longer clear why, and from
what, she is fleeing. She stops near the fence. The camera
follows her move, and frames her standing back in a long
shot. Katsunosuke, taking a different route from her,
catches up with her. Oharu stands crying, covering her face
with her sleeve. Murmuring, "Lady Oharu," Katsunosuke,
struck, kneels down. Oharu throws herself into Katsunosuke's
arms and embraces him. Katsunosuke's kneeling is certainly a
sort of "reflection" on the part of a Mizoguchi actor -
Oharu's desperate ecstasy which might be expressed in her
face strikes him, and makes him kneel down. Then, she faints
in his arms and collapses on the ground, covered with dead
leaves. Katsunosuke takes her in his arms and exits the
frame. The camera cranes down so as to place two stone
lanterns in the center. The seduction
scene in The life of Oharu is enacted with extreme
elegance, both by the two actors and by Yoshimi Hirano's
camera. The choreography of desire here is not a crude
expression of lust but a flow of refined actions and
gestures. It should not be overlooked, however, that every
graceful gesture registers not only the couple's love but
also their social positions. Oharu's avoidance of
Katsunosuke's look sets the perpetual slippage of their
vectors into motion. While Katsunosuke repeatedly expresses
his belief in romantic love freed from the feudal class
system, their romantic love is never realised on screen. Why
does Oharu faint? I disagree with Robert Cohen's diagnosis
of her fainting as hysteria. [37]
Rather, I would argue that Mizoguchi could not picture the
euphoria of romantic love outside the magnetic field of
power relations. Alain Bergala beautifully summarises the
machinery of this sequence: "By means of subtle variations
between the outside (the garden where the samurai keeps
himself) and the inside (the room of the young woman of high
order), with two changes of the 180 degrees axis, the
unbreakable barrier of class which divides them is turned
over by one embrace so subversive that the young woman can
survive it only by fainting."
[38]
In other words, in order to flee from the magnet, Oharu has
to faint, and Mizoguchi has to have her faint. It has been often
said that Mizoguchi transformed a "good wife/wise mother"
type star into the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka. Once we put
aside off-screen personal relationships such as the mythic
romance between director and actress, it is clear that a
film star's acting cannot be independent of mise en
scène, camera and editing. However, this paper
started with a tempting question: why can't the reverse be
true as well? Four properties of Tanaka's acting (prompt
steps, restless actions, avoidance of eye contact and
ambiguity in facial expression) interact with camera and
mise en scène and thereby, through gradual
shifts in the late '40s, play an important role in the
formation of Mizoguchi's style in the '50s. This style can
be called a choreography of desire in which the aggressive
vector of one actor and the defensive vector of the other
develop a perpetual slippage of movement. Mizoguchi
incarnates the power relations between male and female, with
which he was obsessed, in this choreographic
form. Lastly, by
reading Burch's trope of emakimono or the hand-scroll
against its grain, I would like to reconsider, or rather
reorganise, the relation between camera movement and acting.
It seems reasonable to call Mizoguchi's style in the '50s
"human-centred", composed with long takes and travelling
shots. This term might sound as pejorative as did the "long
take à la Wyler", but given that
"human-centered" stresses acting performance, it does not
necessarily suggest a "character-centered", modern
psychological drama. According to Burch, Mizoguchi fuses two
contradictory modes of space - successive stages versus
steady flow. The conflation of these modes is, in my view,
applicable to Miyagawa or Hirano's camera in relation to the
actors' actions. In the choreography of desire, actors'
positions ceaselessly change, and in doing so provide the
viewer with a new, distinctive view and sense of space. On
the other hand, smooth, lateral movements of the camera
organise them as a flow in the frame. To put it crudely, it
follows that actors in late Mizoguchi films are rather like
the partitions or the shoji screens in his prewar
sound period. So what are
"actors" for Mizoguchi? Kirihara's insightful remark seems
to offer a key: Certainly
Mizoguchi did not believe in the doctrine of actors'
"spontaneity". The choreography of desire is nothing other
than the objectification of both the subject and object of
desire. To say this is not to be contemptuous of actors.
