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davidhare wrote:The print of Osaka Elegy used for the LD is pretty ragged! The movie is great and essential Mizo but I certainly saw a far better 35mm print of it back in the 80s.

HerrSchreck wrote:

Michael Kerpan wrote:While I think Sansho is a "must see", I think HerrSchreck is rather overselling it. It is NOT a sacred text, just a fine film. It is not perfect -- at least one major role is rather poorly handled -- but is wonderful despite this.

Mizoguchi, whatever his virtues, was not a modernist -- in technique or in themes (except, perhaps, for a short period in the 1920s). And whatever his genius as a film maker, Mizoguchi is not prospect for canonization because -- as a human being -- he was rather rotten in many respects.

Mike, I can see that your rebound ponged out a clip of replies, and before I get to those (I haven't been on here since I posted what prompted your above response), lemme just keep a grip here on what it is you're getting at and what it was I was getting at.

I think the force of your belief in your reply-- "what up with the singsong rhapsody viz schreck on this film which though fine is flawed etc?"-- sorta clouded your comprehension of what it was I was trying to say on at least one count.

I said Mizo employed modern techniques-- not that he was a "Modernist" complete with quotation marks and capital M. I meant that he employed the most up to date techniques in the service of producing art of a very timeless and ancient style. The opposite would be to take the blocks of a Giza pyramid to contruct a totally modern home. Mizo's films were lushly produced, beautifully photographed, studio-bound, extras-stuffed products of a filmic golden age, using all the resources available at the time, to produce a timeless string of virtual ancient Buddhist wisdom tales of deepest sincerity and antique beauty. This is such an old-hat take on Mizo (though with my usual verbal puffery) that I can't see how this could possibly be construed as "Schreck thinks Mizo is a modernist gulp wow".

I'm perfectly entitled to see Mizo's art in general as approaching sacred. It gets in there and ricochets around with my emotional DNA and echoes in my head all the livelong day-- and I cannot possibly be wrong, Mike, because I'm simply talking about me.

Now there's one thing that you said which I personally see as a huge flaw in your outlook and have to respond to, since it's one of those things that sets me off on the tracts that I'm perhaps notorious for: your critique of my love for Mizoguchi's art because you find the man personally reprehensible because he was a creep in his personal life.

First of all, take half of what you think you know not only about Mizo but every other artist and filmmaker and throw it out, because it's just fucking gossip. You didn't know him, I didn't know him, he operated in a business that is full of salacious gossip, warring egos, and survival desperation-- the flood of folks who get in front of a camera for an interview and invent, embellish, etch in stone forever what may have been true for just one moment in one time and one place, etc.. thereby embodying as a lifelong attribute some transitory response, loss of temper, etc.

But even that's not the point. The point is I don't care about what a prick the man may or may not have been. Fritz Lang was a notorious fucking prick. At his best Bill Freidkin was a raging total asshole. Erich von Stroheim's self indulgence and blindness to his appearance to others in the big picture was breathtakingly idiotic. Josef von Sternberg, Carl Dreyer on JOAN, Robert Bresson... men who earned such hatred from their own employees that ideas of murder crept into the terrain-- people hated these directors that much. Fritz Lang was apparently so loathed on his first American picture FURY by all (Spence not least of them) that a "crane accident" was seriously in the works. Or so the legend goes.

Look at the SCARLET EMPRESS or DEVIL IS A WOMAN, or UGETSU, or the epics of Stroheim or Lang... you see men who have an ongoing connection to infinite timeless beauty and muscular artistic power, and they know that they know how to get that on screen and completely floor artists everywhere... but they know that they are spending other peoples money and if they fail they will not even have a so-so picture in the end: they'll look like complete imbeciles in the end... they have got to find a way to get the mundane, the brainless and the ordinary, who do not see what they see, who cannot possibly be made to understand what the end product is going to be, actors & crew who start whispering campaigns-- a gent like Mizo has got to find a way to transform all these folks into something they generally are not in their personal life or in the vast majority of the other films they make: manufacturers of the sublime.

