Stitched together from readings I've done this week in preparation for Sisters of the Gion (1936), this might be helpful since Standish doesn't give much background in the chapter I sent out.
Mizoguchi was born in 1898 (5 years before Ozu) into a well-off family that lost everything in investments into the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05). His older sister was sold to a geisha house and eventually became the lover of the son of a former daimyo family that had retained its wealth after the Meiji Restoration. She was his financial support and provided him with a home in Tokyo. He first applied to be an actor with the Nikkatsu studio (which would become Shochiku's chief rival during the inter-war period) but due to a labor crisis resulting from the end of the practice of using male actors in female roles (onnagata) in 1922, he became an assistant director instead. He became a director only a year later, directing many successful films in the so-called Nikkatsu style in the '20s. Donald Kirihara describes Mizoguchi in the '20s and '30s as working in what David Bordwell calls a "pictorialist" mode, which is "characterized by urban dramas set in Meiji or Taisho with material often derived from plays, favored long shots, camera movements, and a dense, textured mise-en-scene" (67). Kirihara sees the influence of Joseph Sternberg on Mizoguchi's style, as well as Robert Wiene's German Expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1921), a film whose influence on early Asian cinematic style was so widespread that I wish someone would study it's exhibition and reception in greater detail. Overall, Mizoguchi made "modern" films that were based on the shinpa tradition, the "new school" of theater that arose in the Meiji period and attempted to find a balance between kabuki-style drama and depictions of modern life. The resulting style was decidedly melodramatic and theatrical, and carried over into early cinema well, holding position as the most popular film genre well into the '30s (interestingly, a trend mirrored in colonial Korea).
I will set up a too-simple comparison between Mizoguchi and his contemporary Yasujiro Ozu to help explain Mizoguchi better. I would like to describe Yasujiro Ozu using a term John Ford used on himself: craftsman (deliberately not "artist"). Ozu was a brilliant filmmaker who exerted near total control over his productions from early in his career, something facilitated by his development of a trusty crew of actors and technicians that worked with him through his long career. If Ozu was a brilliant craftsman, the Mizoguchi was a maniacal and mercurial genius. Legendary for his passionate and tyrannical onset demeanor (there are some great stories about this), Mizoguchi never committed to one genre or style, oscillating constantly during the '20s and '30s. Critics have noted how, after making some realistic "women's films" such as Sisters of the Gion and Osaka Elegy (which did have melodramatic qualities), he returned to the over-the-top shinpa style of melodrama only a few years later with Late Chrysanthemums in 1939. He changed styles to suit the genre that he worked in. In the '30s he also switched studios numerous times, making Sisters of the Gion with Daichi Eiga (though it was distributed by Shochiku). Like Ozu, he surrounded himself with young technical innovators and cinematic craftsmen who helped make his films as memorable as they are.
As Akira pointed out last week, much of Passing Fancy was inspired by the structure of the naniwa theatrical form, and many of Ozu's films are about and inspired by traditional theatrical styles. Even more than Ozu, Mizoguchi was clearly inspired by his life in Kyoto (at the Nikkatsu studio), where he became a patron of kabuki and other theatrical forms. Tadao Sato thinks that we can see the influence of kabuki in Sisters of the Gion and some of his other films from the '30s.
Mizoguchi is most famous not for this '30s films but for the movies he directed after the war, especially Sansho the Bailiff (1954) and Ugetsu (1953), both based on pre-Taisho works of literature. Both of these are must-sees for anyone interested in Japanese cinema.
Sources:
Kirihara, Donald. Patterns of Time. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1992.
Sato, Tadao. Kenji Mizoguchi and the Art of Japanese Cinema. Trans. Brij Tankha. New York: Berg, 2008. (original edition 1982) -- this is a dubiously translated (and, I fear, poorly written in the original Japanese) version of a text by one of Japan's most famous film critics. It is a poor source that nonetheless did provide some essential kernels of information about Mizoguchi's life.
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