Word: mizoguchi
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...Mizoguchi's use of deep-focus and high-angle lets him shoot every situation economically and directly. When one slave is to be branded on the forehead, the camera looks down on his head beside the roaring fire where the iron lies. Sansho walks up; the camera tracks out, framing him and a few behind him. He grasps the iron and presses it to the man's temples. We only need hear his scream, for the first image established the man's plight indelibly. And by avoiding a sensational treatment, by refusing to show the man's head being branded...
...tracking shots allow Mizoguchi at once to shoot every situation with unbelievable guts and to keep his film flowing onward. They combine anguish and beauty, human motion and a fixed setting. In the beginning they glide with the noblewoman and her children through a forest, playing with the light and shade of the passing trees. When the bandits take her from them, fast tracks of incredible violence following them running along the shore after the women are cut against shots of her being carried off in a boat. In every track characters and setting, foreground and background, seem...
...freedom, motion, insufficient. What we demand is happiness, the reunification of people with people, or people with settings which are separated in depth. When Zushio returns to Sansho's, he rides into the compound and walks to and from Sansho's house through a crowd of slaves. Mizoguchi tracks in and out with him in high-angle; his triumph over his former enslavement is immense. But he hears that his sister is dead, and suddenly the other position in depth he has struggled to attain becomes empty...
Resigning his governorship, he goes to find his mother. By a fishing hut on the shore of an island he hears the song she made up about him and Anju. Mizoguchi for the first time cranes up away from him and, keeping him in frame on one side of the house, reveals his blind mother on the hillside or the other side. Having set up that other-being-in-depth that is Zushio's goal, he cuts into close shot of her. Zushio approaches her, speaks to her; she refuses to believe it is he and, tearing herself away, hobbles...
Reunification, intergration of beings separated in depth, has finally been achieved. But she immediately breaks away and begins to grope around for Anju. He tells her, "We're all alone now, mother," as they sit in the same plane-in-depth. Mizoguchi cuts to a longer high-angle of the two isolated before the hut, and pans across as he cranes up and away from them. The camera holds on two silhouetted rock cliffs, symmetrical in the frame and flat on a single plane. Unified in depth, they are isolated by the surrounding white sky. Depth has been penetrated...