Tanaka's bravura lies in her own objectification of herself
as a vector. (To
return to your place in the text, simply click on the
endnote number) [1]
I wish to thank Tom Gunning, Adrian Martin, Jonathan
Rosenbaum and Yuri Tsivian for helpful suggestions and
criticism, and my fellow students at the Mass Culture
Workshop meeting on November 3, 2000 at the University of
Chicago for valuable comments on a draft of this essay. I
am also indebted to Sharon Hayashi and Anne McKnight for
their editorial help and suggestions. [2]
The woman of Osaka (Naniwa onna, Japan
1940, no extant prints); Three generations of
Danjuro (Danjuro sandai, Japan 1944, no extant
prints); Musashi Miyamoto (Miyamoto
Musashi, Japan 1944); The victory of women
(Josei no shori, Japan 1946); Utamaro and his
five women; The love of Sumako the actress;
Women of the night (Yoru no onnatachi,
Japan 1948); My love has been burning (Waga koi
wa moenu, Japan 1949); Miss Oyu
(Oyu-sama, Japan 1951); Lady Musashino
(Musashino fujin, Japan 1951); The life of
Oharu; Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, Japan
1953); Sansho the bailiff (Sansho dayu,
Japan 1954); and A woman of rumour aka The
woman people talk about (Uwasa no onna, Japan
1954). [3]
For Tanaka's own recollection of the period, see, Kinuyo,
Tanaka, Kawakita, Kashiko, and Nagashima, Ichiro,
"Taidan: Jyoyu, kantoku, eiga," in Firumu senta,
special issue on Kinuyo Tanaka (Tokyo: The Film Center of
The National Museum of Modern Art, 1971), 6-7. [4]
Sato, Tadao. Mizoguchi Kenji no sekai (Tokyo:
Chikuma-shobou, 1982), 128. [5]
Audie Bock, Japanese film directors (Tokyo:
Kodansha International, 1980), 42. [6]
In Japan there had been no "director of photography", in
the sense that the term is used in the US, until the
breakdown of the studio system in the 1970s. Although
cinematographers like Miki and Miyagawa definitively had
decision-making authority over the image of films,
lighting engineers also played an important role and had
responsibility in creating light and shadow in close
collaboration with cinematographers. The relations
between a cinematographer and a lighting engineer were
not necessarily hierarchical, though it certainly
depended on the case. An assistant director of
Mizoguchi's remembers with a sense of respect the
enthusiastic arguments that Miyagawa and Ken'ichi
Okamoto, the lighting engineer in chief, often had on the
stage. (Miyashima, Hachizo. "Jyokantoku ga kataru
Mizoguchi sono hito to enshutsu-ho", in Eigadokuhon
Mizoguchi Kenji, edited by Tsutomu Saso and Noriyoshi
Nishida [Tokyo: Film Art-sha, 1997], 39.) Also,
in many cases the '50s cinematographers operated the
cameras themselves. [7]
For example, it is said that Miyagawa carefully studied
the camera movements of The life of Oharu, which
was shot by Yoshimi Hirano (Sato, ibid.). [8]
Miss Oyu, Ugetsu, A geisha,
Sansho the bailiff, A woman of rumour,
The crucified lovers and Street of
shame. [9]
Ariane Mouchkine, "Six entretiens," Cahiers du
cinéma, no. 158 (Aug.-Sept 1964):
28. [10]
Noël Burch, To the distant observer: form and
meaning in the Japanese cinema (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1979),
244. [11]
Shindo, Kaneto. Aru eigakantoku no shogai: Mizoguchi
Kenji no kiroku (Tokyo: Eijin-sha, 1975),
313. [12]
Burch, Ibid., 228-29. [13]
Miki made sixteen films with Mizoguchi: Gion
festival (Gion matsuri, Japan 1933, no extant
prints); The Jimpu group (Jimpuren, Japan
1934, no extant prints); The downfall of Osen (Orizuru
Osen, Japan 1935); Oyuki the Madonna (Maria no Oyuki,
Japan 1935); Poppy (Gubijinso, Japan 1935);
Osaka elegy (Naniwa ereji, Japan 1936);
Sisters of Gion (Gion no kyodai, Japan
1936); The straits of love and hate
(Aienkyo, Japan 1937); The story of the last
crysanthemum (Zangiku monogatari, Japan 1939);
The woman of Osaka; Three generations of
Danjuro; Musashi Miyamoto; The famous sword
Bijomaru (Meito Bijomaru, Japan 1945);
Utamaro and his five women; and The love of
Sumako the actress. Miki changed his first name from
Minoru to Shigeto around 1938. Incidentally, Shigeru
