MovieRetriever's 100 Greatest Movies: #26 Ugetsu Monogatari

Ugetsu monogatari was not the first Kenji Mizoguchi film to be shown in the West, but it was the first to reveal him to the West as a major artist. Swiftly establishing itself (especially in France) on many critics' "Ten Best" lists, the film opened the way for the acclamation of the work of Mizoguchi's final period. For some, he became the supreme filmmaker, the cinematic Shakespeare, realizing to the fullest the potential of film as an art form. That was at the time when the "potential of film" was generally felt to have been identified and adequately expounded by Andre Bazin; and assessment which can still be accepted if we add the proviso that Bazin accounted for only one of film's many potentials.

However, the supremacy of his "late" period and the kind of achievement that it represents, has been increasingly challenged since the 1960s. Two factors help account for this: one is the discovery of Mizoguchi's earlier films, previously almost unknown; the other is the politicization of film criticism and the growth, within it, of an ideological awareness. In recent years, Noel Burch's To the Distant Observer, Joan Mellen's The Waves at Genji's Door, and Frieda Frieberg's useful pamphlet Women in Mizoguchi's Films – three books written from quite distinct critical positions, with quite distinct estimates of Mizoguchi's work – have agreed on one point, the application (in a derogatory sense) of the term "aestheticism" to Mizoguchi's late work. Films previously hailed as the greatest ever made – Ugetsu, Sansho dayu, The Life of Oharu – are suddenly perceived as evidence of Mizoguchi's withdrawal from the radicalism of his work in the 1930s and 1940s, and a retreat from a social/political viewpoint into the realm of aesthetic contemplation.

The relationship between aesthetics and politics is incredibly complex: the critical problems it generates have never been successfully resolved. It is true that Ugetsu monogatari is ideologically more conservative than, say, Sisters of Gion or My Love Has Been Burning. The crux lies in the treatment of women. From the radical feminist protest of his earlier films to the celebration of woman as self-sacrificer, redeemer, and mother in Ugetsu is certainly a large and disconcerting jump. (Mizoguchi's conversion to Buddhism in the early 1950s is doubtlessly a related factor.) Further, Ugetsu can be read as advocating the resignation to and the acceptance of one's lot. This withdrawal from the active struggle in favor of a spiritual transcendence makes the hardships of the material world not so much endurable as irrelevant. The film encourages such a reading, yet cannot be reduced to it.

Ugetsu contains within itself an answer to the charge of aestheticism. The story of Genjuro the potter can be taken as Mizoguchi's artistic testament. At the beginning of the film Genjuro is a materialistic artisan, mass-producing pots as a commodity. His encounter with the Lady Wakasa introduces him to the world of the aesthetic. She shows him fragile and exquisite vessels that she presents, and he accepts, as his creations, but that are totally unlike the crude, functional wares we have seen him almost brutally shape earlier. The complexity of response that this whole central segment evokes is sufficient in itself to call into question the reduction of the film to a single clear-cut statement. The Lady Wakasa is both evil spirit and a pathetic, victimized woman; the world of the aesthetic (which is also the world of the erotic) has a fascination and authentic beauty that make it far from easily dismissible. That alluring world, however, has three negative connotations. First, it is presented as a possible option only if one turns one's back on reality. It is a world of fantasy and illusion where the suffering of human beings in a material world of oppression, cruelty, greed, and human exploitation cannot be permitted to intrude. (One of the most expressive cuts in the history of the cinema is that from the exquisite scene of love-making on the cultivated lawn beside the lake to Miyagi, fearfully peering out from her hiding-place, a woman vulnerable to attack from all sides of a society created by men.) Second, Wakasa herself is not presented as an autonomous character, even in her appreciation of beauty. Everything she knows, her father had taught her. Her father (long since dead) appears in the film as a hideous, emaciated skull-like mask speaking in a disturbingly strange subterranean voice. The aesthetic, whatever else it may be, is clearly defined as a patriarchal imposition: "taste" is what women are taught by men. Finally, the father is linked to war, domnation, and imperialism. Wakasa's father had the misfortune to lose, and have his clan exterminated, but the film makes clear that he would have inflicted precisely the same fate on his enemies, had the outcome been reversed.

