Chapter 3: Mise-en-Scène

Essay: Culture, Nation, Auteur: Four Japanese Filmmakers

Film scholars often focus on the works of particular nationalities and cultures. Scholars have paid more critical attention to Japanese cinema than to most other contemporary national cinemas, in part because Japanese film history extends back to the silent era. Since the 1950s, Japanese directors have been successfully exporting art films, genre pictures, and animations. In fact, Japan is one of only about a dozen nations that have produced internationally influential film directors, including Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Akira Kurosawa, and Juzo Itami. Each of these directors has achieved the status of auteur, or cinematic "author," by developing a unified body of films that respond artistically and idiosyncratically to the issues, themes, and values of Japanese culture.

Just as American films reveal uniquely American concerns, values, and preoccupations as well as universal themes, so Japanese films have both uniquely Japanese sensibilities and universal appeal. Some of the most common cultural values represented in Japanese cinema include family loyalty, social status, and personal humility. While these values are certainly not unique to Japan, Japanese cinema validates, dramatizes, and critiques these values in ways most outsiders will recognize as uniquely Japanese. Japanese filmmakers also grapple with what it means to be Japanese, a question they consider in light of different contexts: Japan's ancient feudal heritage, for example, its status as an island nation that is insulated from the world yet also a hub for international trade, and its having experienced the horror of nuclear war. Post-World War II Japanese directors' responses to war and disaster have ranged from the Godzilla series to Isao Takahata's much more serious and heartrending anime Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no haka, 1988), which received international critical attention.

Godzilla: too much radiation and too much traffic

 

WWII firebombing of Japan in Grave of the Fireflies

The following discussions of four Japanese directors emphasize a significant characteristic of Japanese cinema that is aesthetic rather than thematic. Many Japanese films include compositions that convey stillness and invite contemplation. Directors typically achieve this effect by using long takes with little character or camera movement framed by bold but simple compositions. The result resembles a "moving picture" transformed into a static work of art. One of the great pleasures of Japanese cinema, this style may have its roots in the Zen Buddhist tradition.

A moment of stillness in director Hirokazu Koreeda's Maborosi (Maboroshi no hikari,1995)

Yasujiro Ozu (1903–1963)

major films:

The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (Ochazuke no aji, 1952)
Tokyo Story (Tokyo monogatari, 1953)
Early Spring (Soshun, 1956)
Floating Weeds (Ukigusa, 1959)
An Autumn Afternoon (Sanma no aji, 1962)

At twenty, Yasujiro Ozu began work as an assistant cameraman. He directed his first film, The Sword of Penitence, four years later. During World War II, he was drafted and worked on propaganda films; after Japan's surrender, his films focused on the war's effects on Japanese families. Among the approximately fifty movies he made during the following decades, his greatest critical and commercial successes occurred during the 1950s.

In his book Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, film scholar David Bordwell notes that most film critics' and viewers' assumptions about Ozu's movies "are just false and others badly need qualification." According to the conventional view,

All of his films are fundamentally alike. His constant subject is the Japanese family, his preferred genre the "home drama". His plots, revolving around a subtle depiction of character, are as uneventful as ordinary life itself. His camera, always placed about three feet from the floor, registers the low-level viewpoint of a seated Japanese. His films' contemplative resignation to mutability and his purist approach to form preserve the traditions of Japanese art, often evoking the ineffable wisdom of Zen Buddhism. Ozu is, in short, the most Japanese of all directors. (1–2)

But in fact,

Closely scrutinized, his films turn out to be far less alike than people usually think; to have a greater variety of subject and theme than is frequently granted; to be less concerned with psychological verisimilitude than most critics suggest. Placed in a social context, the films are less indebted to Japanese aesthetics and Zen Buddhism than to a vibrant popular culture and, more indirectly, to ideological tensions.

On the one hand, Ozu's films undeniably reflect on and modify what film scholar Donald Richie calls the traditional Japanese virtues of "restraint, simplicity, or near-Buddhist serenity" (xii). On the other hand, at the beginning of his career Ozu's greatest filmic influence might have been American popular films, and many filmic and cultural traditions influenced his later work. As Bordwell points out, Ozu's style is difficult to categorize because

his work may be taken up from so many angles. Critics' ordinary concepts of "richness" and "complexity" do not do justice to the great number of points of entry that Ozu's work offers. Taken as a classicist, Ozu becomes a great storyteller. Taken as an "art-cinema" director, he becomes a profound moralist, sensitive to the ambivalence of a changing world. Taken as a "parametric" director, he is one of the great experimental filmmakers. (178)

Stylistically, Ozu shares with the best Japanese directors the intense interest in seemingly natural yet meticulously arranged compositions. Perhaps because Ozu typical achieves relaxed performances from his actors, his careful arrangement of compositions never feels staged or restrictive. In the stills below from Floating Weeds, we see three aspects of Ozu's style. In the first series, we see moments where characters gaze into the camera or at other characters in a direct manner, an arresting approach that breaks the "fourth wall" and the traditional admonition for actors not to look directly into the camera (see the chapter 1 essay "The 'Staging' of Movies").

Gazing into the camera and breaking the "fourth wall"

The second series of stills illustrates Ozu's most recognized stylistic trait: his placement of the camera at the traditional level of a seated Japanese on a tatami mat.

Camera placement at level of seated Japanese

In the third series, we see the traditional moments of stillness found in many Japanese films.

Moments of stillness in Floating Weeds

Kenji Mizoguchi (1898–1956)

major films:

Osaka Elegy (Naniwa erejî, 1936)
Sisters of the Gion (Gion no shimai, 1936)
The Loyal 47 Ronin (Genroku chushingura, 1941)
The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna, 1952)
Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, 1953)
Sansho the Baliff (Sanshô dayû, 1954)
The Crucified Lovers (Chikamatsu monogatari, 1954)
Princess Yang Kwei-fei (Yôkihi, 1955)
Street of Shame (Akasen chitai, 1956)

"The roots of artistry are often sought in autobiography," writes film scholar Gary Morris, and for filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi, this seems an especially appropriate place to start. Mizoguchi . . . was born in 1898 in the middle class district of Hongo, in Tokyo. Two events occurred when the future director was seven that may have played a pivotal role in the kinds of films he would make. In the first, his family's fortunes were reversed when his overly ambitious father lost their money in a failed business scheme, forcing their move to the poorer district of Asakusa. In the second, which resulted from the first, his 14-year-old sister Suzu was put up for adoption and eventually sold to a geisha house. Mizoguchi's adoration of Suzu and of his mother, who died when he was 17, was balanced by an intense hatred of his father. The senior Mizoguchi's inability to support his family forced his son, who had already developed an arthritic condition that would plague him throughout his life, to be farmed out to relatives. It was only through the sacrifices of Suzu that he was able to study art, become a painter, and eventually direct films.

A "feminist" director before feminism, Kenji Mizoguchi achieved his first international success with The Life of Oharu, a tragedy set in seventeenth-century Japan, in which Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka), daughter of a samurai at the imperial court and now an aging, impoverished prostitute, recounts her fall. Oharu receives little help from the male-dominated society that is partly responsible for her plight. Mizoguchi's final film, Street of Shame, studies the lives of prostitutes in then-contemporary Tokyo. Like many Japanese filmmakers, Mizoguchi dramatically portrays the shame of public humiliation and conveys sympathy for characters suffering from it. Mizoguchi's camera never seems invasive as it explores the tragic lives crushed by social and historical forces. The stills below from 47 Ronin highlight the traditional formalism of Mizoguchi's style in this historical piece. Filmed in 1941, 47 Ronin was somewhat forced on Mizoguchi as a patriotic subject for the war effort. Revealingly, this long film about a famous samurai legend (a commerical failure in Japan at the time) is almost entirely about the human intrigue surrounding violence, with only brief moments of combat, and those staged unheroically. Thus 47 Ronin points toward Mizoguchi's future talents as a director of films concerned with social injustice and interpersonal relationships.

Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998)

major films:

Rashomon (1950)
To Live (Ikiru, 1952)
The Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai, 1954)
Throne of Blood (Kumonosu jo, 1957)
The Hidden Fortress (Kakushi toride no san akunin, 1960)
Yojimbo (1961)
Ran (1985)
Dreams (Yume, 1990)

Akira Kurosawa's "abiding admiration for the dedication of the samurai class at its most authentic," according to film scholar Joan Mellen, reflects, too, his respect for his father, "a strict man of military background", as he would write later in his Autobiography. The family traced its ancestry to a famous Genji warrior, and as a child Kurosawa's father still wore the topknot, the emblem of the samurai class. As a teacher at a gymnasium, the senior Kurosawa was a man with a "single-minded devotion to discipline."

He was a strict father who would rap his younger son's knuckles with the heavy ends of his own chop sticks if Akira happened to hold his chop sticks without grace. Kurosawa's mother, who was from a merchant family, was upbraided if she served fish pointed in an incorrect direction. Her driven husband went so far as to accuse her of wanting him to kill himself since she invariably placed the fish in the manner appropriate to those about to commit ritual suicide. As a boy, Kurosawa absorbed his father's stern ethos and took kendo fencing lessons, a choice which pleased his elder.

Paradoxically, Kurosawa's father was also a man of his time, one who loved the movies, which he said had "an educational value." He combined the liberal enlightenment of the samurai class with its rigour and self-discipline. Despite the family's strained circumstances, he did not object to young Akira's ambition to be a painter. That Kurosawa's brother was a benshi, a narrator for silent films, allowed Kurosawa to merge his interest in painting, in literature and in music into one artistic form. (9)

