silver nitrate notes

The Life of Oharu and Mizoguchi's Descent

4 mar 2020

Kenji Mizoguchi's The Life of Oharu (Saikaku Ichidai Onna, 1952) preceded Ugetsu by a year. The cinematographer was Yoshimi Hirano, working with Mizoguchi for the first and, as it turned out, only time. The film follows Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka), an aristocrat's daughter in seventeenth-century Japan, through forty years of social descent: from lady-in-waiting at the Imperial court to prostitute begging at the gates of a Kyoto temple.

Mizoguchi, making the film at fifty-four, adopted for it an even more sustained long-take method than he had used on The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (1939). Hirano photographed most scenes in takes of several minutes, with the camera tracking alongside characters as they moved through courtyards, streets, and rooms. The average shot length is over a minute. The film has fewer than 250 shots across 136 minutes.

What the method produces is a visual sense of descent that matches Oharu's story. Each period of her life is shot with slightly less open framing than the one before. The early scenes at court are wide, tall, architecturally symmetrical. The middle scenes (as a concubine, a prostitute, a street-seller) are closer, lower-ceilinged, compressed. The final scenes, as a mendicant nun begging along a country road, are shot mostly at ground level, the camera looking up from below into an emptying grey sky. Hirano and Mizoguchi do not announce the descent. The compositions accumulate.

Tanaka was forty-two when the film was shot. She plays Oharu from teenage through middle age. Mizoguchi gave her minimal direction, in his usual mode. Her performance is one of the great sustained female performances in Japanese cinema. She worked with Mizoguchi fourteen times. This is his most demanding material for her.

[ « prev: La Strada · next: The Best Years of Our Lives » ]

» leave a comment in the guestbook

sources
[1] Kirihara, Donald. Patterns of Time: Mizoguchi and the 1930s. Wisconsin, 1992.
[2] McDonald, Keiko. Mizoguchi. Twayne, 1984.
[3] Le Fanu, Mark. Mizoguchi and Japan. BFI, 2005.
[4] Saikaku, Ihara. The Life of an Amorous Woman, trans. Ivan Morris. New Directions, 1963.