How
inadequate I feel, watching Kenji Mizoguchi's movies! I
want to feel closer to his people, the way I feel close
to John Ford's cowboys, Jean Renoir's cancan dancers,
Carl Dreyer's bigots, F.W. Murnau's Polynesians, King
Vidor's blacks, Roberto Rossellini's partisans - any of
whom feel no less "alien" to me than Mizoguchi's
Japanese, medieval or modern. It is not a "cultural
divide" that makes me feel like a distant
observer.
Of course I
feel inadequate not understanding a word of Japanese; I
don't even relate well to its intonations or songs. Of
course I feel inadequate peering at players placed so far
from the camera in prints so dupey that their faces are
white smears, without visible expression.
But there is
no difficulty for me with Mizoguchi's pictures, his
compositions, his blocking of characters, his use of body
language, his long takes, his instrumental music, or with
the conflicts, emotions, themes and philosophy of his
cinema. There is no doubt that Mizoguchi, even though his
subjects were all but exclusively Japanese, conceived his
work also in the expressionistic traditions of Western
cinema and French romantic naturalism, and as an
expression of outrage rather than affection for
traditional Japanese culture. Had Mizoguchi not been
Japanese, his movies would probably be labeled
"anti-Japanese."
I suspect that
I do not feel closer to Mizoguchi's people because his is
a cinema in which artifice is not only the style but the
theme, and the search for authenticity the obsession. I
do not feel closer to Mizoguchi's people because often
they are not quite "there" on the screen, but are sought
for, and are themselves characters in search of an
author, as in Pirandello.
There are two
aspects of this cinema: cutting and everything
else.
Part 1:
Everything else
Yuki fujin
ezu (Madame Yuki, Japan 1950) starts off, like
most Mizoguchi movies (and most Ford movies) with someone
arriving: Hamako, a young woman arrives from the country
to serve the glamorous and aristocratic Lady Yuki, whom
she has adored from a distance since childhood. And few
beginnings could be more inviting than the prospect of
Mizoguchi doing a movie with so delightful and serious an
ingénue as Yoshiko Kuga. One anticipates something
akin to what Max Ophüls and Alfred Hitchcock did
with Joan Fontaine, in Letter from an unknown
woman (US 1948) and Rebecca (US 1940). Indeed,
we start out that way, with Hamako gazing in wonder in
every shot, as we tour Yuki's country estate with her.
Left alone for a moment in a hallway, she cannot help
staring up and down and all around. Mizoguchi even treats
us to her interior monologue, voice-over, as she takes a
bath, a bit as Vidor would do with Audrey Hepburn in
War and peace (US/Italy 1956).
But Mizoguchi,
having seduced us, immediately denies us. He cuts us away
from Hamako to see what she is seeing, and in the next
scene, as she chats with Seitaro, we cannot even feel her
impressions, because Mizoguchi puts her too distant to be
seen: she is there just to listen.
A bus and train ride start out as her experience, but her
companion Kikunaka takes over her scenes,
and
eventually Yuki does the same.
Hamako,
no longer our associate, has become a supporting player
of no significance, a "person" no more, compelled by
Mizoguchi to turn her back to us. She has one more good
scene, when Yuki's husband forces her to come into his
bedroom while he has sex with Yuki, after which Mizoguchi
dumps her deliberately into long shot sweeping a broom,
with Kikunaka and the housekeeper saying "tsk tsk" and
changing the subject. In effect, all the magical scenes
of Hamako's fascination have served merely to set the
stage for Yuki herself.
And then Yuki
turns out to be a nonentity! Like Citizen Kane. And
Kikunaka too turns
out
a nonentity, without will or substance, as is Yuki's
husband, who is gross and repulsive to boot. Degenerate
aristocrats all. Why has Mizoguchi deprived us of Hamako,
who, in Yoshiko Kuga, radiates so much essence with so
little effort and so much grace? Michiyo Kogure, in
contrast, incarnates Yuki as a void, her energy drawing
inward, an addict of her own nothingness, who can find no
higher purpose than her own extinction. Her response to
pregnancy is to dissolve herself in the floating mists of
the lakeside, then in the lake itself. Whereupon Hamako -
speaking for the women of postwar Japan but now relegated
to long shots almost infinitely distant - denounces her
erstwhile hero: "Madame Yuki, woman without courage!" Why
does Mizoguchi not let us see Hamako's face?
