Mizoguchi Kenji was a Japanese motion-picture director whose pictorially beautiful films dealt with the nature of reality, the conflict between modern and traditional values, and the redeeming quality of a woman’s love.
Career
Kenji Mizoguchi, regarded both at home and abroad as one of Japan’s greatest movie directors, had a career that spanned from the silent film era to the first years of color motion pictures. During that time Mizoguchi made some ninety motion pictures. Unfortunately, no prints exist of two-thirds of them, and many of the missing ones are his earlier silent films. Although prodigious in output, Mizoguchi was slow in gaining recognition on the world stage.
While living in Tokyo, his sister Suzu arranged a job for Mizoguchi at a porcelain factory in Nagoya, far from Tokyo. He went to Nagoya, but did not like the town and he returned the next day. He next tried work designing photographic advertisement spreads for a newspaper in Kobe. That time he stayed with the job for a while. Besides the ad work, he wrote occasional verses that were published in the newspaper.
Homesick for Tokyo, Mizoguchi left Kobe one day without even packing his belongings or giving notice. He whiled his time in occupational — though not intellectual-idleness, spending his days reading and his nights at the theatre. A friend suggested that he try out as an actor at the Nikkatsu Film Studios in Tokyo. He won a job as an actor but soon switched to the job of transcribing scripts. Eventually he won a position as assistant director. He made his mark in 1922 in designing sets for a movie about Tokyo’s lower depths. In December of that year Nikkatsu suffered a walkout instigated by the female impersonators on the payroll. Early movies — like traditional Japanese theatre-used men in both male and female roles. Nikkatsu was experimenting with the idea of using women for the female roles, and the female impersonators resigned, taking with them some of the more traditional movie directors. Mizoguchi assumed a vacant slot and began directing movies for the first time.
Beginning in 1923, Mizoguchi scripted many of his earlier films, including “The Resurrection of Love”, an innovative movie that limited the need of a traditional narrator; “Foggy Harbour”, based on Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, which unveiled its story with mainly images and little dialogue: and “Blood and Soul”, an expressionistic film possibly influenced by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the great German expressionist film. Mizoguchi’s career was going well, but nature intervened on September 1, 1923. An earthquake that measured 8.3 on the Richter scale struck near Tokyo and devastated that city and Yokohama, leaving more than one hundred thousand dead and another forty thousand missing.
Mizoguchi took his cameras to the streets, capturing the vast destruction on film for the U.S. newsreel market. He incorporated what film footage he had left over into his fictional treatment of the earthquake. “Among the Ruins”, which was released to the public just six weeks after the earthquake. Unfortunately, Nikkatsu’s Tokyo studios were heavily damaged and Mizoguchi was sent to work at the Nikkatsu studios in Kyoto, where he made films to spec. From this point on his films were scripted by others. “This Dusty World” was scripted by Shuichi Hatamoto, who would write most of the scripts for Mizoguchi’s movies during the silent era. “The Song of the Mountain Pass”, another Mizoguchi film from the same time, were both melodramas, but he generally eschewed this genre. His “The Chronicle of May Rain”, got him in trouble with the censors because of its portrayal of a lusty Buddhist priest’s relationship with a geisha, and his war satire “No Money, No Fight”, was banned for a time in Japan.
Mizoguchi continued his drinking binges in Kyoto, often conscripting Hatamoto and his assistant director into service for the nights of carousing. Mizoguchi was often dictatorial with those who worked for him, ordering them around both on and off the set. He met and fell in love with a call girl, Yuriko Ichijo, and she moved in with him. She was a volatile person, given to jealous rage over Mizoguchi’s late nights and over the attention his actresses showered on him. One night during the summer of 1925 she attacked him with a razor, slicing up his back and sending him to the hospital. Widely reported in Japanese newspapers, the scandal led to his six-month suspension by Nikkatsu. The Andrew brothers believe that the attack and subsequent suspension had a profound effect on his working style and on his films.
Mizoguchi directed “A Paper Doll’s Whisper of Spring” in 1926. It was critically acclaimed for its portrayal of male egotism and the conflicts it causes. He persuaded an old school chum, Matsutaro Kawagachi, a successful writer in his own right, to script his next movie, “The Love-Mad Tutoress.” It was a ghost story and it was the first of Mizoguchi’s films to be exported to Europe. When he directed “The Nihon Bridge” in 1929, he had a European audience in mind for this depiction of traditional Japan based on a novel by Kyoka Izumi.
Influenced by leftist and Marxist ideals, Mizoguchi directed a few “tendency films.” Chief among these were “Tokyo March”, which used newsreel techniques to tell its story, and “Metropolitan Symphony", shot with hidden newsreel cameras and mixing actors dressed as laborers with real laborers. “Tokyo March” was scripted by several leftists. Mizoguchi was interrogated by the police over the making of the film and one of the scriptwriters landed in jail. Mizoguchi did not make many tendency films as the appetite of the public for such fare was waning.
