silver nitrate notes

Sansho the Bailiff and the Long Track to the Lake

15 jun 2023

Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff (1954) followed Ugetsu by a year. The cinematographer was Kazuo Miyagawa again, his third Mizoguchi film and the one where Miyagawa's long-take technique reaches its most extended form. The film is set in eleventh-century Japan. A provincial governor is exiled; his wife and two children are separated from him and sold into slavery. The children spend the rest of the film trying to reunite with each of their parents. Most of them do not succeed.

What Miyagawa does with the camera across the two-and-a-half-hour running time is work primarily in long tracking shots that follow characters through landscapes. The film has relatively few close-ups. The characters are usually at middle distance, with the landscape doing work around them. Mizoguchi asked Miyagawa to keep the camera moving, not to emphasise dramatic peaks, but to sustain a constant unfolding of space. The film does not accelerate toward emotional climaxes. It moves at the pace of the landscape.

The sequence that survives every discussion of the film is the mother Tamaki's sale into prostitution on an island at the edge of the Sea of Japan. Mizoguchi and Miyagawa shoot this not as the emotional peak it might have been. They shoot it in a long wide track along a beach as the boats leave with the children in one direction and the mother is led away in another. The track lasts more than a minute. The camera does not cut. Tamaki's face is visible but not emphasised. The beach, the water, the morning light, the ships are all present at their actual scale. The drama is diffused across the composition.

Later in the film, when the grown son Zushio is searching for his mother, Mizoguchi and Miyagawa repeat the landscape. The same beach, photographed years later in the same extended manner. The sustained visual vocabulary across a gap of several years in the story's time is one of the things that makes the film's last sequence land so heavily. When Zushio finally finds his mother on the beach, the landscape recognises them before they recognise each other.

Donald Richie wrote that Mizoguchi's sustained shots trained a particular kind of attention in the viewer. Sansho is where that training is most complete.

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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] Le Fanu, Mark. Mizoguchi and Japan. BFI, 2005.