The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Kenji Mizoguchi · a film · 1953 · scored on the Japanese release, with the desk’s own English renderings · from two tales by Ueda Akinari
Mode
Period film made into a ghost story and a fable of art and greed; war film, ghost tale and moral fable held in one visual law
Mythos
The man drawn away by a woman of the other world; the return after a short absence to a home altered and a wife dead and waiting
Phase
One season of war around Lake Biwa, from the kiln fired in a raid to the fields after the return, framed by a pan along the shore and a crane rising from a grave
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, Academy ratio, mono sound, in Japanese; two couples, two strands parting at a market and meeting again at home; Fumio Hayasaka’s score with traditional musicians
Register
From Tōbei strutting before his retainers to Wakasa singing in her ruined house; mist on the lake, a lit hearth, a child crying on a dying woman’s back
Scale
Two couples, one war, the living and the dead in one take
Governing Proposition
In the civil wars of the sixteenth century a potter and a peasant leave their village for the profit and the rank the war makes possible; the potter is taken up by a dead noblewoman in a mansion that is a ruin, the peasant buys a samurai’s rank with a stolen head, and their wives pay, one with her body and one with her life. The wager of the film is that a camera which does not cut between the living and the dead can show the dream and the waking world as one continuous place, so that a dead wife can be made present in a single movement and received without a seam.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a long pan along the shore of Lake Biwa to a village, and it ends with a crane rising from a grave to the fields. Its frame is a movement of the camera, not a cut. Between the two the village is left and returned to, and its life goes on around the story told inside it. The time is the civil wars of the late sixteenth century, and armies are near enough to bring both money and death.
The design is two couples and two strands. Genjūrō, a potter, wants wealth; Tōbei, a peasant of the same village, wants to be a samurai. Their wives are Miyagi, who has a small child, and Ohama. The strands part at the market of Nagahama and meet again in the village. The places of the action are three, the village, the lake and the market town, and the mansion of the Kutsuki, with the road between them. The potter’s strand carries the film, and the peasant’s answers it: one man’s dream of profit beside another’s dream of rank, and each wife paying for her husband’s.
Kenji Mizoguchi directed it for Daiei, with Masaichi Nagata producing, and it was released in Japan on 26 March 1953. Matsutarō Kawaguchi and Yoshikata Yoda wrote the screenplay from two tales in Ueda Akinari’s collection of 1776, also called Ugetsu monogatari: “The House amid the Thickets” (Asaji ga yado) and “The Lust of the White Serpent” (Jasei no in). Kazuo Miyagawa photographed it, Kisaku Itō was its art director, and Fumio Hayasaka wrote the score, with traditional musicians. Masayuki Mori plays Genjūrō, Machiko Kyō Lady Wakasa, Kinuyo Tanaka Miyagi, Eitarō Ozawa Tōbei and Mitsuko Mito Ohama. It is in black and white, in the Academy ratio, with mono sound.
Movement II
Soldiers raid the village, and Genjūrō keeps his kiln firing through the raid. The scene shows his greed and his art at once. The pots are what the war will buy, since armies bring money to the markets, and they are the work of his hands. Tōbei wants armour and a place among the samurai. The war is the chance for both men, and neither of them counts what it will cost, because the cost will not fall on them.
They set out across Lake Biwa by boat. The boat slides out of mist, and Ohama sings as she poles it. A drifting boat comes alongside with a dying man in it, who warns them of pirates. It is among the most transporting passages in the cinema, and it is a crossing to another world: the lake is a threshold, and the dying boatman is a ferryman who warns.
Because of the warning, Genjūrō sends Miyagi back with the child. The decision is made out of care, and it sends her to her death. Ohama goes on with the men. From here the film keeps two places in view that its characters cannot see together: the road home, where Miyagi walks with her child, and the market, where the men are about to find what they came for.
Movement III
At the market of Nagahama the pots sell, and the coins are counted. Here the strands part. Tōbei goes after rank and buys it with a stolen general’s head: armour, and a troop of retainers at his back, a glory he did not win. Ohama is raped, and sold. The film moves through this strand quickly, by coincidence and at speed, and Ozawa plays Tōbei broad, a man strutting in a costume.
At the market Lady Wakasa finds Genjūrō and takes him to the Kutsuki mansion. She sings, and her dead father’s voice sounds from the armour. She loves the potter for his art. She is a dead woman who wants the life she was denied, and the beauty that seduces him is the beauty he makes, cut off from the life that made it. Kyō plays her with a face made like a Noh mask and a body that glides rather than walks, unearthly without any effect to say so.
The bath and the picnic by the water are joined by a pan across the landscape, and the pan carries the lovers out of time: a season passes in one movement of the camera. The mansion is shot as solidly as the village, at the same distance and in the same light, because that is how Genjūrō lives it. Nothing in the image marks the other world. The dream the war’s money bought looks exactly like the world.
Movement IV
A priest on the road, and sacred writing on Genjūrō’s body, break the spell. The mansion is a ruin. The man drawn away by a woman of the other world, whose house is a ruin, is one of the oldest patterns there are: Ueda’s white serpent, the lamia, the fairy mistress. Here it is built into the structure, the lake the crossing, the mansion the enchanted dwelling, the written charm the end of the enchantment.
Miyagi, on the road home with her child, is struck down for a little food, the child crying on her back. It happens before Genjūrō comes home, and the film shows it, so that the viewer knows what he does not. Of the two dead women who frame him, one takes, and this one gives. Tanaka plays her plainly and exactly, and the film keeps her a patience more than a person it opens.
Tōbei, in his armour, comes to a brothel and finds Ohama there. He throws the armour away, and they go home. The meeting is a coincidence and the reform takes a few minutes, and the strand’s law is lighter than the one that has just killed Miyagi. But the parallel is exact. One man wanted wealth, the other rank, and each wife has paid with her body.
Movement V
Genjūrō comes home at night. The camera follows him through the empty, ruined house and out again, and turns back to find the hearth lit and Miyagi sewing. In one movement the empty house has become a house with a wife in it. The viewer, who saw her die, receives her as he does, without a seam to mark the impossible. Cut the take, and she would be a trick. Uncut, she is present.
The next morning she is gone; she was dead before he came home. The men are chastened, Tōbei back from his rank and Genjūrō from his dream, and Miyagi’s voice is heard approving. The end states as a moral what the homecoming had already shown, and the dead wife’s patience is offered as the measure of the living men. It is the old return of the man who comes home after what seems a short absence to find his wife dead and waiting: Urashima Tarō, Odysseus come home to a dead Penelope.
The child carries an offering to her grave, and the camera rises from it to the fields. The film won the Silver Lion at Venice in 1953, and the critics of Cahiers du cinéma, Rivette above all, set its director at the summit of mise en scène; through them the long take that holds the living and the dead in one space passed to a generation of filmmakers. Its questions stay open, most of all about its women, whom it shows paying for the men’s dream and idealizes in the same frame. What it shows is not open. The war makes a dream of profit and rank, and the women at home pay for it with their bodies and their lives.