Mizoguchi directed “Home Town", one of Japan's first sound motion pictures, in 1930. The sound quality of the film was poor, however, and the film was a commercial failure. This was also a period of intense growth for Mizoguchi. He studied music. He joined a folk-art group and, like other members of the group, made and dyed his own clothes. He added to his film vocabulary the “one scene-one shot" method that was to become his trademark. This involved using no editing during a scene, catching the action in one long shot. Mizoguchi believed, based on experiments performed by a psychologist friend, that this intensified the action. “Mistress of a Foreigner”, the silent film he followed with, exemplified this technique. He also demonstrated the length to which he would go to get a shot, ordering that a line of telephone poles be cut down to clear the scene for the camera.
In 1931 Mizoguchi directed “And Yet They Go”, a late tendency film, and in 1932 he directed “The Man of the Moment”, his first successful sound film and his last film for Nikkatsu. He jumped to Shinko Kinema Studios, lured by a better offer, but the first film he was directed to make for the studio was “Dawn in Manchuria”, a militaristic propaganda piece that failed at the box office, embarrassed Mizoguchi, and led to his refusal to make another film for six months. When he got back to work, it was to make “Cascading White Threads”, the story of a difficult love affair with a Romeo and Juliet-type ending. He displayed perfectionist tendencies that would only grow over the years, demanding a forty-day shooting schedule — unheard-of in those days. The result was a film hailed by critics and the public alike, and from this time forward Mizoguchi was considered a master of the film arts.
His next film, “Gion Festival”, also shot in 1933, marked the beginning of his long association with Hiroshi Mizutani, his art director. Mizoguchi had developed the “one scene-one shot” method, but Mizutani filled those scenes with historically-authentic artifacts, some of which he cajoled museum directors into loaning for productions. Mizoguchi’s “The Jinpu Group", set in Meiji era Japan (1868-1911), was a showcase for meticulous historical research in the service of cinematic authenticity. All the props were authentic, including dishes, money, and costumes.
Mizoguchi left the Shinko studio over a disagreement with the studio head. He returned to Nikkatsu, but was allowed to form a subsidiary company, Daiichi Eigatha, that would allow him more artistic freedom. He directed “The Mountain Pass of Love and Hate”, about a love affair between a political activist and a blind actress, and “The Downfall of Osen”, about the doomed love of a prostitute for a doctor. The latter was praised for its use of a double flashback showing the unfolding of the story from both main characters’ perspectives. He made two more films in 1935 — “Oyuki, the Madonna”, based on a Guy de Maupassant story, and “Poppy”, another Meiji-era story. Poppy did not do well at the box office, and Mizoguchi turned away from Meiji-era dramas for the time being.
For his next film, “Osaka Elegy”, he collaborated with the scriptwriter Yoshikata Yoda for the first time. Yoda would script most of the rest of the movies Mizoguchi made after that date. Stories about their collaboration are legendary, with Yoda being ordered time after time to rewrite scripts with little direction from Mizoguchi except to “create characters so real that the audience could smell their human odors,” according to a contributor to World Film Directors. The story concerns a telephone operator who resorts to prostitution to help her family with their financial difficulties only to be spurned by her family for turning to a life of prostitution. A critical success, it did little at the box office due to a lack of publicity attending its release because the film’s distributors were put off by its controversial subject matter. Instead of avoiding controversy in his next film, Mizoguchi met it head on, filming “The Sisters of Gion”, a drama about the lives of the geishas in Gion, a lower class district of Kyoto. Mizoguchi had trouble with the censors and with his distributors on this film; again he had a critical success, again the movie lost money. This second disaster was to cause the breakup of the Daiichi subsidiary. Incidentally, both Naniwa ereji and Gion no shimai were praised for the authenticity of their dialects.
Mizoguchi returned to Shinko’s Tokyo studios and directed several films there, including “The Straits of Love and Hate”, adapted from Leo Tolstoi’s Resurrection, and “Song of the Camp”, a militarist movie that Shinko pushed Mizoguchi into making. He made only one more film for Shinko, “Ah, My Home Town”, and set out to freelance for other studios for a while. ln 1939 he directed “The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums”, a traditional story about a Kabuki actor and his self-sacrificing wife. It was an instant success with the Japanese audiences. Mizoguchi won an Education Ministry Award and a place on the National Film Committee due to this movie and many critics regard it as one of the high water marks of his career.
