Sansho the Bailiff | Scanners
Japanese period films, or jidai-geki, often draw on familiar myths and legends for their storylines. "Chushingura," or "The Tale Of The Loyal Forty-Seven Ronin," has been filmed innumerable times-by Tatsuo Osone, Hiroshi Inagaki, Mizoguchi, and many, many others. Although Mizoguchi made quite a few films with contemporary settings, known as gendai-geki, most of his films that I have seen have been set in the distant past. By setting his films in a historical/legendary past, Mizoguchi achieves a fable-like timelessness.
Mizoguchi's visual style is also based on Japanese tradition. He stresses diagonal compositions like those found in prints by well-known artists such as the 18th-Century Utamaro, who also specialized in portraits of women and about whom Mizoguchi made a film in 1946. Visual energy flows through Mizoguchi's frame on the diagonal, suggesting a world much larger than, and never contained by, that frame. The lines of the tree and the brook, which the characters follow in Sansho's opening shot, suggest we are seeing only a portion of a journey-in-progress, a journey which began somewhere (and sometime) offscreen-left and will continue to destinations unknown offscreen-right.
Mizoguchi's films don't posit absolute beginnings and endings for themselves; human life is a journey which has no beginning or end -- it keeps flowing, metamorphosing, interacting with the world at large. Water (streams, lakes, oceans), fire (flames, smoke), and earth (rocks, trees, hills, paths, roads) achieve harmony in, and through, Mizoguchi's compositions; they, too, are "characters" in his elemental dramas.
As one Japanese critic has suggested, the setting is the real hero of a Mizoguchi film. The landscape often determines the shape of the story, or vice versa. Mizoguchi frequently uses long takes, and long-shots, which emphasize his characters' position in, and relation to, an environment. But unlike, say, Fritz Lang or Stanley Kubrick, Mizoguchi does not imprison his characters in his landscapes/compositions/shots; he stresses both their harmony with the landscape and their transitory nature as they move through timeless natural settings. Yet even these age-old vistas are not immutable; they are constantly evolving. The last image of "Sansho the Bailiff" is of a landscape whose character has recently been altered by a tidal wave. When Mizoguchi shows us a stone, a tree, a river, a hill, a road, we wonder how many centuries it has been there, what it has survived, and what forces have shaped its evolution throughout the past.
