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Gregory wrote: To begin with the original claim of whether this is a "fascist propaganda film," I am far from convinced that even reading the story as lubitsch sums it up, a woman's noble sacrifice for a man's career, is a distinctly fascist narrative. It’s conservative and even reactionary but there is nothing whatsoever about it that's peculiar to fascism, and it can be found just as readily in countless later films remote from any context of fascism. It’s about a broader patriarchal culture, which is not to try to plead guilty to a lesser crime or anything, it’s just a different kind of charge which better explains why such stories involving traditional gender roles extend far beyond a fascist context.

As for whether it’s propaganda, I think some distinctions and questions of degree and intent need to be made. Painting with the same brush every Japanese film made during the war that outwardly espouses conservative values as “fascist propaganda” obscures far more than it reveals. Likewise if both Triumph of the Will and Schlußakkord were both deemed nothing but “Nazi propaganda” and thus repugnant in equal measure, then that obscures not only the major differences between the two (textually and in terms of historical context, intention, and so on) but also the potentially interesting things in Schlußakkord that are not propagandistic, which is crucial to valuing a problematic film if we’re not ready to just dismiss it as corrupted trash. Is Schlußakkord tainted by its origins (UFA during the Third Reich), even if it was merely an escapist melodrama in that setting? Of course it is, but I'd argue that there's much more to consider in it, and it should not be treated as if it's akin to one of Riefenstahl's propaganda films.

I admit that my use of the term "fascist propaganda" is a bit generous and problematic. However I most certainly don't want to paint the whole Japanese film output of 1937-45 as fascist because these films vaguely supported the system at the very least just by providing entertainment. This lazy kind of critizism is in fact very much what I'm opposed to and I absolutely agree with you.
However Chrysanthemum strikes me as more problematic than Schlußakkord. It is not an all out propaganda film, but also not completely escapism. What bothers me is the ideology of suffering, sacrifice and subjugation ending in the apotheosis of a man finding a vocation which consumes him. During the Third Reich the most successful kind of propaganda film in 1940-42 was the biopic which praised the superhuman hero on his historic mission to do something great in his field, a genre obviously fishing for parallels with Hitler. There were also melodramas where women try to detract men from their vocation and have to be taught otherwise.
Both genres are represented well in Chrysanthemum. We have a hero who has greatness in him and he finally goes on his mission by sacrificing his personal happiness. And we have a woman who indirectly stands in his way and is written out of the history by killing her off.
So generally I'd say this film is supportive of the mood of the times and of the demands the Japanese military might have. It preaches the subjugation and the sacrifice of the individual towards a greater good.

Gregory wrote:But I think a real misunderstanding is that Mizoguchi was indifferent to a character such as Otoku just because of the distance in his technique.

lubitsch wrote:But for me the effect is clearly one of validating the sacrifice of the young woman for her beloved one which is reactionary and in tune with the rollback against women's liberation perpetrated in Japanese cinema. I think Mizoguchi's aesthetic style makes things even worse because his detached long takes actually minimize suffering and create instead a kind of visual tapestry which makes human experience remote and distant while emphasizing order and society rules.

For one thing, close-ups were not used in 1930s Japanese cinema in the way they were in Hollywood, and they didn’t need to be used that way to convey emotional concern for a character. And to investigate these assumptions about “distance,” the point of comparison that comes readily to mind is Sirk, whose technique often established distances (and his films were more "distant" than most other melodramas and "message" dramas) but that in no way meant that audiences should or would feel disconnected from the characters and their problems.

First I don't think that Mizoguchi was indifferent to Otoku. However he didn't care as much for her as for the ladies in his 36 films. Otoku is much more of an abstraction than a living character. She is a sacrificial lamb, always supportive, lacking any character traits of her own.
My stylistic critique may reflect my scepticism towards the long take, long distance aesthetic which Mizoguchi uses. I don't think it's a helpful aesthetic approach to suffering to film it aesthetically from a distance, it tends to soften the blow. People become a design element (ironically not too dissimilar to Riefenstahl).
This may be open to debate however I'm not so sure about Japanese 30s cinema being that different from hollywood. Bordwell critizised this in his Figures traced in Light if I remember correctly. Hollywood standards were Japanese standards by then and Mizoguchi's special style was seen as highbrow and an attempt to create a certain Japaneseness. Unfortunately I haven't seen enough films from the era - especially the more normal ones - to make any qualified statement about this, but watching the classics Ozu and Mizoguchi might be very misleading about the Japanese standard film aesthetics of the era.

