By Richard Brody
When the Sight & Sound poll of the best movies of all time came out in 2012, one of its biggest surprises was the absence of any film by Kenji Mizoguchi from its highest reaches. By contrast, Yasujiro Ozu’s “Tokyo Story” came in at three and his “Late Spring” at fifteen, and Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” finished in seventeenth place and his “Rashomon” in twenty-sixth. Mizoguchi’s “Ugetsu” tied for fiftieth place (with Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights” and Chris Marker’s “La Jetée”). Clearly, Mizoguchi’s star has dimmed among the world’s critics, and this is unfortunate. There’s no way to say this without sounding derivative, but I consider Mizoguchi to be not just the greatest Japanese director but one of the handful of the greatest filmmakers ever—and the comprehensive retrospective of his surviving films, which began Friday at Museum of the Moving Image (and which I discuss in the magazine), provides the evidence.
Nothing against Ozu, whose emotional world, though relatively placid on the surface, roils with anguish, frustration, and regret. He’s a severe critic of what he perceives as the secrets and lies, the soul-crushing rigidity of the unquestioned traditions of Japanese society, but his analyses take place locally. His image-making fits into an intentionally limited range, within which he bangs out angles with an expressive spontaneity akin to that of Nicholas Ray. The limitations that he imposes on himself, in an era that prizes shows of form above all, are mistaken for a sort of formalistic precision. Kurosawa is a bombastic filmmaker whose authentic but swaggering talent finds its distinction in his actors’ hectic performances. He’s perhaps Japan’s Elia Kazan, if not its John Huston, and he’s certainly not in the same artistic league with either Ozu or Mizoguchi.
Mizoguchi is a filmmaker of astonishing contrasts and extremes. He’s one of the most furious and fiercely critical political filmmakers of all time, in any country. He delves deeply into Japan’s cultural and political history in order to highlight grievous and still-unredressed injustices, and he also peers closely at his contemporary Japan and sees its moral horrors above all. His look at tradition is avid, thorough, and harsh; he can’t take his eyes off the wreckage that its wonders give rise to. The crucial devastation wrought in Japan is the unrelenting subjugation and oppression of half its population—women—and women are at the center of almost all of his films (and, when not their center, their fulcrum).
He views political depredations as inseparable from intimate ones, public failings to be inextricable from private attitudes, and he invents a cinematic style to match. He unites the widest, most comprehensive view of civic life with the most intimate and piercing domestic agonies. It’s a style based on the long take—often with the camera in motion, roving on tracks, swooping on cranes, or swiftly pivoting. The shot keeps the dramatic action of individual characters within the maneuverings at court, backstage turmoil, or in the swarm of political gatherings. His camera will follow a woman fleeing in anguish from the oppressive architecture of a cruel order, out to the liberating promise of a lonely death in the outdoors—a sequence that poses an intimate family discussion against the deep-set power of wealthy authorities.
In effect, Mizoguchi is both Japan’s John Ford, with his emphasis on history and legend, and its Max Ophüls, with the grandly operatic resonances of his highly stylized images. The vastness and the complexity of Mizoguchi’s world view and of his art lead to the sort of misunderstandings that may also contribute to the rarity of his films in the home-video market. In the magazine, I call attention to some of Mizoguchi’s very greatest works, ones that aren’t on DVD, though “The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums” is on Hulu Plus. I consider that film, from 1939, to be one of the most expansively imaginative in the history of cinema, one of the great explosions of creative energy on-screen. But soon thereafter, Mizoguchi’s two-part, nearly four-hour-long adaptation of the classic early-eighteenth-century historical episode “The 47 Ronin” (1941-42) upped his own ante.
“The 47 Ronin” is, simply, one of the great political films of all time. It’s the story of a group of samurai whose lord has been put to death—ordered to commit hara-kiri—by the shogun, and whose castle has been confiscated. The warriors of the title take it upon themselves to avenge the injustice and to oppose the confiscation—to stand up to the unjust yet unquestioned authority of a dictatorial regime and yet, at the same time, to remain true to the samurai code of honor. It’s an extraordinary balancing act that Mizoguchi pulls off. To satisfy the wartime norms of the day, he exalts classical Japanese warriors as self-sacrificing men of unimpeachable principle, and yet he emphasizes their fidelity to their conscience and their spirit of resistance. It’s a man’s world, the world of the samurai. Yet Mizoguchi builds the story to a crescendo of nobility and bloodshed through the intervention of a woman, the fiancée of one of the samurai, whose romantic concerns—though feared to be destructive of the samurai spirit—prove to be as noble, as principled, as courageous, as civic-minded, and as grand as those of the warriors.
“Utamaro and His Five Women,” from 1946, is among the cinema’s most incisive portraits of an artist as well as a clarion directorial credo. Utamaro (1753-1806) is a historical figure, one of Japan’s most renowned artists, and Mizoguchi locates the artist’s passions in the realm of the director’s own experience. Mizoguchi was an art student, who apprenticed in the traditional art of kimono painting before becoming a newspaper illustrator and then entering the world of movies. In Mizoguchi’s film, Utamaro gets into trouble for his brazen defiance of artistic tradition and his own original methods, which he discovers not in the fine arts but in popular arts (including his own devotion to a tattoo artist). But Utamaro, drawing inspiration for his art from the women in his life, is also witness not merely to women’s physical beauty but to their pain, to the dependence and the mistreatment to which they’re relegated. And when, in despair, they burst their bonds in acts of self-destructive fury, the terrifying beauty of their gestures is more than mere inspiration for Utamaro’s, and Mizoguchi’s, art: it’s an artistic creation in itself.
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