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Kenji Mizoguchi and the Art of Japanese Cinema
Kenji Mizoguchi is one of the three acclaimed masters--together with Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa--of Japanese cinema. Ten years in the making, Kenji Mizoguchi and the Art of Japanese Cinema is the definitive guide to the life and work of one of the greatest film-makers of the 20th century. Born at the end of the 19th Century into a wealthy family, Mizoguchi's early life influenced the themes he would take up in his work. His father's ambitious business ventures failed and the family fell into poverty. His mother died and his beloved sister was sold into a geisha house. Her earnings paid for Mizoguchi's education. Weak and deluded men, and strong, self-sacrificing women--these were to become the obsessive motifs of Mizoguchi's films. Mizoguchi's apprenticeship in cinema was peculiarly Japanese. His concerns--the role of women and the realist representation of the inequities of Japanese society--were not. Through two World Wars, Japan's culture changed. Though censored, Mizoguchi continued to produce films. It was only in the 1950s that Mizoguchi's astonishing cinematic vision became widely known outside Japan. Kenji Mizoguchi and the Art of Japanese Cinema tells the full story of this famously perfectionist, even tyrannical, director. Mizoguchi's key films, cinematographic techniques and his social and aesthetic concerns are all discussed and set in the context of Japan's changing popular and political culture.
259 pages, Paperback
First published July 15, 2008
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July 21, 2021
In was quite normal for people to view young people like Mizoguchi, who had neither a fixed job nor a skill, just a great love for literature and art, as simply immature. The film industry was one of the few places willing to employ them. There is no evidence to show that Mizoguchi had any passionate interest in cinema - nor had Japanese cinema reached a stage where it was possible to be passionate about it.
There is a story of the scriptwriter, Yoda Yoshikata, who arrived in Tokyo and went to one of the city's best restaurants with Mizoguchi. As they entered they found that the cook had wheeled in a wagon next to the tables and was grilling steaks over the charcoal fire with great flair. Mizoguchi was really taken by this and burst out, 'This is it. This is it. If you retreat to a place like Kyoto you don't expect to see such new things.'
“I basically hate talking. Really, I think words lack freedom. I always think impatiently so that before speaking I am already irritated at not finding the proper words. So I always come across as some raging beast. People think I say things unnecessarily, but it's not I who am at fault. It is language itself that is to blame.” (Mizoguchi)
An unreliable man, a strong-willed woman and a stubborn, crafty and cruel patriarch who will not let the two live: with some variations, these human relations formed the core of Mizoguchi's art.
As a rule, we pay little attention to everyday human actions; but if we were to observe them carefully, we would see their inherent beauty. He who can perceive and convey this beauty has the makings of a director. But not all are so gifted. It requires effort and exceptional skill to capture and express a beautiful thing in a readily understandable way. For, no matter how much thought goes into capturing the moment, it may just come out flat.
What is important is to experience the joy of discovering that there is so much beauty even in the commonplace that it makes you forget yourself. In his search for that beauty, Mizoguchi went beyond the affectation and ostentatious style of a geisha's daily life. He saw its gravity. He observed without prejudice. The scales fell from his eyes and he developed a unique way of looking, a way that was grounded in society.
Mizoguchi found a way to depict love scenes through Buddhism. In art, the dis covery of a particular pose or form is the same as discovering its meaning. Precisely because art is a ceaseless discovery of form, discovering the spirit of the form is an act of creation. If the last scene in Sansho the Bailiff is, imbued with such meaning for us, for Mizoguchi it must have been a moment of beatitude. And for me, it was a moment of spiritual awakening, a reflection of Mizoguchi's under standing.
I recall Oscar Wilde' famous words, 'It's not art that imitates life, it is nature that imitates art.' In Mizoguchi's case, I feel it was not his life that provided the model for his art but rather his art that was the model for his life, an art that transcended his personal vision of life. He based his tragedies on the idea that the fundamental contradiction in society was the inequality of the man-woman relationship. This was expressed most acutely in the evils of the Meiji ideology which sought 'success in life' for men. If this premise were to be accepted, we could perhaps agree that Mizoguchi's life was a kind of martyrdom. Japanese modernization inevitably gave rise to a certain form of tragedy, and Mizoguchi used Izumi
Kyoka's works as a sort of filter to concentrate on this tragedy and make it part of his own life. This he achieved in his later years with a series o f graceful prayers o f devotion to a sacred sacrifice.
For Mizoguchi the most important thing - more than any ideology or any thing else - was to discover the truth of 'one woman's demon'. What comes out clearly in all his films is that even through 'the form of an artist's concentration (devotion), a prostitute's way of thinking', a despised person can discover himself by concentrating completely on the reason for his existence. In his films the geisha, the dissolute young girl and the artist, always steel themselves in the face of ago nizing humiliation. The form that this determination takes organically, develops as 'the form of an artist's concentration, a prostitute's way of thinking'.
But 'arranging the form' is not just formalism, even if it appears to be so. The fact is that when 'something to live for' is given a human face through 'arranging the form', the beauty of the style itself affects people emotionally. This can be used to show not just warriors, but merchants, peasants and geisha as well. Each in his own way has a specific way of being and behaving, ways that are regulated and transmitted over generations. This is what Mizoguchi brought out beautifully in his later years in a series of masterpieces: The Life of Oharu, Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiffand A Storyfrom Chikamatsu.
How can a work be a masterpiece when its subject has not been properly inte grated into the story? Because by 'arranging the form', these films have reached the highest level of art. They represent a series of moments of sublime beauty.
“ 'Are you reflecting?' This was an expression that Mizoguchi used when he was directing. He often said that if there was no reaction to the others' emotions then the acting was dead.'Are you reflecting?' This was an expression that Mizoguchi used when he was directing. He often said that if there was no reaction to the others' emotions then the acting was dead. ” (Sugai Ichiro)
Mizoguchi loved using the crane so much that, according to Tanaka Kinuyo, actors would jokingly say that a crane would even be part of his funeral cortege!
Mizoguchi viewed these two movements of looking up or looking down at someone as fundamental to human consciousness.
Mizoguchi believed that men and women were wholly under the spell of their social positions until they fell in love. For him, the highest form an expression of love took was the image of an arrogant person prostrating himself before a social inferior. Such an image denotes Mizoguchi's disposition towards a feu- dalistic way of thinking: even in love, he believes, human relations were deter mined by who would be the superior and who the subordinate. This is not to slander him. The theme of his art was a constant battle against feudal instincts. and in the very ferocity of this battle lay the source of his tremendous creative power.
However, what leaves a powerful impression is the depth of Mizoguchi's imagination, expressed in the way he altemates between 'looking up' and 'looking down' - looking up to the woman as a sacred being and 'looking down' on the pitiful.
A society where men use women is also a society where men use each other. A man who crushes women is not a man to be admired. Portraying such men is a way of portraying a society where men cannot be men. The structure of a patriarchal social order is unquestionably based on violence. Yoda wrote his scripts for Mizoguchi from this understanding of Japanese society. He rarely wrote what is called social drama, where people trample over each other to get ahead. By pre senting the very core of society realistically, he provided us with a social analysis that was far sharper and more accurate than ideological works with their direct approach to social problems.
There is a story of the scriptwriter, Yoda Yoshikata, who arrived in Tokyo and went to one of the city's best restaurants with Mizoguchi. As they entered they found that the cook had wheeled in a wagon next to the tables and was grilling steaks over the charcoal fire with great flair. Mizoguchi was really taken by this and burst out, 'This is it. This is it. If you retreat to a place like Kyoto you don't expect to see such new things.'
“I basically hate talking. Really, I think words lack freedom. I always think impatiently so that before speaking I am already irritated at not finding the proper words. So I always come across as some raging beast. People think I say things unnecessarily, but it's not I who am at fault. It is language itself that is to blame.” (Mizoguchi)
An unreliable man, a strong-willed woman and a stubborn, crafty and cruel patriarch who will not let the two live: with some variations, these human relations formed the core of Mizoguchi's art.
As a rule, we pay little attention to everyday human actions; but if we were to observe them carefully, we would see their inherent beauty. He who can perceive and convey this beauty has the makings of a director. But not all are so gifted. It requires effort and exceptional skill to capture and express a beautiful thing in a readily understandable way. For, no matter how much thought goes into capturing the moment, it may just come out flat.
What is important is to experience the joy of discovering that there is so much beauty even in the commonplace that it makes you forget yourself. In his search for that beauty, Mizoguchi went beyond the affectation and ostentatious style of a geisha's daily life. He saw its gravity. He observed without prejudice. The scales fell from his eyes and he developed a unique way of looking, a way that was grounded in society.
Mizoguchi found a way to depict love scenes through Buddhism. In art, the dis covery of a particular pose or form is the same as discovering its meaning. Precisely because art is a ceaseless discovery of form, discovering the spirit of the form is an act of creation. If the last scene in Sansho the Bailiff is, imbued with such meaning for us, for Mizoguchi it must have been a moment of beatitude. And for me, it was a moment of spiritual awakening, a reflection of Mizoguchi's under standing.
I recall Oscar Wilde' famous words, 'It's not art that imitates life, it is nature that imitates art.' In Mizoguchi's case, I feel it was not his life that provided the model for his art but rather his art that was the model for his life, an art that transcended his personal vision of life. He based his tragedies on the idea that the fundamental contradiction in society was the inequality of the man-woman relationship. This was expressed most acutely in the evils of the Meiji ideology which sought 'success in life' for men. If this premise were to be accepted, we could perhaps agree that Mizoguchi's life was a kind of martyrdom. Japanese modernization inevitably gave rise to a certain form of tragedy, and Mizoguchi used Izumi
Kyoka's works as a sort of filter to concentrate on this tragedy and make it part of his own life. This he achieved in his later years with a series o f graceful prayers o f devotion to a sacred sacrifice.
For Mizoguchi the most important thing - more than any ideology or any thing else - was to discover the truth of 'one woman's demon'. What comes out clearly in all his films is that even through 'the form of an artist's concentration (devotion), a prostitute's way of thinking', a despised person can discover himself by concentrating completely on the reason for his existence. In his films the geisha, the dissolute young girl and the artist, always steel themselves in the face of ago nizing humiliation. The form that this determination takes organically, develops as 'the form of an artist's concentration, a prostitute's way of thinking'.
But 'arranging the form' is not just formalism, even if it appears to be so. The fact is that when 'something to live for' is given a human face through 'arranging the form', the beauty of the style itself affects people emotionally. This can be used to show not just warriors, but merchants, peasants and geisha as well. Each in his own way has a specific way of being and behaving, ways that are regulated and transmitted over generations. This is what Mizoguchi brought out beautifully in his later years in a series of masterpieces: The Life of Oharu, Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiffand A Storyfrom Chikamatsu.
How can a work be a masterpiece when its subject has not been properly inte grated into the story? Because by 'arranging the form', these films have reached the highest level of art. They represent a series of moments of sublime beauty.
“ 'Are you reflecting?' This was an expression that Mizoguchi used when he was directing. He often said that if there was no reaction to the others' emotions then the acting was dead.'Are you reflecting?' This was an expression that Mizoguchi used when he was directing. He often said that if there was no reaction to the others' emotions then the acting was dead. ” (Sugai Ichiro)
Mizoguchi loved using the crane so much that, according to Tanaka Kinuyo, actors would jokingly say that a crane would even be part of his funeral cortege!
Mizoguchi viewed these two movements of looking up or looking down at someone as fundamental to human consciousness.
Mizoguchi believed that men and women were wholly under the spell of their social positions until they fell in love. For him, the highest form an expression of love took was the image of an arrogant person prostrating himself before a social inferior. Such an image denotes Mizoguchi's disposition towards a feu- dalistic way of thinking: even in love, he believes, human relations were deter mined by who would be the superior and who the subordinate. This is not to slander him. The theme of his art was a constant battle against feudal instincts. and in the very ferocity of this battle lay the source of his tremendous creative power.
However, what leaves a powerful impression is the depth of Mizoguchi's imagination, expressed in the way he altemates between 'looking up' and 'looking down' - looking up to the woman as a sacred being and 'looking down' on the pitiful.
A society where men use women is also a society where men use each other. A man who crushes women is not a man to be admired. Portraying such men is a way of portraying a society where men cannot be men. The structure of a patriarchal social order is unquestionably based on violence. Yoda wrote his scripts for Mizoguchi from this understanding of Japanese society. He rarely wrote what is called social drama, where people trample over each other to get ahead. By pre senting the very core of society realistically, he provided us with a social analysis that was far sharper and more accurate than ideological works with their direct approach to social problems.
October 22, 2012
Japanese art critic Tadao Sato's study of Kenji Mizoguci, Kenji Mizoguchi And The Art Of Japanese Cinema (1982), was my next foray into understanding the films and legacy of Mizoguchi after reading Mark Le Fanu's study, Mizoguchi And Japan. Sato's book is a good companion, because he brings an understanding of traditional Japanese culture (i.e. Noh, shimpa dramas, bunraku puppet shows,etc.) and values that inform much of Mizoguchi's work. Furthermore, since he is working in his own native tongue he is able to draw from a variety of primary sources to give insights about Mizoguchi and his film making techniques. There was an interesting revelation he made in the chapter entitled "Encountering the New School of Theater," in which he discusses how in the past crimes against women (rape, incest, etc.) were heard in court the judgements were quite severe and the victims were also punished for bringing the men to trial. Sato also makes clear his judgements about Mizoguchi works; identifying those that he feels are classics (he adds A Story From Chikamatsu (1954) as one his best films along with those that are universally praised-The Life Of Ohara, Ugetsu, and Sansho The Baliff) and those that he feels are flawed or minor works in Mizoguchi's oeuvre. His chapters that analyze the camera techniques used by Mizoguchi are also illuminating: ("The Dialectic of Camera and Performance" and "Looking Up, Looking Down"). This is a useful and informative book for anyone interested in Mizoguchi or Japanese cinema. I was somewhat apprehensive about the English translation that was completed in India before reading it, but had no qualms about it while reading, however, two stills were mislabeled, however I encountered few other errors.
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