Interesting points all, thank you! It seems to me like it turns out there's much more common ground between our understandings of this movie than I would've thought at the outset, and my next viewing of it may be a bit critical of how well it works—which is what repeat viewings of a familiar film should be, sometimes.

Bordwell's Mizoguchi chapter in Figures Traced could be a discussion in itself. I'm a little skeptical of some of his ideas: of everything flowing out of America after World War I (when the medium was still in its infancy), of how quickly this jelled into an international "lingua franca," and of Japanese filmmakers having developed only "variants" of these emerging styles.

lubitsch wrote:My stylistic critique may reflect my scepticism towards the long take, long distance aesthetic which Mizoguchi uses. I don't think it's a helpful aesthetic approach to suffering to film it aesthetically from a distance, it tends to soften the blow. People become a design element (ironically not too dissimilar to Riefenstahl).
This may be open to debate however I'm not so sure about Japanese 30s cinema being that different from hollywood. Bordwell critizised this in his Figures traced in Light if I remember correctly. Hollywood standards were Japanese standards by then and Mizoguchi's special style was seen as highbrow and an attempt to create a certain Japaneseness.

AllMovie:

The first film that the director felt was truly his own, it employs the fluid sequence takes and crabbing, or diagonal tracking shots, of which he was one of the medium's masters. Forced to shoot the 40-year-old actor in long shots to make him appear younger for the earlier scenes, the director was so impressed by the detached, meditative quality they afforded, that they would become a mark of his style.

AllMovie wrote:The first film that the director felt was truly his own

What

lubitsch wrote:My stylistic critique may reflect my scepticism towards the long take, long distance aesthetic which Mizoguchi uses. I don't think it's a helpful aesthetic approach to suffering to film it aesthetically from a distance, it tends to soften the blow. People become a design element (ironically not too dissimilar to Riefenstahl).

I couldn't disagree with this more. The conventional trope of shooting in CU to make an emotional scene bigger and more dramatic can feel artificial in its intrusiveness. Mizoguchi's distance is effective in these cases because they tend to draw me in rather than throw the moment at me. Sometimes it feels true to life - if you're observing someone experiencing an awful, personal moment, you don't necessarily stick your face into the mix, you probably keep your distance, and there's a tension that heightens that experience because even as you try to respect their space, you care, your attention's hooked.

I'm with hearthesilence on this.... True in Mizoguchi, true in HHH as well.

Coming to this late but... the idea that a given method of composition, regardless of the facility and sensitivity of the filmmaker employing it, is inherently ineffective, inappropriate, even immoral or anti-revolutionary strikes me as an awfully puritanical and censorious one.

chetienne wrote:Coming to this late but... the idea that a given method of composition, regardless of the facility and sensitivity of the filmmaker employing it, is inherently ineffective, inappropriate, even immoral or anti-revolutionary strikes me as an awfully puritanical and censorious one.

I don't get the puritanical, but regardless if you agree with me, I'm sure you're familiar with Chaplin's quote "Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot." And I'm hardly the first to suggest that different cinematic techniques have different effects.

Maybe. But the same cinematic technique can have different effects,depending on how it is handled.

Michael's spot on. Chaplin's remark defines his own cinematic world and his own style, and it has become a convention of basic film language, but that's really the most you can make of it, as a convention, and stylistic conventions have always been broken and proven wrong in remarkable ways.

I mean.... Chaplin is also pretty clearly using the language of cinema to make a philosophical point rather than literally describing how comedy and tragedy work?