The overall effect of the film is to suggest, not that the aesthetic is invalid in itself, but that it cannot validly exist in this world. (The film's contemporary relevance is by no means compromised by its setting in the sixteenth century.) The pot Genjuro is making at the end of the film, under Miyagi's spiritual supervision, is significantly different from the two previous kinds of work: it is made with loving care, but also the product of experience; it is a work of art yet made to be used by Genjuro's peers rather than admired by a cultivated elite. The great beauty of the film is of an order altogether different from the aestheticism of the Wakasa world. Mizoguchi never aestheticizes pain and suffering (in the manner of, say, David Lean in Dr. Zhivago). The extraordinary sequence-shot showing the mortal wounding of Miyagi is a case in point: the aesthetic strategies (long take, distance, complex camera movement, depth of field showing simultaneous actions in foreground and background) serve to sustain the characteristic Mizoguchian tension between involvement and contemplation, but do not in any way mitigate the horror of the scene.

If on one level Ugetsu tends to reinforce traditional myths of woman, on another it remains true to the radical spirit of Mizoguchi's earlier Marxist-feminist principles. The actions of both Genjuro and Tobei are motivated by the values forced upon them by patriarchal capitalism. They both seek success (Genjuro through the acquisition of wealth, Tobei through the prestige of becoming a Samurai) in order to impress their wives, neither of whom shows the smallest interest in such ambitions. The film is a systematic critique of the kind of male egoism (expressing itself in greed and violence and the destruction of human relationships, always at the expense of women) that a patriarchal capitalist civilization promotes.

Release Date: 1953
Rating: Unrated

Starring: Machiko Kyo, Kinuyo Tanaka, Mitsuki Mito, Masayuki Mori, Sakae Ozawa, Sugisaku Aoyama, Kikue Nori, Mitsusaburo Ramon, Ryosuke Kagawa, Kichijiro Tsuchida, Syozo Nanbu, and Ichiisaburo Sawamura
Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Writer: Matsutaro Kawaguchi

Source Citation: Wood, Robin. "Ugetsu Monogatari." International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. Ed. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast. 4th ed. Vol. 1: Films. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 1254-1256.

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MovieRetriever's 100 Greatest Movies: #26 Ugetsu Monogatari

Ugetsu monogatari was not the first Kenji Mizoguchi film to be shown in the West, but it was the first to reveal him to the West as a major artist. Swiftly establishing itself (especially in France) on many critics' "Ten Best" lists, the film opened the way for the acclamation of the work of Mizoguchi's final period. For some, he became the supreme filmmaker, the cinematic Shakespeare, realizing to the fullest the potential of film as an art form. That was at the time when the "potential of film" was generally felt to have been identified and adequately expounded by Andre Bazin; and assessment which can still be accepted if we add the proviso that Bazin accounted for only one of film's many potentials.

However, the supremacy of his "late" period and the kind of achievement that it represents, has been increasingly challenged since the 1960s. Two factors help account for this: one is the discovery of Mizoguchi's earlier films, previously almost unknown; the other is the politicization of film criticism and the growth, within it, of an ideological awareness. In recent years, Noel Burch's To the Distant Observer, Joan Mellen's The Waves at Genji's Door, and Frieda Frieberg's useful pamphlet Women in Mizoguchi's Films – three books written from quite distinct critical positions, with quite distinct estimates of Mizoguchi's work – have agreed on one point, the application (in a derogatory sense) of the term "aestheticism" to Mizoguchi's late work. Films previously hailed as the greatest ever made – Ugetsu, Sansho dayu, The Life of Oharu – are suddenly perceived as evidence of Mizoguchi's withdrawal from the radicalism of his work in the 1930s and 1940s, and a retreat from a social/political viewpoint into the realm of aesthetic contemplation.

The relationship between aesthetics and politics is incredibly complex: the critical problems it generates have never been successfully resolved. It is true that Ugetsu monogatari is ideologically more conservative than, say, Sisters of Gion or My Love Has Been Burning. The crux lies in the treatment of women. From the radical feminist protest of his earlier films to the celebration of woman as self-sacrificer, redeemer, and mother in Ugetsu is certainly a large and disconcerting jump. (Mizoguchi's conversion to Buddhism in the early 1950s is doubtlessly a related factor.) Further, Ugetsu can be read as advocating the resignation to and the acceptance of one's lot. This withdrawal from the active struggle in favor of a spiritual transcendence makes the hardships of the material world not so much endurable as irrelevant. The film encourages such a reading, yet cannot be reduced to it.