Miki, the cinematographer of The white threads of
cascades (Taki no shiraito, Japan 1933), is a
different person. [14]
Okazaki also worked with Joseph von Sternberg as the
camera operator on The saga of Anatahan (Japan
1953). [15]
Yokota made as many as twenty-seven Mizoguchi films in
Nikkatsu between 1925 and 1930. The only films with
extant prints or fragments are, however, The Song of
hometown (Furusato no uta, Japan 1925), The
Tokyo march (Tokyo koshinkyoku, Japan 1929)
and Hometown (Furusato, Japan
1930). [16]
Sato, Tadao. "Intabyu: Shinko no kameraman wa genzo,
henshu made yatta," in Shinko Kinema: senzen goraku
eiga no okoku. Edited by Tadao Sato, Naoki Noborikawa
and Sadashi Maruo (Tokyo: Film Art-sha, 1993),
98. [17]
Mizoguchi, Kenji, and Matsuo Kishi. "Mizoguchi Kenji no
geijyutsu," in Mizoguchi Kenji shusei. Edited by
Noriyoshi Nishida (Tokyo: Kinema Jumpo-sha, 1991),
60. [18]
Sato, Mizoguchi Kenji no Sekai, 303-04. [19]
Ibid., p. 284. [20]
Hisaki Matsuura, "Ouga to Kenryoku: Mizoguchi Kenji
Gion bayashi ron," Shinetikku no. 1 (1993):
128. [21]
I have borrowed this term from David Bordwell'. In his
analysis of Ozu's staging/editing, "sujikai" refers to
the arrangement which makes two figures face one another
but en décalage, in order for Ozu to shift
the camera position 180 degrees, and at the same time
displace it laterally for reverse shots. See Ozu and
the poetics of cinema (Princeton: Princeton UP,
1988), 94-5. [22]
Shigehiko Hasumi, Kantoku Ozu Yasujiro, paperback
ed., (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1992), 179-80. [23]
Alain Bergala also casts light on how hierarchical power
relations in Mizoguchi films take shape in filmic space
as the "interval" between the actors/objects and that
between the camera and these actors/objects in his
insightful article, "De l'intervalle chez Mizoguchi,"
Cinémathèque no. 14 (Autumn 1998):
28-43. [24]
Jean Douchet, "Mizoguchi: la réflexion du
désir," Cahiers du cinéma no. 463 (?
19XX): 27. [25]
Douchet goes on to say: "Ce n'est pas un cinéaste
qui s'est amélioré au fil de sa
carrière. D'emblé, il possédait le
génie et du cadre et des scènes. " (Ibid.,
24.) ["He is not one of those filmmakers who improves
at the end of his career. From the start, he was a genius
of framing and staging".] [26]
It is from this perspective that Matsuura defines The
geisha as "political film." (Ibid., p.
143-44.) [27]
Burch, p. 228. [28]
Donald Kirihara, Patterns of time: Mizoguchi and the
1930s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992),
131-32. [29]
Ibid., p. 132. [30]
Screenplay: Yoshikata Yoda; Cinematography: Kazuo
Miyagawa; Sound Recording: Iwao Otani; Music Composer:
Fumio Hayasaka; Production Design: Hiroshi Mizutani;
Lighting: CH:Ken'ichiOkamoto; Costume/Historical
Background Advisor: Tadaoto Kainosho [31]
Kenji Mizoguchi, "Jisaku wo kataru," in Mizoguchi
Kenji shusei, 229. [32]
Yoshikata Yoda, Mizoguchi Kenji no hito to
geijyutsu (Tokyo: Tabata Shoten, 1970),
189. [33]
From the perspective of Tanaka's acting style and star
image, it may be interesting to compare Miss Oyu
to Yasujiro Shimazu's Okoto and Sasuke (Okoto
to Sasuke: Shunkinsho Japan1935), another Tanizaki
adaptation in which the young Tanaka gives a brilliant
performance in the role of the heroine Shunkin, a
well-bred koto musician. I consider that the fact that
Shunkin is blind provides Tanaka's mannerism with
creative restraint, and Shunkin's manifestly
aggressive/sadistic aspects offer freedom of active
expressions. [34]
Shigehiko Hasumi, lecture at the University of
Tokyo-Komaba, Winter 1992. [35]
Dominique Païni, "Mizoguchi ou la mise en
scène en ses sites discrets,"
Cinémathèque no. 14 (Autumn 1998):
10. [36]
James Naremore, Acting in the cinema (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988), 101. [37]
Cohen, Robert. "Why Does Oharu faint?: Mizoguchi's The
life of Oharu and patriarchal discourse," in
Reframing Japanese cinema: authorship, gender,
history. Edited by Arthur Nolletti JR., and David
Desser, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana U.P., p.
