Kenji Mizoguchi Filmed Women’s Pain and Was Often Its Author

Kenji Mizoguchi

Photo: Daiichi Eiga / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 16, 1898 Tokyo, Japan
Died	August 24, 1956 (58)
Occupation	Film director
Known for	Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff, The Life of Oharu
Awards	International Award, Venice Film Festival · 2 Silver Lion, Venice Film Festival · Medal with Purple Ribbon · Order of the Sacred Treasure, 4th class

There is a scar on Kenji Mizoguchi’s back, about an inch long, left by a lover’s razor. Years later one of his assistant directors saw it in a bath and flinched, and the man who would make Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff told him not to be so easily shocked: without a wound like that, he said, you cannot depict women. Japanese cinema has no filmmaker who looked more steadily at women sold, abandoned and used up by men and money. Few looked at the women in their own lives, and on their own sets, with less mercy.

That knot starts in Hongō, in Tokyo, where Mizoguchi was born the second of three children of a carpenter whose scheme to sell raincoats to soldiers in the Russo-Japanese War failed. The debts pushed the family into the poorest streets of Asakusa, and his sister Suzu, seven years older, was given up for adoption and later placed in a geisha house. A viscount bought out her contract, kept her as his mistress and eventually married her. Her money kept the family afloat and, more than once, found her drifting younger brother a job. The critic Tadao Sato noticed how closely this resembled the shinpa melodramas of the time, in which a woman pays for a young man’s rise. Mizoguchi would film that plot for the rest of his life.

Mizoguchi, born on 16 May 1898, trained as a painter and drew newspaper advertisements in Kobe before a friend brought him, in 1920, to the Nikkatsu studio at Mukōjima, which needed an assistant director more than another actor. Two years later he was directing. The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 sent the studio, and him, to Kyoto, where he studied kabuki and noh and spent his nights in the teahouses he would later put on screen. Most of his silent films are lost.

Kyoto also gave him the scar. In 1925 Yuriko Ichijō, the woman he was living with, slashed his back with a razor; the scandal reached the newspapers and Nikkatsu suspended him for three months. Two years later he married Chieko Saga, a dancer from Osaka, with the studio man Masaichi Nagata as go-between. It was a loud, at times violent marriage, and Chieko was also his sharpest critic. In December 1941, during the shoot of the second part of The 47 Ronin, she suffered a breakdown. He wept, had her committed and went straight back to the set. She never left the hospital, and he spent the rest of his life convinced he was the cause.

The style came before the fame. The Water Magician, from a Kyōka Izumi story about a performer who ruins herself to pay for a young man’s studies, already shows the long unbroken takes that became his signature. In 1936 came the pair he named as the moment he grew up as an artist, Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion, both with Isuzu Yamada as a modern young woman who refuses the part men have written for her. They opened a twenty-year partnership with the screenwriter Yoshikata Yoda, who was told that people had to be written so the audience could smell them. The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums then turned the one-scene-one-shot method into a full grammar: the camera keeps its distance, refuses the close-up and lets a woman’s sacrifice for a kabuki actor play out at the speed of life.

The war is where the canonized version gets uncomfortable. As head of the Directors Guild of Japan and a member of the cabinet’s film committee, Mizoguchi made The 47 Ronin, a two-part samurai loyalty epic shot under the wartime national-policy system. Some historians say he was pushed into it. Matsutarō Kawaguchi, a primary-school classmate who wrote for him and admired him, was blunter in a 1964 interview with Cahiers du cinéma: he called Mizoguchi an opportunist who followed the current from left to right and, after the defeat, to democracy. The postwar films with Kinuyo Tanaka, among them Utamaro and His Five Women and Flame of My Love, argued for women’s emancipation under the American occupation.

On set, the champion of women behaved like a tyrant. Accounts collected in Japan describe him hitting the actor Ichirō Sugai with a slipper during Flame of My Love and, on Ugetsu, shouting at Mitsuko Mito, who was playing a woman raped by soldiers, to ask whether she had ever been through it herself. When Tanaka, his lead in fifteen films, applied to direct Love Letter in 1953, he objected. She made it anyway and became the second Japanese woman to direct a film, after Tazuko Sakane, who had learned the trade as his own assistant. After 1954 the two never worked together again. Calling his films feminist means accepting that their author defended women’s dignity inside the frame and attacked it in the room. The films do not resolve that contradiction, and they are stronger for it.

Recognition abroad came late and fast, at Daiei, where Nagata was now president, with the cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa. The Life of Oharu, with Tanaka as a court lady pushed down every rung of Edo society, won an International Award at Venice in 1952. Ugetsu took a Silver Lion the following year, and Sansho the Bailiff won another in 1954, sharing the prize with Fellini, Kazan and Kurosawa. The Crucified Lovers came next. His first colour film, Princess Yang Kwei-fei, was made with Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers, and his last, Street of Shame, went back to black and white and to a Yoshiwara brothel.

He was preparing a new film set in Osaka when the evening fevers began. He died of leukemia in a Kyoto hospital on 24 August 1956, at 58; the diagnosis had been kept from him. Kōzaburō Yoshimura directed the film he left behind.

The French took him up first and hardest. Cahiers du cinéma treated his staging as a language that needed no translation, and the magazine’s annual list put Ugetsu at the top in 1959 and Sansho the Bailiff the year after. Jean-Luc Godard called him Japan’s greatest filmmaker, the equal of Murnau or Rossellini, and borrowed the slow pan toward the sea that closes Sansho the Bailiff for the ending of Contempt. Jacques Rivette said The Life of Oharu fed into The Nun.

Seventy years after his death the argument is still running. A 4K restoration of Sansho the Bailiff by Kadokawa and The Film Foundation reached festivals this year, and the Tokyo International Film Festival, running from 26 October to 4 November, is screening thirteen of his films, from The Water Magician to Street of Shame, including both parts of The 47 Ronin, the wartime epic admirers usually skip. Seen together, they make the case his life complicates: a director who understood exactly what it cost a woman to survive in a world run by men, and who never claimed to stand outside it.

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Tags: Japanese cinema, Kenji Mizoguchi, Kazuo Miyagawa, Kinuyo Tanaka, Sansho the Bailiff, The Life of Oharu

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