Following the Camera With Japan's Greatest Storyteller
There are a lot of things in contemporary filmmaking that are not currently enjoying a Golden Age. Camera movement — the art of tracking and dollying and craning for maximum storytelling clarity and emotional communication — is certainly one of them.
That Ron Howard would need to underscore the first act climax of his woeful modern western "The Missing" with a 360-degree camera twirl around Tommy Lee Jones is a pretty good indication of the state of the contemporary dolly art. "This man is having thoughts and feelings, folks," Mr. Howard's directorial choice redundantly howls out from the screen. "Don't listen to the actor, listen to me — this is a big moment!"
The weapon of choice for most modern filmmakers to bludgeon their audience is, of course, the Steadicam. Combining a lightweight body with a gravity-defying spring gimble and a treadmill-hardened operator who wears the contraption like a Godzilla costume, the Steadicam's "slick, smooth, weightless feel," as Indie super-producer Christine Vachon describes it, allows even the most clueless helmer to realize any roving visual caprice, no matter how self-indulgent or inane.
There was a time when a tracking shot was something a director had to earn. Cranes and dollies cost money, tracks took valuable production time to lay and level, and actors and crews had to rehearse extensively to preserve emotional reality within the shifting focus and pace of the moving camera's frame. A camera move that is grounded by tracks or a crane or even an operator's shoulder has gravity. A move with a Steadicam does not. But more than just a technical headache or a matter of gravity, "a tracking shot," Jean Luc Godard once observed, "is a moral issue." And the moving camera's great moralist was Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi (1898–1956).
If, as Andrew Sarris once observed, "all the dollies and cranes in the world should snap to attention" when Max Ophuls, the Viennese director whose extravagant camera sense parallels Mizoguchi's gifts, is mentioned, then when the name Kenji Mizoguchi is intoned, every piece of camera equipment on earth should execute a deep bow. In the six films showing at Film Forum over the next two weeks in new 35mm prints, Mizoguchi's gentle but unwavering camera nurtures and observes his characters' often tragic lives with an emotionalism that is, paradoxically, as intense as any committed to film, yet free of melodrama.
Born in Asakusa, Tokyo, Mizoguchi sought escape from his impoverished youth and abusive father through painting, and deliverance through the nascent Japanese film industry. But the price of his rise was great: Mizoguchi's sister was sold into Geisha slavery. Throughout his creative life, the director would acknowledge the debt he owed his sister, demonstrating an unusual sensitivity for the plight of women in Japan's rigidly male-dominated society.
By the time he made "Sisters Of Gion" (9/21), the earliest of the half dozen masterpieces in Film Forum's program, Mizoguchi had directed upward of 50 features (most of which were lost during WWII). Delicately supported by smooth, confident camera maneuvers, "Sisters Of Gion" tells the story of a mismatched pair of siblings with vastly different personalities, neither of whom can deliver them from gender slavery as Kyoto geishas. All of the films in the Film Forum program offer this film's masterfully clear and honest view of the Japanese institutions that exploited women for centuries.
But Mizoguchi's keen understanding of the hand Japanese women were historically dealt was never clouded by hand wringing or condemnation. His effortlessly prowling camera sought and found nuanced, three-dimensional characters everywhere it went. He also demonstrated a unique ability to bring Japan's chaotic feudal past into the present. Both "Sansho the Bailiff" (9/15 & 16) and "Ugetsu" turn on family groups released from cloistered safety into a nightmare world of risk and separation lurking just outside the farm gate or mansion door.
In "Ugetsu," which will play for a full week beginning tonight, the unsentimental vision of 16th century life is only the beginning. No one will ever make a better ghost story than "Ugetsu." Moving from the personal to the mythic, and ultimately to a level of tragedy and acceptance that is unparalleled in film, "Ugetsu's" story of a rural potter's ill-advised wanderlust remains one of cinema's greatest treasures. Mizoguchi's camera flows through the film (in one shot it even travels from day to night without interruption) connecting and separating husband from wife, mother from child, and this life with the next.
"Ugetsu" also showcases Mizoguchi's multi-film collaboration with Kinuyo Tanaka, a director-actor collaboration that deserves to be as well known as that of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. In 1952's "The Life of Oharu" (9/17), star and director reached their shared apotheosis. A perversely graceful anti-Horatio Alger story, the film chronicles an Edo Period woman's descent from maiden, to concubine, to courtesan, to whore. Mizoguchi's camera draws lines and creates connections between the most ephemeral areas of human experience through the suffering and survival of one woman. Unlike contemporary cinema's audacity addicts, Kenji Mizoguchi was able to perform this directorial miracle from a perfectly discrete distance.
Through September 21 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).
