When Japanese cinema first won international distribution in the 1950s, it was Kurosawa Akira, with his flamboyant visuals and heartfelt humanist sentiments, who first stepped into the spotlight.
The quietly poignant domestic dramas of Ozu Yasujirō were discovered a few years later; today, he is perhaps the most esteemed of classical Japanese filmmakers.
Yet in the 1950s, the highest praise was reserved for their elder contemporary Mizoguchi Kenji (1898-1956), whose late masterpieces earned comparisons with Tolstoy from Lindsay Anderson and Homer from Eric Rohmer, both of whom went on to become celebrated filmmakers themselves. The praises of these directors-to-be have been echoed by more recent admirers. ‘The comparisons are as inevitable as they are unfashionable,’ wrote Toronto-based film programmer James Quandt a quarter of a century ago, introducing a centenary retrospective of Mizoguchi’s films. ‘Mizoguchi is cinema’s Shakespeare, its Bach or Beethoven, its Rembrant, Titian or Picasso.’
In the 1962 Sight and Sound critics’ poll to rank the greatest films of all time (published every 10 years by the British magazine), it was Mizoguchi, not Kurosawa, who was represented in the Top 10, with Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) taking equal fourth place despite the fact that it had not yet been commercially released in the UK. Kurosawa himself, giving the eulogy at Mizoguchi’s funeral in 1956, declared that ‘With the death of Mizoguchi, Japanese film has lost its truest creator.’
If Kurosawa’s films are characterised by dynamism and Ozu’s by stasis, Mizoguchi’s are defined by grace. His style is as immediately recognisable as Ozu’s, though the two directors were almost polar opposites. His compositions often evoke classical Japanese art: his long shots resemble medieval screen paintings in the way he maroons his characters in vast landscapes, while the bustle and vitality of his group shots bring to mind the animated gestures and postures in ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Yet despite their painterly beauty, his images are wholly cinematic, drawing their power from the onscreen movement of actors and the corresponding or contrasting motion of the camera. Above all, Mizoguchi was one of cinema’s most elegant practitioners of the long take.
Yet the aesthetic beauty of Mizoguchi’s films never overwhelms their human content. Serenely moving, his art also burns with anger at injustice and sorrow for human suffering. He focused with single-minded clarity on the experiences of women in a patriarchal society. As one of the cinema’s most sympathetic directors of actresses, he owed much to the commitment of some of the screen’s finest female stars, most notably, Tanaka Kinuyo (1909-1977), who starred for him in fifteen films between 1940 and 1954. Other collaborators, too, were of vital importance: many of his most distinguished films boasted sophisticated scripts by Yoda Yoshikata (1909-1991) and rich photography by Miyagawa Kazuo (1908-1999).
While Mizoguchi’s career spanned more than thirty years, the film season at Japan House London concentrates on his last years, balancing some of the most esteemed period films with lesser-known, yet fascinating, dramas of contemporary life.
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The Life of Oharu (1952)
Envious of Kurosawa’s triumph with the film Rashōmon at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, Mizoguchi was determined to match him. With the bleak but brilliant period film The Life of Oharu, he not only scooped the International Award at the same festival the following year, but also initiated his sequence of masterly late period films. Dramatising the decline and fall of a courtly woman, this film was based on the prose novel The Life of an Amorous Woman (1686) by Ihara Saikaku, the great chronicler of the so-called ‘floating world’: the fleeting pleasures of Japanese urban life during the early part of the Edo period (1603-1868). But in place of the writer’s detached, amused irony, Mizoguchi brought to his film ‘something deeper than empathy’ (in screenwriter Yoda Yoshikata’s words) for the marginalised heroine. As Oharu, Tanaka Kinuyo gives one of the finest of her many great performances.
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The Lady from Musashino (1951)
A fine example of the so-called ‘bourgeois melodramas’ which Mizoguchi crafted in the early 1950s, this story of a marriage on the rocks features another star turn by the wonderful Tanaka Kinuyo. The personal drama is set against the backdrop of a fast-changing postwar Japan; indeed, the very landscapes among which it unfolds were soon to disappear as semi-rural Musashino was swallowed up by the Tokyo sprawl.
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Gion Festival Music (1953)
One of Yoda Yoshikata’s most polished and pointed scripts is at the heart of this compelling drama set in present-day Kyoto. Two outstanding actresses, Kogure Michiyo and the then 19-year-old star Wakao Ayako, star as an experienced geisha and her young apprentice (maiko). The latter’s rebellion against the obligations of the trade forms the basis of a devastating social critique, made both trenchant and moving by Mizoguchi’s characteristic sympathy for his female protagonists.
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A Story from Chikamatsu (1955)
Another period piece inspired by one of the great Japanese writers, in this case Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725), whose name features in the film’s title. Chikamatsu was the master playwright of the bunraku doll theatre, and one of his puppet plays was the source of this story of star-crossed love between a merchant’s wife and his apprentice. The film crafts a meticulous social critique in austerely elegant long takes, telling its story in moods of both anger and resignation. Kurosawa Akira acclaimed it as ‘a great masterpiece that could only have been made by Mizoguchi.’
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Sanshō Dayū (1954)
For many critics, this magisterial chronicle of man’s inhumanity to man and woman is Mizoguchi’s greatest achievement. Set in medieval times, yet powerfully relevant in the face of twentieth-century and even more recent atrocities, this story of an aristocratic family sold into slavery displays an exquisite visual beauty which somehow intensifies its outrage at human cruelty and its celebration of human dignity. ‘Style in Sanshō Dayū,’ critic Robin Wood observes, ‘is the convincing embodiment of the cinema’s supreme intelligence and sensibility.’
Alexander Jacoby lectures on Japanese cinema at Oxford Brookes University, and is the author of A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors (2008, Stone Bridge Press) and a forthcoming monograph on Koreeda Hirokazu (British Film Institute / Bloomsbury). He has curated retrospectives of Japanese film at BFI South Bank, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna and the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone.