silver nitrate notes

Mizoguchi's Ugetsu and the Crossing of the Lake

11 jul 2016

Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956) directed Ugetsu (1953) at Daiei with Kazuo Miyagawa, whom we met on Rashomon a few years earlier. Mizoguchi had been making films since 1923. He would die three years after Ugetsu, at fifty-eight. Ugetsu is one of the two or three films by which his work is now remembered (the other being Sansho the Bailiff, 1954, also with Miyagawa).

The film is set in sixteenth-century Japan during the civil wars. Two peasant brothers, Genjuro and Tobei, leave their wives behind to pursue ambitions in the nearby city; Genjuro wants to sell the pottery he has made, Tobei wants to become a samurai. What happens to the wives in their absence, and what happens to the brothers in their pursuit of ambition, forms the rest of the film. Part of what happens is literal ghost story. Part is not.

The sequence that everyone writes about is the crossing of Lake Biwa. Genjuro, his wife Miyagi, Tobei, and Tobei's wife Ohama row across the lake at night in a flat-bottomed boat. Fog rises. The camera is in the boat with them. Miyagawa photographs the crossing in a single long take on water, with no visible horizon, the only light a small lantern on the prow. A second boat appears out of the fog. The camera does not cut. The approach, the encounter, the exchange, and the departure are all one shot.

What Miyagawa does on the lake that he does not do elsewhere in the film is refuse to mark the supernatural. The ghost story begins later; here, on the lake, the film is doing something harder than horror. It is establishing that the boundary between the material world of the brothers' ambitions and the non-material world of what happens when ambitions run out is porous, and that the camera will not help us tell which side of the boundary we are on. Mizoguchi's long takes, which Miyagawa executed by laying track through shallow water and at the edges of sets, refuse the viewer the editing rhythms that would normally signal supernatural content.

The film won the Silver Lion at Venice in 1953 and opened Mizoguchi to Western audiences. Donald Richie would later write that Mizoguchi was, of the three great Japanese directors of the 1950s (Ozu, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi), the one whose work is hardest to carry to a Western viewer without a cultural guide. I think this is about half true. The lake crossing does not need a guide. Watch it first. Then read Richie.

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sources
[1] Kirihara, Donald. Patterns of Time: Mizoguchi and the 1930s. Wisconsin, 1992.
[2] McDonald, Keiko. Mizoguchi. Twayne, 1984.
[3] Richie, Donald. A Hundred Years of Japanese Film. Kodansha, rev. ed. 2005.
[4] Miyagawa, Kazuo. Interview in American Cinematographer, January 1981.