In an uncharacteristic move, Mizoguchi directed a samurai film next, “The Forty-Seven Ronin”, about a group of samurai left leaderless after their lord commits seppuku (ritual suicide) in response to an insult; the samurai then bide their time for a year before retaliating. Mizoguchi spared no expense in building authentic sets. One unusual aspect of the three and one-half hour film is that not one scene of violence is shown. Mizoguchi made one more film in 1941, “The Life of an Artist”, but the onset of World War II delayed his career until 1944. On a tragic personal note, Mizoguchi’s wife Chieko succumbed to mental illness and had to be institutionalized for the rest of her life. Mizoguchi soon took up with her war-widowed sister and went to live with her.
Along with his other post-war films, Mizoguchi directed several with strong women characters — “The Victory of Women”, “Five Women around Utamaro", “The Love of Sumako the Actress”, “Flame of My Love”, and "Women of the Night" among them. In the latter film, Mizoguchi returned to his thematic obsession with the plight of prostitutes. This time the setting is post-war Japan, and the heroine has to turn to prostitution under the weight of the social and economic collapse of Japan. Yoru no onnatachi was a great success with the general public. Mizoguchi next moved to Shin Toho Studios and niade “A Picture of Madame Yuki”, a potboiler derived from a magazine serial. Some Japanese critics were shocked by the sensuality of the movie but most critics agreed that it was a minor movie in Mizoguchi’s cannon, as were the two that followed: “Miss Oyu” and “Lady Musashino", both made in 1951.
Mizoguchi next set his sights on one of his most ambitious projects. He had been trying for several years to make a movie out of a seventeenth-century Picaresque novel written by Saikaku lharu. He finally was able to realize his dream of making “Diary of Oharu” in 1952. The movie tells Oharu’s story in flashback as Oharu, now fifty, worships at a Buddhist shrine. That movie combined Mizoguchi’s attention to historical detail with his social concerns about the lives of geishas and prostitutes.
While he was in the midst of filming it, a younger Japanese director, Akira Kurosawa was being honored with a Gold Lion, the highest award of the Venice Film Festival for Rashoman, a historical drama Kurosawa had filmed the previous year. According to the scriptwriter Yoda, Mizoguchi felt slighted that Kurosawa, a much younger man, had received high accolades from the European film community before he had. Yoda claimed that the incident spurred Mizoguchi on to make an extraordinary film. He had subcontracted from Toho to make the film, but he had no studio at which to film it, so he built his own sets in a bombed-out park near Kyoto. Trains passed close by the park every fifteen minutes and Mizoguchi had to carefully plan his shots around the train traffic.
Despite these obstacles, according to reviewers, Mizoguchi made a masterpiece in Saikaku ichidai onna. Not as well received as many of his other movies at home, it was nonetheless chosen for showing at the 1952 Venice Film Festival, where Mizoguchi shared a Silver Lion for directing with John Ford, whose entry at the festival was The Quiet Man.
An old friend of Mizoguchi's formed Daiei Films and gave Mizoguchi a carte blanche contract to make whatever films he chose. “Tales of Ugetsu”, Mizoguchi’s first film under the new contract, was another masterpiece. It was based on two ghost stories from the eighteenth-century collection of Akinari Ueda and a short story by Maupassant. Some American critics regard Ugetsu monogatari as “one of the most perfect movies in the history of Japanese films,” according to a writer for World Film Directors. Like Saikaku ichidai onna, it won a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Mizoguchi went on to make “Gion Festival Music”, which was essentially a remake of his earlier film, Gion no shimai. It was not well received in Japan and was not shown abroad until after his death. His next film, “The Bailiff”, based on a Japanese legend, was another of his masterpieces. The movie was well-received abroad and shared a Silver Lion with Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai at the Venice Film Festival.
Mizoguchi made a few more movies before his death in 1956 — “The Crucified Woman”, 1954, “The Crucified Lovers”, 1954, “The Empress Yang Kwei Fei”, 1955, “Legend of the Taira Clan", 1955, “Street of Shame”, 1956, and “An Osaka Story), 1957 (finished by another director after his death). Two of the films — Yokihi and Shin heike monogatari — were in color, demonstrating Mizoguchi’s constant efforts to expand his techniques. With Akasen chitai he returned to a familiar topic, the life of prostitutes in Tokyo. A controversial film, it may have helped to bring about reforms regarding prostitution in 1957. The movie was very popular in Japan.
Views
Kenji Mizoguchi's work arguably embodies some of the purest expressions of cinematic artistry cultivated within the domestic industry in its first half century. Mizoguchi was unashamedly unapologetic about his chosen concern: the unfair lot of Japanese women through the ages.
Quotations:
“You must put the odor of the human body into images...describe for me the implacable, the egoistic, the sensual, the cruel... there are nothing but disgusting people in this world.”
"I have not yet made a film that pleases me."
"It was only when I passed 40, that I understood the human truths I want to express in my films."
"When I was working for Nikkatsu, the company already had Murata Minoru making films featuring heroes, so for balance they made me do films featuring heroines. Also, I am very quarrelsome and so when I work there is always the possibility of a fight, but I can't very well slug an actress."