Akira Kurosawa is Japan's most famous film director and one of the country's greatest cultural exports. Kurosawa's international success began in 1950, when his Rashomon won over international film critics on the film festival circuit. Throughout his long career, Kurosawa adapted Western literary works (Shakespeare's King Lear for Ran, for example) and borrowed American genre elements, prompting some critics to wonder aloud whether his work was Japanese enough for the Japanese. Despite the rumblings of some guardians of traditional Japanese culture, Kurosawa's films were all immensely popular in Japan as well as abroad. The director's traditional upbringing, his family's samurai heritage, and his perfectionist attention to historical detail in period films helped deflect criticism from those who objected to the Western influences in his work. In fact, Kurosawa may have influenced Western filmmaking more profoundly than Western filmmaking influenced him. The Hidden Fortress inspired much in George Lucas's Star Wars (1977); Yojimbo was remade by Sergio Leone in 1964 as A Fistful of Dollars (a major influence on the Italian spaghetti-western genre); and The Seven Samurai became John Sturges's The Magnificent Seven (1960). Even more significantly, hundreds, if not thousands, of future filmmakers around the world were inspired to some degree by Kurosawa's widely seen and discussed international successes of the 1950s and 1960s.

Kurosawa also can lay claim to one of the great comebacks in cinema history: after falling out of favor in the 1970s and attempting suicide, he went on to direct a number of outstanding films, including the masterpiece Ran. The director was seventy-five when he completed this ten-year project. These images from The Seven Samurai offer a modest indication of Kurosawa's bold and carefully considered compositions:

Triangular, symmetrical composition of swords and samurai	Composition emphasizing the first samurai grave
Deference, samurai style-and symmetrical composition	Silhouette of samurai graves, a visual motif throughout the film
The horror of battle as the bandits, villagers, and samurai fight in the rain and mud
Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) in an intense close-up	Another triangular composition

Juzo Itami (1933–1997)

major films:

The Funeral (Ososhiki, 1985)
Tampopo (1985)
A Taxing Woman (Marusa no onna, 1987)
Minbo (Minbo no onna, 1992)

In an article written shortly after Juzo Itami's suicide, Murakami Mutsuko assessed the director's career: Itami (real name Ikeuchi Yoshihiro) was regarded as one of the most powerful Japanese directors of his generation. In all, he made 10 films after turning to movie-making in 1984, at the age of 50. Before that he had been a commercial designer, an essayist, a magazine editor and a television reporter. He also acted in a number of films and TV dramas, and had parts in 55 Days in Peking (1963) and Lord Jim (1965).

From his first film (The Funeral) to his last (Marutai no Onna, released four months ago), he poked sticks at Japan's sacred cows. Itami was revered for the way he spoke the unspeakable, ridiculing the way the country buries its dead, collects its taxes, treats its sick and strives for the perfect noodle. But it was all done deftly, in a lighthearted and strictly comedic fashion that provoked both laughter and introspection.

When Itami leapt to his death just before a Japanese tabloid was going to publish a story about his affair with a younger woman, the iconoclastic director's traditionally Japanese response to potential public shame surprised his country and sparked speculation about the true cause of his death. A closer look at his movies helps put his suicide in context, however. In comically and sometimes irreverently portraying Japanese traditions, Itami's work advocates a liberal and modern acceptance of Japanese cultural values such as family loyalty, social status, and personal humility. In fact, in an interview Itami, internationally the most successful Japanese director of recent decades, describes himself not as a cultural rebel but as a kind of cross-cultural translator:

I have been thinking about a film that would explain Japan to the United States and vice versa. . . . Movies are a very effective means of communication. I hope to express Japanese culture to American and other audiences by making them identify with the main character. . . . I am trying to discover who I am through making movies. I see myself as being confined in a cage of Japanese culture and the cage of being a man. I have to look at myself from an outsider's point of view when I make my films. (Friedland)

Tampopo, Itami's most popular film, uses a comically exaggerated Japanese cultural lens to explore the human relationship to food, birth, sex, and death. After a young woman takes over a noodle shop, she seeks the aid of a noodle mentor (a truck driver!), who trains her in the secrets of the trade. Bridging East and West, the mentor's techniques and motivational speeches echo aspects of both Asian martial-arts apprentice films and Rocky-style sports films.

Itami's next film, A Taxing Woman, focuses on Japan's very high tax rates (50 to 80 percent) and the often outlandish means by which criminals and even ordinary citizens try to avoid paying taxes. In the sequence below, camera placement, framing, and acting work together to dramatize Hideki Gondo's (Tsutomu Yamazaki) attempt to intimidate Tax Inspector Ryoko Itakura (Nobuko Miyamoto) by pulling her badge:

 

FOR FURTHER READING

Bordwell, David. Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Friedland, Jonathan. "Profile: Juzo Itami." Far Eastern Economic Review156:42 (October 21, 1993), 82.

"Japanese Cinema." Bright Lights Film Journal36 (April 2002).

Mellen, Joan. Seven Samurai. London: British Film Institute, 2002.

Morris, Gary. "Tragic Poignancy: Kenji Mizoguchi's The Loyal 47 Ronin." Bright Lights Film Journal 26 (November 1999).

"The World of Kenji Mizoguchi." Bright Lights Film Journal22 (September 1998).

Mutsuko, Murakami. "A Mundane Exit for a Man Who Mocked Convention." Asia Week(January 9, 1998).

Nolletti, Arthur Jr. and David Desser. Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre, History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.

Richie, Donald. Ozu. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.