Ugetsu contains within itself an answer to the charge of aestheticism. The story of Genjuro the potter can be taken as Mizoguchi's artistic testament. At the beginning of the film Genjuro is a materialistic artisan, mass-producing pots as a commodity. His encounter with the Lady Wakasa introduces him to the world of the aesthetic. She shows him fragile and exquisite vessels that she presents, and he accepts, as his creations, but that are totally unlike the crude, functional wares we have seen him almost brutally shape earlier. The complexity of response that this whole central segment evokes is sufficient in itself to call into question the reduction of the film to a single clear-cut statement. The Lady Wakasa is both evil spirit and a pathetic, victimized woman; the world of the aesthetic (which is also the world of the erotic) has a fascination and authentic beauty that make it far from easily dismissible. That alluring world, however, has three negative connotations. First, it is presented as a possible option only if one turns one's back on reality. It is a world of fantasy and illusion where the suffering of human beings in a material world of oppression, cruelty, greed, and human exploitation cannot be permitted to intrude. (One of the most expressive cuts in the history of the cinema is that from the exquisite scene of love-making on the cultivated lawn beside the lake to Miyagi, fearfully peering out from her hiding-place, a woman vulnerable to attack from all sides of a society created by men.) Second, Wakasa herself is not presented as an autonomous character, even in her appreciation of beauty. Everything she knows, her father had taught her. Her father (long since dead) appears in the film as a hideous, emaciated skull-like mask speaking in a disturbingly strange subterranean voice. The aesthetic, whatever else it may be, is clearly defined as a patriarchal imposition: "taste" is what women are taught by men. Finally, the father is linked to war, domnation, and imperialism. Wakasa's father had the misfortune to lose, and have his clan exterminated, but the film makes clear that he would have inflicted precisely the same fate on his enemies, had the outcome been reversed.

The overall effect of the film is to suggest, not that the aesthetic is invalid in itself, but that it cannot validly exist in this world. (The film's contemporary relevance is by no means compromised by its setting in the sixteenth century.) The pot Genjuro is making at the end of the film, under Miyagi's spiritual supervision, is significantly different from the two previous kinds of work: it is made with loving care, but also the product of experience; it is a work of art yet made to be used by Genjuro's peers rather than admired by a cultivated elite. The great beauty of the film is of an order altogether different from the aestheticism of the Wakasa world. Mizoguchi never aestheticizes pain and suffering (in the manner of, say, David Lean in Dr. Zhivago). The extraordinary sequence-shot showing the mortal wounding of Miyagi is a case in point: the aesthetic strategies (long take, distance, complex camera movement, depth of field showing simultaneous actions in foreground and background) serve to sustain the characteristic Mizoguchian tension between involvement and contemplation, but do not in any way mitigate the horror of the scene.

If on one level Ugetsu tends to reinforce traditional myths of woman, on another it remains true to the radical spirit of Mizoguchi's earlier Marxist-feminist principles. The actions of both Genjuro and Tobei are motivated by the values forced upon them by patriarchal capitalism. They both seek success (Genjuro through the acquisition of wealth, Tobei through the prestige of becoming a Samurai) in order to impress their wives, neither of whom shows the smallest interest in such ambitions. The film is a systematic critique of the kind of male egoism (expressing itself in greed and violence and the destruction of human relationships, always at the expense of women) that a patriarchal capitalist civilization promotes.

Release Date: 1953
Rating: Unrated

Starring: Machiko Kyo, Kinuyo Tanaka, Mitsuki Mito, Masayuki Mori, Sakae Ozawa, Sugisaku Aoyama, Kikue Nori, Mitsusaburo Ramon, Ryosuke Kagawa, Kichijiro Tsuchida, Syozo Nanbu, and Ichiisaburo Sawamura
Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Writer: Matsutaro Kawaguchi

Source Citation: Wood, Robin. "Ugetsu Monogatari." International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. Ed. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast. 4th ed. Vol. 1: Films. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 1254-1256.