I'm not at all familiar with the physical history of this film, but is the film in such dire straits that the best possible physical copy is a print? Or are the screencaps just badly rendered/compressed?

Ribs wrote:Blu-ray.com

That's why I prefer Chris reviews when it comes to giving a grade to some Criterion discs : there's just no way such a damaged movie gets 4.25/5 on PQ and 4/5 on AQ.

Mungo wrote:I'm not at all familiar with the physical history of this film, but is the film in such dire straits that the best possible physical copy is a print?

It actually seems like it is.

tenia wrote:

Mungo wrote:I'm not at all familiar with the physical history of this film, but is the film in such dire straits that the best possible physical copy is a print?

It actually seems like it is.

In that case, that seems like a sorry state for a movie to be in.

When someone gets their copy, could they please transcribe the "About the Transfer" section of the foldout? I'd like to know where the movie's restoration was sourced from.

EDIT: The restoration was NOT done by Criterion. Also, thanks to Criterion Forum's review of the film, the transfer was apparently sourced from a dupe negative, not a print.

Here are the notes about the transfer:

The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.37:1. 0n widescreen televisions, black bars will appear on the left and right of the image to maintain the proper screen format. This new digital transfer was created in 4K resolution on a Scanity film scanner and restored by Shochiku Co., Ltd., at IMAGICA Corporation in Tokyo. The restoration was undertaken from a 35mm fine-grain positive and a 35mm duplicate negative. The original monaural soundtrack was remastered from a 35mm optical soundtrack print.

I left out the fine-grain positive part in the review and will fix that.

cdnchris wrote:Here are the notes about the transfer:

The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.37:1. 0n widescreen televisions, black bars will appear on the left and right of the image to maintain the proper screen format. This new digital transfer was created in 4K resolution on a Scanity film scanner and restored by Shochiku Co., Ltd., at IMAGICA Corporation in Tokyo. The restoration was undertaken from a 35mm fine-grain positive and a 35mm duplicate negative. The original monaural soundtrack was remastered from a 35mm optical soundtrack print.

I left out the fine-grain positive part in the review and will fix that.

Thanks!

I haven't viewed the Criterion blu-ray, but the audio on the Shochiku disc is appalling. There's little reason to suspect the Criterion sounds significantly different.

Here's a short comparison:
Vimeo

The irony here, of course, is that following the aggressive restorative clean-up, scrubbing the track of its age-related damage and distortion, the dialogue and music in the processed output are far less intelligible than they initially sounded.

Moshrom wrote:I haven't viewed the Criterion blu-ray, but the audio on the Shochiku disc is appalling. There's little reason to suspect the Criterion sounds significantly different.

Here's a short comparison:
Vimeo

The irony here, of course, is that following the aggressive restorative clean-up, scrubbing the track of its age-related damage and distortion, the dialogue and music in the processed output are far less intelligible than they initially sounded.

Holy crap! I haven't heard audio this bad on a disc since Dead Ringers!

The new 4K Shochiku Late Spring blu-ray sounds about the same.

...I should make more comparisons to bring light to this problem (I was motivated to do so only after finding these -
https://vimeo.com/56206935" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
...blu-ray/VHS comparisons for Frankenstein (1931) -- loads of films now sound like this.

Yikes. My laptop speakers aren't ideal but I'd almost say the Criterion and Shochiku sound very similar.

I would say that the Shochiku disc sounds very much like the 2 screenings I've seen (prior to the blu-ray era) -- while the AE version sounds nothing like what I recall hearing. So it is possible that AE's version features a lot more audio processing/improving. Very mysterious.

cdnchris wrote:Yikes. My laptop speakers aren't ideal but I'd almost say the Criterion and Shochiku sound very similar.

Why wouldn't they use the Artificial Eye track? There's no way in hell someone at Criterion hasn't seen both versions, and there's no way in hell that person that person thought the Shochiku was better. I mean, I was suspicious about this release ever since I saw screencaps of it, but screencaps don't do it justice. This restoration is gimped.

It might have to do with what they licenced which probably was an A+V package.