Act III · The Twelve
The main strand resists subtraction. The kiln fired during the raid shows the potter’s greed and his art at once; the crossing of the lake, with the dying boatman’s warning, is why Miyagi is sent back to her death; the market is where Wakasa finds him; the mansion is the dream the war’s money buys; Miyagi’s death on the road is the price, shown before the homecoming so that the viewer knows what Genjūrō does not. The two strands answer each other: one man wants wealth, the other rank, and each wife pays with her body. What gives is the execution of Tōbei’s strand: the stolen general’s head, the troop of retainers and the meeting in the brothel come by coincidence and at speed, and his reform is a few minutes long. The parts are required; one of them is made thinly.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: war turns men’s ambition into a dream of profit and rank, and the women at home pay for the dream with their bodies and their lives. The pots sell because armies bring money; Tōbei’s armour is bought with a stolen head; Miyagi is killed for a little food; Ohama is raped and sold. Under it lies a second truth: the dream is aesthetic. Wakasa, dead, wants the life she was denied and loves the potter for his art, so that the beauty he is seduced by is the beauty he makes, cut off from the life that made it. Held below the top because the end states its moral, the men chastened and the wife’s voice approving, and Miyagi is a patience rather than a person the film opens.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Elevation is frequent and reaches the top. The crossing of Lake Biwa: the boat sliding out of mist, Ohama singing at the pole, a drifting boat with a dying man in it who warns of pirates, among the most transporting passages in the cinema. Wakasa’s song, and her dead father’s voice sounding from the armour. The bath and the picnic by the water, joined by a pan across the landscape that carries the lovers out of time. Miyagi struck down on the road, her child crying on her back. The homecoming, where the dead wife is made present in one movement and is gone by morning. The final crane rising from the grave to the fields. Held from the very top by Tōbei’s strand, which runs level and broad between these heights.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The myth is built, from two of the oldest patterns. The man drawn away by a woman of the other world, ghost or serpent, whose house is a ruin: Ueda’s white serpent, the lamia, the fairy mistress. And the man who returns after what seems a short absence to find his home altered and his wife dead and waiting: Urashima Tarō, or Odysseus come home to a dead Penelope. The structure bears load. The lake is a crossing to another world and the dying boatman a ferryman who warns; the mansion is an enchanted dwelling; sacred writing on the body breaks the spell; two dead women frame the hero, one who takes and one who gives. Pots, coins and a kiln keep it particular. Held a step below the top because Tōbei’s strand is satire, not myth, and stands outside the pattern.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is threefold: the period film, the ghost story (kaidan) of the Japanese stage and screen, and Mizoguchi’s own long take and moving camera, worked out over twenty years from Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion (1936) to The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939) and The Life of Oharu (1952). The departure is real: the supernatural and the historical held in one visual law, the ghost and the living in the same take and the same light, without the effects the ghost film used to mark the other world; and a war film told as a fable of art and greed. Held at the bar because the grammar was the director’s proven path by 1953, and the stake was smaller than the result suggests. The swerve is of subject and fusion more than of form.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that the dream and the waking world are one continuous place and that the dead are present among the living, and only a camera that does not cut between them can carry it. The homecoming is the proof: in one movement the empty house becomes a house with a wife in it, and the viewer, who saw Miyagi die, receives her as Genjūrō does, without a seam to mark the impossible. Cut it, and she becomes a trick. The lateral movement, like a handscroll unrolled, makes time pass as space: the pan from bath to picnic moves the lovers through a season. The costs: Tōbei’s strand is staged conventionally, the form there a container rather than an instrument, and the score at times underlines what the camera has made clear.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Seventy-three years of return are evidence. The literature is substantial: Noël Burch’s To the Distant Observer (1979), Tadao Satō’s writing on Mizoguchi, and the long line of French criticism, Rivette’s above all, that set Mizoguchi at the summit of mise en scène. The readings divide: an anti-war allegory of a nation led by ambition into ruin; a Buddhist fable of illusion; a feminist reading in which the film exposes men’s dreams and idealizes the women who pay for them; a formal reading that finds the meaning in the camera’s movement. It yields on return chiefly in form: the takes, the figures placed in depth, the rhymes between the lake and the mansion. Held a step below because its moral is clear and less disputed, and the dispute that remains runs mostly through one question, its women.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Released in 1953, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1950s. The force: the fullest demonstration that the long take and the moving camera could hold the real and the supernatural in one space, and that a period film could be a fable of art. Part of it belongs to Mizoguchi’s earlier films and to the door Rashomon had opened at Venice two years before, and it is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Silver Lion at Venice in 1953, and the veneration of Mizoguchi by the critics of Cahiers du cinéma in the later 1950s, which shaped the French New Wave’s idea of mise en scène and changed how a generation of filmmakers understood the camera. The reach stayed within art cinema and criticism, narrower than Rashomon’s, and the figure is held there.