The best
American movies are character driven, meaning that
events, like plot, lighting and staging, are concocted to
further our interests in the character. If the movie
should happen to tell us about Napoleon's invasion of
Russia or some other event, and should the movie also
meditate like Tolstoy upon all sorts of issues of love,
morality and fate, so much the better; but the value of
any of these matters will depend on their emotional value
to the characters.
Not in
Mizoguchi. In his cinema what counts is the
deed.
Youth is
always denouncing age in Mizoguchi. Youths tell us
aristocrats have had their day also in Shin Heike
monogatari (New tales of the Taira clan, Japan
1953), and that time it is the twelfth century. It is
hard to think of a Mizoguchi movie in which women do not
denounce their helplessness and men are not brutes - and
equally helpless. It is always a time in Japan when, as
the credits of Sansho dayu (Sansho the
bailiff, Japan 1954) inform us, people have "yet to
awaken as human being". Yuki perhaps associates a strong
patriarch with her lost childhood identity and for this
reason is powerless against her husband. Hamako's
denunciation of Yuki thus has an eternal, even a generic
quality that, for Mizoguchi, renders Hamako irrelevant as
an individual, except in her deed.
Ironically, an
actor of Yoshiko Kuga's quality is exceptional in
Mizoguchi's movies precisely because she gives her
characters such definitive individuality. She becomes a
character physically and mentally to such an extent that
it is impossible, while watching her in one part, to
think of her in another - in Mizoguchi's Shin Heike
monogatari and Uwasa no onna (The woman of
rumour, Japan 1954); Yasujiro Ozu's Ohayu
(Good morning, Japan 1959); Akira Kurosawa's
Yoidore tenshi (Drunken angel, Japan 1948)
or Hakuchi (The idiot, Japan 1951); or in
her movies for Masaki Kobayashi, Kon Ichikawa or Nagisa
Oshima.
In contrast to
Kuga, Mizoguchi's actors usually have a commedia
dell'arte side to them, a Pirandellian awareness of
playing, and of playing within a stock role. Thus the
theme of artifice. It seems the besetting sin in
Mizoguchi's Japan that everyone is always assuming a
role, and a posture appropriate to it, and that
personalities and names and clothing and social position
are nothing but constructs concealing nonentities and
voids. Some characters search for identity (the heroes of
Sansho dayu and Shin Heike
monogatari), most others seek to assume one, and
still others, like Yuki or Oharu in Saikaku ichidai
onna (The life of Oharu, Japan 1952) seem
never to have formed personalities beyond memories of
childhood - like Robert Bresson's donkey Balthazar (in
Au hasard, Balthazar [France 1966]),
except that everyone is a donkey in Mizoguchi, brunts of
the world's cruelty, not yet human, just
constructs.
Evil is
systemic in Mizoguchi, not individual: we have not
"awakened" yet. Thus the actors seem to be speaking to
us, not just to each other, and are not afraid to be
hammy, like Chaplin; they come alive flirting with us;
they circle constantly around each other, playing to us,
telling us - like commedia, Brecht and Chaplin -
that social constructs are persecutive rather than
preserving.
Tradition is
for the most part institutionalized brutality. A tea
ceremony in Gion bayashi (Japan 1953) is the
subject of one of Mizoguchi's loveliest shots, but the
tea ceremony is being staged by the madam of a geisha
house, as part of a school for adolescent girls training
to be prostitutes, as a demonstration of Japan's
successful selling of itself to foreign tourists. Family
relationships are constructed with similar corruption: in
Chikamitsu monogatari (A story by
Chikamitsu, Japan 1954), a mother who has to sell her
daughter to avoid bankruptcy is terrorized by the idea
that the daughter might kill herself and not because she
loves her daughter, but because the scandal would
demolish the family. Meanwhile the daughter (though
fleeing for her life), is dutifully sending borrowed
money to the mother, who through fear, denounces her
daughter to the police. The daughter is put her to death
by the police - on a cross - for the crime of love, even
though the love is chaste.
Virtually
every relationship in Mizoguchi is humiliating,
hierarchal, enslaving, with space expressing the power of
one person, the nullity of another: endless bowing and
kowtowing and scraping across floors in self-abasement.
And despite all these shots of people walking in rooms
and passageways, we get no sense from Mizoguchi of what
it is like to be in these houses, because these are sets,
designs, formed of rectangles, cubes, lines and blocks,
and their space is fictive, part of the nightmare of
power. The grace of the architecture, the clear lines of
buildings, the comforting sensation of a storybook Zen
order radiated by structures, all are geometric forces of
imprisonment and oppression, owing as much to Caligari as
to Japanese
tradition.
Percussive
soundtracks often echo the geometry of sets. Even
Mizoguchi's exteriors are constructed: the famous
fog-covered lakes in Ugetsu monogatari
(Ugetsu, Japan 1953) and Yuki fujin ezu,
sparking ponds in Yuki and Sansho, country
streams and villages that echo Dutch landscapes in
Utamaro o meguru gonin no onna (Utamaro and his
five women, Japan 1946). Reality is subjective,
emotionalized. Movies are basically atmosphere, Mizoguchi
maintained, citing Vermeer.
At
times Mizoguchi's Japan is not much different than
Dreyer's Denmark, where witches are burned in Day of
wrath (Denmark 1943) and the dead resurrected in
Ordet (Denmark 1955), apparently for no other
reason than the quality of the light. As for the really
"real world", it is like freedom or love or liberty -
something beyond reach: heaven.
If tradition
sustains or inspires, it does so as hope: a reverence for
keeping troth to father's "words". Anju sacrifices
herself by drowning, in Sansho dayu, in order that
Zushio fulfill father's words. After passing through a
gate where streaked light suggests infinity beyond, in a
pool of water whose ripples spread those "words" outward
in a movement echoed an hour later by the ever-retreating
movement of the camera while Zushio messianically
liberates the slaves, moving grandly outward until at
last he learns of his sister's deed, of which his great
deed has been merely the end point of the ripple.
Similarly motivated is Kyomori's defense of his father in
Shin Heike monogatari (after resolving the crisis
of which man is his father); the devotion of the
forty-seven samurai in Genroku chushingura (A
tale of loyal retainers in the Genroku era aka The
47 ronin, Japan 1941) and of Mohei in Chikamatsu
monogatari; the heroism of Okita in Utamaro;
the fortitude of Munechika in Gubijinso
(Poppies, Japan 1935); the grave offering by the
little boy at the end of Ugetsu. In all cases,
keeping troth means doing a deed. Self identity is one's
deed. "Personality" is a void. We construct ourselves
according to father's words and devote ourselves
samurai-like to single-minded accomplishment of
ideological purpose.
Thus, on one
level there is no difference in Sansho dayu
between the slaver and the liberator: the slaver's
refusal to feel pity for the slaves he brands with an hot
iron is also founded on purity toward a father's words.
Thus the self-consciously Pirandellian side to these
people, beautifully exemplified not simply in the ease
with which Zushio switches his pose from slave to
imperial governor without a blink, but even more in his
contempt for poses - the Pirandellian enslavement to
artifice, to the need to put on a face in society in
order to survive or command - and employs authority
against itself. But Zushio is capable of doing all this
only because he realises that he himself is nothing: it
is his deeds which count. Contrariwise, if Hakamo
disappears from our view in Yuki, it is simply because
she no longer has anything to do.
Mizoguchi's
heroes are few and exceptional; they remind us that most
people are cogs in the system, equally brutal and
terrorized. It seems like a Brechtian joke, in The
life of Oharu, when someone is arrested for
counterfeiting in this geisha-like world where every
relationship is counterfeited and the only authentic
emotion is fear; the entire movie is an iconoclastic rage
against all authority, power, position, and manner. Thus
Mizoguchi's great themes are the great passions: love,
duty, honor, and suicide. And petty ones: money and
greed. The people he concentrates on are obsessive, even
hysterical in their needs, like Balzac's demonic
profligates - Goriot, Hulot, Eugènie Grandet.
Heroes like Zushio and Kyomori move their bodies as
though propelled by coiled springs. But Yuki and her
husband sink deeper and deeper into languidness. Villains
are as extravagant as the heroes, seeming far beyond
redemption, creatures of melodrama and commedia, if not
Punch and Judy. And yet only a few days before liberating
the slaves, Zushio was such a brutish cog himself,
branding an old man with hot irons, pitilessly. He had
not "awakened".
"Describe for
me the implacable", Mizoguchi once instructed his
longtime scenarist Yoshikata Yoda, at the time of
Naniwa hika (Osaka story, Japan 1936).