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MovieRetriever's 100 Greatest Movies: #20 Tokyo Monogatari

Film historians have long singled out three major directorial talents from Japan: Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujiro Ozu. And, at least in the West, and to almost as great a degree in his own nation, Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari) stands for the best in Ozu's nearly forty-year career, a superior example of a filmmaker at the height of his powers.

The narrative of Tokyo Story seems straightforward and simple enough. An elderly couple, living by the sea in Onomichi in the south of Japan, go to visit their grown up children in Tokyo, but find they do not fit in. Their children (and grandchildren) have become mean and selfish, negatively affected by city living. The grandparents are only treated nicely by their widowed daughter-in-law, who despite having to live in poverty, has retained traditional values. The grandparents eventually return home, and the grandmother dies, leaving the grandfather to face the future alone.

Tokyo Story hardly has a happy ending. By closing the drama with the daughter-in-law going off, leaving the grandfather by the now familiar port, we confront the often sad reality of everyday existence. Tokyo Story presents an all too common situation, a tale of real life which happens more often than we like to consider. The point is that while the Hollywood system would not permit such a tragic tale to make it to the screen the Japanese industry would.

Most critics find Tokyo Story central to Ozu's final period of filmmaking, the last great excursions of a virtuoso in a lengthy career in the Japanese cinema. During the 1950s, after Japan had emerged from the war, Ozu often dealt with traditional values. The "Tokyo" in the title was central to the life of the nation after 1880, presenting to the world how Meiji Japan could succeed in western arenas. By the 1920s Tokyo stood as one of the more populous cities in the world. Of Ozu's fifty-four films, some forty-nine take place in Tokyo and five mention the city in their title. This city, more than any, symbolized the modern world, with its mass culture, including the ever growing obsession with motion pictures.

In certain respects Tokyo Story is a typical work, but in many it is not. Although not all of Ozu's films are about the family, certainly he was vitally interested in that part of Japanese life. He was, after the war, particularly intrigued with the changes his nation was undergoing. Although Ozu is most often seen as a traditionalist, he was always concerned with the events of everyday life. Tokyo Story is typical of late Ozu in that it arose from immediate concerns of the early 1950s, in particular Tokyo being rebuilt and families becoming more "urbanized."

Tokyo Story illustrates the structural rigor and richness of the later Ozu films. This is true for editing, camerawork, mise-en-scene, and sound. For example, three recurring sounds define the acoustic texture of the film: chugging boats, the noises of trains, and the sounds of cicadas. All three are established in the film's initial scene when the grandparents prepare to leave Onomichi. Their stay in Tokyo is then constantly punctuated by train whistles. Later when the grandmother is about to die the scene opens with train sounds and closes with the noises of harbor boats.

In the West Ozu is celebrated as an artist. But in the Japanese film industry he was seen as a steady worker. He created, on schedule, one film a year for the massive Shochiku studio. He was that studio's most famous director, and films such as Tokyo Story kept profits flowing in the years before television would become a rival for the mass entertainment audience. And he was honored in industry polls. Tokyo Story won the "Kinema Jumpo" first place for the best film of the year in Japan.

Although Tokyo Story was released in Japan in November, 1953, and was a popular success there, it did not make its impact in the West until nearly two decades later upon its release in the United States in 1972. But today critics around the world list it among the greatest films ever to be created in the nearly one hundred years of world cinema.

Release Date: 1953
Rating: Unrated

Starring: Chishu Ryu, Chieko Higashiyama, So Yamamura, Haruko Sugimura, Setsuko Hara, Kyoko Kagawa, Shiro Osaka, Eijiro Tono, Kuniko Miyake, Nobuo Nakamura, Teruko Nagaoka, Zen Murase, Mitsuhiro Mori, Hisao Toake, Toyoko Takahashi, Mutsuko Sakura, Toru Abe, and Sachiko Mitani
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Writers: Yasujiro Ozu and Kogo Nada

Source Citation: Gomery, Douglas. "Tokyo Monogatari." International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. Ed. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast. 4th ed. Vol. 1: Films. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 1220-1223.

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