Word: mizoguchi
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...Until recently either a woman married or retired to maiden aunthood, or she became a prostitute. The prostitutes were often women or great culture and provided men with the only intelligent female conversation around, for wives were generally little more than child-bearers and tea-servers. Kenji Mizoguchi, director of Utamaro and His Five--Women, (1946), is regarded as the women's champion among Japanese film directors, yet even he takes what in another context would be an extremely sexist attitude towards them. "He doesn't love me," says one of Utamaro's five women. "He loves women, all women...
Utamaro and his Five Women is not, unfortunately, one of Mizoguchi's best films, yet it exemplifies many of his most pressing themes and is certainly well worth seeing. Its greatest flaw is the lack of simple plot: five women is simply too many to keep track of properly. The artist Utamaro, in trouble with the government for offending a traditional school of art by proclaiming that his own work is superior, is handcuffed for sixty days and is unable to draw. He has tattoeed one of the women; when she runs away with a lover one of Utamaro...
This is a style which goes to an extreme of simplicity by using methods perfectly unique to film. It renders every personal event visible, and depicts changes in relationships as physical events. The dramatic structure of Mizoguchi's scenes equals the spatial relationships of their characters. So that in his works drama comes down simply to motion, that is, change in place over time; and narrative drama is completely incorporated into film space and film time. Narrative reality becomes the reality of his films...
...THIS strain of change against order, of time against space, Mizoguchi's camera motions occupy a special place. They too transform the relationships that bind people, but transform them spatially and visibly, not as a cut slicing them apart and then re-confronting them in an artificial drama. People in his compositions are points set a certain way in space; an emotion sets the camera in motion and the points twist around gradually, with all the anguish of a process occurring within reality, to a new dynamic which is again immediately transformed...
Crane shots twist spatial relationships in such a way that their effect is wonderfully moving. Set within the extremely developed order of his compositions. Mizoguchi's crane shots strain the dramatic structure of his scenes to its fullest. The point is not that he uses a crane-the point is what his craning motions push against. Any rich fool can set up a crane shot. Only Mizoguchi can so stylize his shots that a crane's are back into space wrenches your heart away from the bearings on which it has rested long enough...