"Describe for me the implacable, the egotistic, the
sensual, the cruel...There are none but disgusting people
in this world". Naturalistic melodrama was the ideal:
"everything has to be crystallised, concentrated... You
have to write a great work, like Balzac, Stendhal, Victor
Hugo or Dostoyevsky". [1]
If "acting" of
the quality of Yoshiko Kuga's is exceptional in
Mizoguchi, it is maybe because she is so successful in
constructing new persons for herself, and is thus the
ultimate justification, at least artistically, of the
very system of artifice that Mizoguchi is intent on
denouncing. Performance styles that are more
self-doubting, more "Brechtian", better signal the
artifice of social repression, and the primacy of deed
over personality. Mizoguchi's interest is less in the
individual than in the design containing the individual,
the design which both defines and restrains, from which
there is always the danger that the individual will burst
out, and do cosmic violence to the design. And yet, it is
only when the deepest emotions burst through the
Caligari-esque constructions that moral innovation
redeems the intolerable regimentation of life.
Mizoguchi's
interest in icons and in designs containing individuals,
produces many of his magic moments. His players have only
to pose, as here in Gion Bayashi.
And
long shots often only amplify their emotion. Murnau's
awesome influence is evident in this sort of body
language; compare, for example, this model of despondency
in Murnau's Tabu (US 1931). And William Wyler,
whom Mizoguchi
admired,
began Dodsworth (US 1936) similarly.
In Uwasa no
onna a prostitute need only lean against a post for
all her emotions to be plain. In Saikaku ichidai
onna, the suffering of Oharu staring desperately for
a peek at her son depends equally on posing. One could
cite hundreds of similar moments. Their pathos is
external, however - a conflict between them and the
world. Whereas what gives Genroku chushingura such
surprising excitement and power - despite its
three-hour-thirty-six-minutes duration and only one
hundred and sixty shots virtually without action - is
that the conflict is internal. Not only is much of the
"acting" modeling, but the conflict between actor and
model is clear, and this is the drama. Long takes contain
the tension, as do the cubes and rectangles, and like
time,
amplify
it beyond endurance.
The conflict
begins in 1701 when Lord Kira provokes Lord Asano into
attacking him during a court ceremony. For this
sacrilege, Asano is sentenced to hara-kiri and his house
is suppressed. Asano's family and followers agree with
the justice of this sentence, because they are obeisant
to order. But their samurai codes demand that Kira also
be condemned, else there is no order; the emperor as well
regrets Asano's attack failed. The conflict of orders is
resolved by Asano's forty-seven samurai killing Kira,
placing his head on Asano's tomb, and committing
hara-kiri on themselves. Thus is revolution from within.
Their deed inspires the suppression of Kira's house and
establishes a moral innovation, like Zushio's liberation
of the slaves in Sansho dayu.
At the same
time, it exacts a heavy personal toll, prompting us to
wonder how much possibility there is for a society whose
most virtuous citizens feel obliged to kill themselves.
Critics are forever writing that Genroku
chushingura, made at enormous expense during World
War II, exalts militarism, obedience even to death,
subservience of individuality to a code of honor, and
thus Japan's fascistic war. But when, nine years after
Hiroshima, in Sansho dayu, Anju walks calmly into
the water so that her brother may escape to bear troth to
father's words, no critic charges a continuance of
fascist sentiment. In fact, deliberated suicidal actions
are endemic in Mizoguchi in the decade after the war:
Utamaro, Yuki fujin ezu, Oyu-sama
(Miss Oyu, Japan 1951), Musashino fujin,
Sansho dayu, Chikamatsu monogatari and
Shin Heike monogatari. And, as in Genroku
chushingura, suicide is always a protest against the
prevailing order, and justified as necessary to purify
that order, to "turn the lie into truth", as a young
woman who elects to join the mass hara-kiri of the
forty-seven samurai puts it.
Mizoguchi
leaves out the blood. Perhaps it is immoral for him not
to make us watch the actual murder of Kira in horrifying
detail, so that we may see what all this fine abstract
talk actually comes down to. But neither do we see the
disembowellings. It is not pain they fear, or death,
which are too negligible to count on the moral ledger;
what they fear, like Christians awaiting the lions, is
that they may flinch (as Asano did). "Keeping up
[courage] is much harder than one would think",
Oishi remarks. This is what is tearjerking. This is the
tension Mizoguchi's long takes extend. At every moment we
can see the actor threatening to destroy the model, the
individual almost breaking through the ritual. It is
because they have lost everything and cannot control
themselves that these people impose iron discipline on
themselves. Asano's wife cutting her hair in mourning
solidarity with perfect grace and style is passion raw,
like Dreyer's Joan.
Theirs is not,
as some have claimed, a conflict of duty and feeling
(giri versus ninjo). Oishi's deed is his
feeling, his identity, his self. The unbearable feeling
is the fear of not keeping troth. These are love stories:
Oishi was Asano's companion since boyhood; the young
woman cannot not join her fiancé. And in both
cases these suicidal lovers "correct" their loved ones'
failures, turning lie into truth.
Scorn for
troth, accordingly, regularly incites Mizoguchi's people
to erupt in violence. In Uwasa no onna, Yukiko
(Yoshiko Kuga) is as placid as a sheep, until she goes
after her two-timing lover with a pair of scissors.
Mizoguchi loathes two-timers also in Gubijinso,
Naniwa ereji (Japan 1936), Gion no shimai
(Sisters of Gion, Japan 1936), Utamaro,
Yuki fujin ezu, Oyu-sama, Musashino
fujin (Lady Musashino, Japan 1951), and
Ugetsu (and I can account for only twenty-one of
Mizoguchi's eighty-five features). Utamaro is
almost a remake of Genroku chushingura: Okita
justifies her murder of her two-timing lover as keeping
troth to herself, for which, just like the forty-seven
samurai, she is willing to accept the legal consequences,
and all around her applaud; an aristocratic woman
declares that now she knows the path a woman must follow,
and the artist Utamaro, overwhelmed by Okita's mythos in
the same way as centuries of Japanese poets at the mythos
of the forty-seven samurai, exclaims: "I want to draw
[her]!".
Part 2:
Cutting
It is
this language, and not Japanese, that has to be
learned to understand "Mizoguchi".
- Jacques
Rivette, speaking of mise en scène
[2]
The succession
of shots below, from Gubijinso, would never have
been permitted to leave the cutting rooms of any Western
film company, and yet they are typical of Mizoguchi not
only here in 1935 but all of his career.
In America or
Europe, the camera placement for the six shots would be
as diagrammed below:
Whereas what
Mizoguchi does is this:
Mizoguchi's
shots do not "go together": each cut is disruptive, at an
angle unexpected, requiring each time that we orient
ourselves anew. The Western way would not jump to a lower
angle for shot 2, or shift for no apparent reason to
behind the characters' backs for shots 2, 3 and 5, then
jumping back to their fronts for shots 4 and 6. The
Western way would have preserved the characters'
emotional spaces, allowing us to experience their
feelings as they gaze at each other and exchange gazes.
In Mizoguchi, in contrast, the shifting compositions
suggest the boy and girl are posing for us rather than
for each other. Mizoguchi looks for the most romantic way
of composing, pictorially, each stage of their
conversation, as separate events, and the result is
exciting and delightful, much worth running and
re-running for itself. But it keeps placing us newly
outside the characters, in favor of their deeds.
Mizoguchi's shifting perspective resembles the way
Humphrey Jennings jumbles surrealistically divergent
images of Britain during the Blitz, except that Jennings
cuts all over England, whereas Mizoguchi cuts around a
love scene.
Somewhat
similarly, Mizoguchi jumps all over the compass in
Genroku chushingura during the long conversation
between Oishi and the young woman, and in Ugetsu,
high and low as well, while Genjuro is seduced by the
phantom enchantress:
Naturally a
conversation between three people in Gion bayashi
is viewed from three perspectives - something which has
probably never occurred in an American
movie:
For Mizoguchi,
it is absolutely the norm to "cut across the axis" so
that characters exchange position in the frame,
but even though "cutting across the axis" is technically
the correct term for a procedure which, in the West,
every editor is taught to avoid, it is not an appropriate
description for Mizoguchi's style.
Imagine a big
floor-map of North America, and place a couple in the
middle. The Western way would keep the camera in Mexico,
shifting right or left to the boy or girl, or showing
both together, within a coherent perspective. Mizoguchi
might start in Mexico, but would then switch to Canada,
and might add a shot from Hawaii. In this way he disrupts
not only our empathy with the characters, but also the
dialectical (or conversational) mode of Western cinema.
Instead, by shifting up, down, and all around, Mizoguchi
wraps his characters within a community, enclosing space
which is essentially shared space. This is one reason it
is difficult for us to figure out the layout of his
houses and rooms, and why space in his movies seems so
fictive and to relate more to design and psychology than
to reality. It is not that Mizoguchi is deliberately
"cutting across the axis" and confusing us spatially. It
is that he encloses the space physically, within his
narration. Because it is deeds that count, not
individuals, and Mizoguchi's conception of space favors
the deed, not the individual. A bit like Rossellini,
Mizoguchi gives us the illusion that events are occurring
beyond his intervention and that he is trying to film
them. Thus he keeps us further outside a character than
we are used to - or than we want to be, in the case of
Yoshiko Kuga especially! But the result, as Fred Camper
puts it, is that "the relationship between an individual
and his culture is in part the result of the way we see
space itself". [3]
Gion
bayashi is an unusual Mizoguchi movie in its
concentration on two women who want to be the
protagonists of their lives, in contrast to Oharu in
Saikaku ichidai onna and most of the director's
ladies in distress, who are abused objects viewed in long
shot. But Mizoguchi's cutting transforms the sort of
empathetic relationships we form in Western
cinema.
When sixteen
year old Eiko first arrives at the geisha Miyoharu's
house, she opens the slatted gate, a geometry marking her
application to be a geisha, and hears Miyoharu talking
with a client:
Miyoharu:
I hate people like you. You owe all this money.
Still
you come to play around with the geisha. You should
only go
to a geisha house when you have money.
Client: But I want to marry you. That's not playing
around with
a geisha.
Miyoharu: I have no intention of marrying you.
Client: Then you lied to me?
Miyoharu: Geisha don't lie, they talk business. Don't
you
know that we just agree with everything? ...Work and
pay
your debts. Then we can meet again.
But the shot
that follows - of Miyoharu and her client -
is
not from Eiko's perspective, as it would be in any
American or European movie. Why?
Because the
scene gives Eiko a false definition of geisha life as
woman power. Eiko envisions Miyoharu and herself as
liberated, postwar women with Constitutional rights to
inspect and reject clients, to take their money, and not
to fall in love. Eiko, like Gigi, sets out to become a
geisha oblivious to fatality not only in the world but in
her own character; one of Mizoguchi's more magical
sequences follows her wonder and delight as she dresses
for her first day, scampers across Kyoto, and nods
happily during her hairdresser's wisdom:
Maiko
always come here their first day. I bet you were
so
happy, you couldn't sleep last night. It's all
business from
now on. You have to look your prettiest. [Eiko
nods yes!] But
don't fall in love, that's bad. [Eiko nods
yes!].
Later she
banters: "Obligation? Love? I don't know anything about
that.... Men ought to serve us".
Returning to
Miyoharu and her client: the sharp American-style
crosscut in the middle of their dispute is the only such
cut in the movie until the end, when Eiko's education
will be completed in a similar crosscut with Miyoharu,
who then again will spin around to incarnate in motion a
rebuke - a device typical of expressionist
moviemakers:
At film's end,
Eiko rebels -
shot 1. 
Eiko: Everyone lies. Kyoto's geisha, Maiko, it's all
lies. If you sell yourself well, you succeed. Otherwise,
like me, you're locked out...
shot 2:
Eiko: ...If I cannot live without selling myself, I'll
quit.
-[whereupon
Miyoharu spins around in rebuke, then retreats]:
shot 3:
And once
again, as at film's beginning, Eiko stares
shot 4: 
-
but does not see: [the shot that follows of Miyoharu
is not from Eiko's perspective] -
shot 5: 
-
as is clarified by the next shot:
shot 6: 
Instead
of giving us the cross cut we expect to rhyme with shot
4, Mizoguchi has simply pulled back his camera in shot 5,
enclosing his characters' space rather than placing the
camera between them, maintaining his own angle, not
switching to Eiko's.
This sequence
also began like the film's opening sequence, with the
slatted gate, but this time the gate closes on Eiko.