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole, in its one version, with nothing known to be lost. The presence is seventy-three years of exhibition, restoration and circulation on home video, continuous but narrower than that of the most widely shown films of its decade: it lives in repertory and film study, not in common speech; Rashomon has the wider presence. No charge to the fabric is known. The surface, the civil wars of the sixteenth century and a tale of 1776, was already historical in 1953 and does not date. The evidence would carry more, but film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it; the medium’s span holds it at 8.8, well below the Parthenon.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The making bears weight throughout. Kazuo Miyagawa’s camera gives the crane and the long lateral move, the lake in mist, the homecoming take and the final rise from the grave. Kisaku Itō’s sets, the village, the market and the mansion, are built so that the camera can travel through them. Fumio Hayasaka’s score draws on drums, flute and chant from Noh and older music, joined to the image rather than laid over it. Machiko Kyō’s Wakasa has a face made like a Noh mask and a body that glides; Kinuyo Tanaka’s Miyagi is plain and exact; Masayuki Mori’s potter is possessed by a dream he half knows is one. The costs hold it from the top: Eitarō Ozawa’s Tōbei is broad comic playing, the business of the stolen head is perfunctory, and once or twice the score underlines a feeling the image has made.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Tōbei strutting at the head of his retainers in a stolen glory, and the dead Wakasa singing in her ruined house. One law governs both: each man pursues a dream the war makes possible, and each dream costs a woman. The ghost world and the war world are shot at one distance, in one light; Miyagi’s death on the road and Wakasa’s feast obey one physics, and the range runs from farce through the uncanny to grief. The strain is Tōbei’s strand. Its comedy is broader than anything around it, its coincidences belong to another kind of story, and its resolution, the wife found in a brothel and the husband reformed in a scene, is a lighter law than the one that kills Miyagi. The halves are parallel and do not weigh the same.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged on what a film of under a hundred minutes holds. War and history: armies, plunder, starving soldiers, a fallen noble house. Labour and the economy, at the centre: the kiln, the pots, the market, coins counted, profit made from war. The family, in two marriages and a child. Class, in a peasant who would be a samurai and a potter taken up by a lady. Gender, in women’s bodies as the war’s currency. The sacred and the dead, in the priest, the written charm and two ghosts. Art, in the potter’s work and the beauty that seduces him. The natural order, in the lake, the fields and the seasons. Two couples and one question hold them. What keeps the axis lowest: the state is armies only, and history is a ground the characters cross, not a force the film examines.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.2, then The Made at 9.1, then The Sublime and The Archetypal Deep at 9.0. A form in which the camera does not cut between the living and the dead, so that a dead wife can be made present in one take; a making in which camera, sets, score and performance are the instrument of what the film knows; heights from the lake in mist to the crane above the grave; and two of the oldest patterns built into the structure.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.3: war, labour, the family, class, gender, the sacred, art and the natural order are held through two couples, but the state is armies only, and history is a ground the characters cross, not a force the film examines. Next above it, The Inevitable and The Swerve at 8.5: a strand of coincidence and speed whose parts are required and thinly made, and a turn of subject and fusion on a grammar the director had proved over twenty years.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.2, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.8, The Imperishable at 8.8 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve meets it exactly, at 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.5, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.8 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Ugetsu monogatari (雨月物語) as released in Japan by Daiei on 26 March 1953, black and white, in the Academy ratio, from the pan along the lake shore to the crane above the fields: directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, produced by Masaichi Nagata, from a screenplay by Matsutarō Kawaguchi and Yoshikata Yoda after two tales in Ueda Akinari’s Ugetsu monogatari (1776), photographed by Kazuo Miyagawa, with art direction by Kisaku Itō and music by Fumio Hayasaka. The film has one version, and it is the object. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Japanese film. The English renderings are the desk’s own, used for sense, a reader’s aid rather than the object; no subtitled version is judged, and nothing here is charged to one. No line of the dialogue is held to the word with certainty, so none is quoted, and the speech is described. Ueda’s tales are not part of the work; the film is scored on what it builds from them in its own medium. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact running time, any further literary source, how the lake was staged, any change to the ending, the shot count and the share of each strand, the film’s place in later critics’ polls and the later films said to answer it, are not given.