33-55. Cohen centers on another faint, i.e., the one
after Oharu 's flash-back. It might be also possible to
answer his question by saying: because Thymiane in
Diary of a lost girl (Germany 1929) faints.
Although Kinuyo Tanaka bears no resemblance to Louise
Brooks, it is quite likely that Mizoguchi had seen this
film - whose Japanese title, Rinraku no onna no
nikki translates as A diary of a fallen woman
- and was, to some extent, inspired by it. [38]
Bergala, p. 36. [39]
Kirihara, p. 88.
13,833 words
Abstract
1. Depth of
field and lateral movement
Then,
perhaps, what Mizoguchi was finally led to pursue is a
phase where a woman, who became a saint after having
undergone distress, forgives a man by forgetting their
past. It seems that the state of euphoria of being
forgiven by women, for which the late Mizoguchi seems to
have sought, is revealed in several motifs: the religious
image at the end of The life of Oharu; the wife
who, transforming herself into a ghost, welcomes her
husband and son in Ugetsu; the blind mother who
strongly holds her son close in the last scene of
Sansho the bailiff; the smiling heroine heading to
the scaffold with her lover in The crucified
lovers (Chikamatsu monogtari, Japan 1954).
[4]
In
particular, one observes in this film [The life of
Oharu] and in the others of the 1950s such an
utter absorption in the aesthetics of the long take, its
organisation and composition, that it is as if
shot-changes simply did not exist. Each cut gives the
same impression of perfunctorily 'turning a page', as in,
say, Visconti's Il gattopardo [Italy
1963]. When the end of a shot has arrived, we pass on
to the next, and the spatio-temporal event constituted by
that change seems to be regarded as non-existent, whereas
even in Tale of late chrysanthemums [Japan
1939], where cuts were rare and were not the object
of any special effort, they were almost always produced
as caesura. The camera in these later films was, of
course, as supple and free-moving as it had ever been
before, but totally subservient to a stylised version of
the dominant code. [10]
I was
always trying to shoot, with the principle of "one
scene/one shot" in my mind. When I first met Mizoguchi,
he passionately said to me, "Miyagawa, I'd like to make a
film like a hand-scroll (emakimono). My films from
now on should be, above all, straight and irreversible
like a hand-scroll, which you can look through
successively, and don't have to return to the beginning
again once you finish looking. You can smoothly follow
the story of this hand-scroll in sequence until the end,
and its pictures consist of climactic moments, some
strong touches and other weaker ones".
[11]
There
was the cinematographer Tatsuyuki Yokota, who had teamed
with Mizoguchi for a long time.
[15]
He was also a master, known for Jinsei gekijyo
[directed by Tomu Uchida, Japan ??] etc., but I
think when he was in partnership with Mizoguchi, he
usually used the "normal" lens [by which Okazaki
seems to mean 40 mm]. It seems to me that after
Mizoguchi moved to Daiichi Eiga and worked with Kohei
Sugiyama and Shigeto Miki, Mizoguchi's style started
changing. [16]
2. The
dialectic of camera and acting
In
Mizoguchi, even a state of love between a man and a woman
is under the sway of hierarchy. Or, for Mizoguchi, the
most desirable form of romantic relationships might have
been a picture of holding down under him someone noble at
whom he used to look up... He recognised that every human
relation inevitably takes shape as either the act of
looking up or that of looking down, even in romantic
relationships. [18]
The base
is the camera eye filming with an angle of vision that
Mizoguchi identifies with the spectator. The right line
of this angle of vision will be taken as the axis of
desire and of agressivity, therefore of action. The other
line will be the defensive axis confronting that desire,
namely, the axis which folds onto itself, therefore the
axis of contemplation. The V of the angle of vision
becomes the V which serves as the device for mise en
scène on the screen. Frequently the screen
closes the V opened by the camera in such a way that if
one made this combination into a figure, it would form a
lozenge. In the V visible on the screen, the axis of
agressivity and desire is occupied by the male, and the
other is ascribed to the woman trying to protect herself
from attack. [24]
3. The
love of Sumako the actress: restlessness in depth of
field
4. Sisters
of Gion: manipulation by glances
5. Miss
Oyu: the ambiguity of looking
6. The
life of Oharu: the magnetic field of power
relations
Conclusion
By this
time [1935] Mizoguchi was notorious for
dominating and exhaustively rehearsing his actors,
planning their performances free of stray gestures and
unexpected posturing. The self-absorbed attitudes and
deliberate movements of the characters in The downfall
of Osen reflect this preparation. Actors' bodies are
less seats of personality and more vectors of force and
direction. [39]
Endnotes