And
Miyoharu, returning home after being compelled to have
sex against her will, appears imprisoned in
Mizoguchi's
Caligari-like set. And no sooner is she home, than she is
set upon by Eiko's rebukes, as Mizoguchi's high angle
geometrically details (Eiko is on top, Miyoharu her
victim):
This high angle (of Eiko and Miyoharu) appropriately
echoes the high angle (of Kanzaki and Miyoharu) which
Mizoguchi used in the scene, just before this one, of
Miyoharu's humiliating prostitution.
Miyoharu was
forced to prostitution because otherwise she and Eiko
were barred from employment as geishas and, more to the
point, because Eiko would have been raped by one of the
bosses. Miyoharu thus finds herself in a position similar
to Dr. Cartwright's (Anne Bancroft) in John Ford's 7
Women (US 1966), who also walks a dark corridor on a
similar prostitutional mission to save her
friends.
But Ford
emphasizes Cartwright's courage and fear, whereas
Mizoguchi's high angle over Miyoharu (with Kanzaki)
emphasizes her victimization - and anticipates the high
angle of Eiko's damning condescension toward her in the
subsequent scene.
But all high
angles show victims in Mizoguchi's cinema, where everyone
is eternally bowing or low or raising themselves on
platforms. Thus, the high angle of Miyoharu over Kanzaki
places Kanzaki, Miyoharu's apparent persecutor, in his
position as an even lower victim of the same ridiculous
artifice. And the high angle of Eiko over Miyoharu, shows
Eiko also as victim. No one is on top.
And Eiko
cannot be saved. The nature of the geisha system, as
explained by Miyoharu at film's beginning, is
exploitation and power - whether of geisha over client,
or client over geisha. Miyoharu's prostitution only
reinforces the system. Now she wants to be Eiko's
protector, preserving her from prostitutional sex as a
sort-of Constitutional prostitute, in effect working for
Eiko, who is thus, through the matching high angles,
appropriately compared to Kanzaki as part of the
corruption of power.
Returning to
the confrontation between Eiko and Miyoharu, shot 6
continues as Eiko, finally breaking out of her dollhouse,
recognizes her corruption to power, and runs away to the
rear of the frame:
shot
6:
shot 7:
With
one of his Mexico-Canada crosscuts, Mizoguchi enclose
their space, and then echoes the expansion of space
between shots 5 and 6, by pulling back his camera to shot
8.
shot 8:
Eiko has
retreated from Miyoharu, and from the realities of a
cruel world that forces us to assume roles which are not
of our choosing, to become cruel ourselves, to corrupt
our consciousnesses, so that ultimately our selves (like
Madame Yuki) have no existence, no deed. The nature of
the geisha (like that of the lady) is to be a doll with
no more personality than a doll: a void. Mizoguchi's
postwar women think they can change this. In Josei no
shori (The victory of women, Japan 1946), a
female attorney actually declares that her opponent's
"formalism makes his point void". She is arguing more
from Mizoguchi's sense of the world as misdesign than
from tradition. Change costs dear. Mizoguchi's
revolutionaries are all Christ figures, who sacrifice
themselves. "What good does it do you to face the world
proudly?" asks one of Eiko's predecessors in Gion no
shimai. None of the forty-seven samurai are there to
reply.
To all of
this, Miyoharu replies with compassion. Her compassion is
expressed is the actors' Tabu-like body language
in shot 8: Eiko a figure of defeat; Miyoharu a
pietà who has failed to save her child from
life.
And Miyoharu's
compassion is expressed also in the movement within the
shot. Miyoharu coming forward from the rear of the frame
to the proscenium - to us - continues the same
coming-forward movement begun in the transition from shot
7 to shot 8. It is this movement by which Miyoharu's
compassion replies to Eiko's despair. It is the deed that
counts.
And thus
Mizoguchi's shifting camera - the freedom of his point of
view - annuls the constrictions of constructed space. We
are free.
Endnotes
(To
return to your place in the text, simply click on the
endnote number)
[1]
Ariane Mnouchkine, "Six entretiens autour de Mizoguchi",
Cahiers du cinema 158 (August 1964): 24,
26.
[2]
Jacques Rivette, "Mizoguchi viewed from here", in Jim
Hillier (ed), Cahiers du cinema volume 1 – The
1950s: neo-realism, Hollywood, new wave (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 264.
[3]
Fred Camper, "Adventures in space: the loyal 47
ronin", Chicago reader (7 February 1997).
http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/archives/0297/02077.html.