If Mizo was stabbed in the back by a whore, or he was a creep to the chicks in his life, I could care fucking less-- I'm innarested in his films, not his personal life, which I assume I know nothing about, regrdless of the (very limited) information out there about him and what it says. Oftentimes it's the rottenest souls who produce the most sublime art. Creeps often have the heaviest loads to spool out. I speak with a wink and say I wanta canonize Mizo because the man was so meticulous, so deeply soulful in his work, he exhibited such care and attention to the best of his works that it makes me love him for it. There are so very very very few individuals like that in any age, Mike, that you've got to appreciate them in whatever form they come, baggage and all. There is all this richness and pictorial/compositional/musical depth, such flawlessness in miraculously long takes that their length becomes nearly invisible, such heavy expression of genuine Buddhist wisdom and understanding-- that's the Mizoguchi I see in SANSHO, despite the screechy performance by the elder version of Zushio (who I assume you mean as the flawed performance) and the meanness of the man in getting his results. You see the screechy boy and a mean director.

I find it strange that I guy like you Mike would let a delirious singsong love from one person honked into the sky about a filmmaker get you riled. Being the aggressive shooter-downer of another person's love is rumpled fuckin attribute, Mike. We all sit still for the ongoing outpouring of your general love affair with Japanese films, many of which are extrapolated at length here simply because they're 1) unsubbed, and 2) they're so obscure that with the exception of Stephen, you're probably the only guy around here who's seen them... many of which, let's face it, are run of the mill domestic melodramas or formulaic genre pieces ground out at a quick clip by Ozu & Naruse, etc, and are only of moderate historical interest owing to the name of their creators. Far be it from me to call out your name to hose down one of your posts owing to "invalid excess love".

I don't think this nasty diatribe (totally misconstruing what I actually wrote) is worthy of a reasoned response. It is mostly a string of vicious insults..

No director is beyond criticism -- even my beloved Ozu and Naruse.

But your dismissal of most of their work as "formulaic genre pieces" shows you are as lacking in perspective as to their work as you are as to Mizoguchi's.

Be an over-the-top fanboy all you want --

but until you are made dictator of this forum, I don't see you have any right to foreclose discussion on any director or film

-- or to insult people who wish to carry on discussions.

I admit to preferring Mizo entirely over Ozu (with perhaps one exception) or Naruse, perhaps for the reason I've seen more of him (although Ive seen and own a lot of Ozu).

But he always moves me more (and Im reminded of two felicitous appreciations of him which are more than fulsome - Robin Wood's superb essay on Ugetsu in Personal Views which is one of the most exemplary and deepest felt pieces of film writing Ive ever read; and David Thompson of all people who nails his mise en scene perfectly as one which physically and visually illustrates profound emotions intelligently through the camera.

Michael wrote:I find Mizoguchi films, flaws and all, completely successful on repeated viewings more than Ozu. I tried watching Floating Weeds (third viewing) the other night but gave up halfway through. There is something about Mizoguchi that cut right through to the very core of my soul and release it. A very spiritual journey every time.

HerrSchreck wrote:We all sit still for the ongoing outpouring of your general love affair with Japanese films, many of which are extrapolated at length here simply because they're 1) unsubbed, and 2) they're so obscure that with the exception of Stephen, you're probably the only guy around here who's seen them... many of which, let's face it, are run of the mill domestic melodramas or formulaic genre pieces ground out at a quick clip by Ozu & Naruse, etc, and are only of moderate historical interest owing to the name of their creators. Far be it from me to call out your name to hose down one of your posts owing to "invalid excess love".

the dancing kid wrote:Yoshimoto's essay on postwar melodrama has a lot to say about this (it appears in the 'Melodrama and Asian Cinema' book).

I think the point that I'm trying to get to is that Mizoguchi's filmmaking can be seen to embodying the disjunction between the novelty of cinema as a device of modernization and the social modernity that normally accompanies it. We can see this in many other wartime films, which are perhaps more aggressive in trying to substitute technological modernization for social modernity, but I think Mizoguchi really captures the cognitive dissonance of wartime culture in a unique way. I'm hesitant to say how much of what goes into his films is him asserting himself as the author and how much of it is just him playing along with film policy and social trends, but I think starting with the sound period his films get really contradictory in terms of representing modernity through modern technology.

Steven H wrote:I had a difficult time following most of that article, so I'll go back and reread it.

But if you understand modern warfare as a major part of social modernization, then he falls right into play. I would agree that his films are contradictory, but I still see them as a player within modernity (perhaps struggling against it) not outside of it.

I find all the better Ozu and Naruse films almost infinitely re-watchable -- while I feel that way about only a few Mizoguchi films. Perhaps I am allergic to spirituality in film -- as I much prefer Mizoguchi's NON-spiritual work,

the dancing kid wrote:But his long-standing project seems to be to remove Japanese film studies from the discourse of ethnographic subject (the west) looking down at the ethnographic object (Japan), which I think is valid, and presented far more clearly in his book on Kurosawa.

the dancing kid wrote:But his long-standing project seems to be to remove Japanese film studies from the discourse of ethnographic subject (the west) looking down at the ethnographic object (Japan), which I think is valid, and presented far more clearly in his book on Kurosawa.

the dancing kid wrote:

But if you understand modern warfare as a major part of social modernization, then he falls right into play. I would agree that his films are contradictory, but I still see them as a player within modernity (perhaps struggling against it) not outside of it.

I definitely agree that Mizoguchi is still involved in that discourse. I think one of the ideological projects of wartime cinema in Japan was to create an alternative form of modernity, so at the very least there's always a dialectical relationship between what they were doing (repression of the subject) and what we typically think of as western modernity (emergence of the modern subject).

Steven H wrote:I think every government at that point was trying very hard to control social discourse in as many ways possible, to retain power (which the horizontal rather than vertical modern world would siphon.) Maybe Japan stands out the most because of their spectacular loss (in almost every way, after WWII) and then equally spectacular rejuvenation, economically. That neo-confucian ideals survived isn't odd, and I'm actually surprised those thoughts didn't become more entrenched. The power of modern propaganda is intensely powerful, but it's still modern.

ltfontaine wrote: Based solely on my reading of Yoshimoto's excellent Kurosawa book, I would agree that he intends to reclaim interpretation of the Japanese cinema for Japanese commentators, a most welcome effort.

Steven H wrote: This reminds me of the chapters on wartime film contained in both Isolde Standish's books.

Very interesting time period, but an attempt to control modernity (the non-colonial sort) is still an advancing modernity.

Maybe Japan stands out the most because of their spectacular loss (in almost every way, after WWII) and then equally spectacular rejuvenation, economically.

the dancing kid wrote:

Very interesting time period, but an attempt to control modernity (the non-colonial sort) is still an advancing modernity.

I'm not sure. In a general sense, I think modernity is defined by the expansion of social horizons through the leveling of class, gender, etc. Those things were made possible by new technologies and capitalism*, which allowed for the individual subject to function as the basic unit of society rather than the family. Wartime Japan is clearly interested in preserving the family as the foundation of society, and went to great length to repress the individual subject (or at least represent that in the cinema).

I think Germany is just as significant. Walter Benjamin all but predicted the concentration camp as the "end game" of modernization, in which physical life became an extension of political life; the human body was in the domain of the state, and the camp was the realization of the biopolitical system of management. Giorgio Agamben also has some interesting thoughts on that in his book 'Homo Sacer'.

Also, Masumura called Mizoguchi a "caricaturist" which I think is accurate. He doesn't mean it as an insult or as a way of dismissing Mizoguchi's work, but rather as a way of trying to explain his mode of representation (particularly acting I think), which tends to drift toward exaggeration.

the dancing kid wrote:I don't have a copy handy, but is he really arguing for Japanese commentators, or just non-essentialist/Orientalist analysis? I don't think a Japanese scholar necessarily has any more insight than a non-Japanese one by simple virtue of his or her nationality.

Steven H wrote:Actually, I've been so busy with work lately I've been falling asleep before I hit the bed, nevertheless watching obscure, run of the mill, domestic melodramas (invalid or not). I'm sure both of your hearts are in the right place. Dove, olive branch, etc.

What I really want is a discussion of whether or not Mizoguchi was "modern". That seems really interesting to me, especially after reading some of Catherine Russell's very interesting takes on modernity in early Japanese films (the films themselves being a representation and engine of modernity). You have Ozu and Naruse (as early as 1935) showing women in suits, choosing their own suitors, showing varying personalities, whereas Mizoguchi seems drenched in Meiji shimpa style melodrama, even when discussing prostitutes in a contemporary setting. He seems far more interested in society treating women better (paternal, conservative), than women demanding better treatment (suffrage, progressive).

In his formal style, it's a little harder to ascribe. I don't believe modernity can be discounted or ascribed in Mizoguchi since film was a modern invention to begin with, which makes it a moot point. If you say that Mizoguchi is modern, as in "modern art", or an "emphasis on representing emotions, themes, and various abstractions" (as wikipedia defines it), then I would say he definitely *was* modern, though he probably wouldn't say it himself. A person who lived in the past while being ahead of his time, maybe (what other directors can we say this about?).