The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (289 page)

It is said that only about a third of Mizoguchi’s work survives. Of those thirty or so films, very few ever opened in the West commercially, and few are available on videotape. Moreover, this is a place to say that, despite all its advantages for research and preservation, video is unkind to any movie and cruel to any great movie. Mizoguchi worked with scale, space, and movement, and movement on a TV set is like a fish moving across a tank, whereas movement on a real screen is that of a great fish passing us in the water. So the greatness of Mizoguchi is no easier to discover now than it was in 1975. And this is a greatness that could one day soon be lost. By 2010 will it be possible to see these films on the screen they deserve:
Ugetsu, Princess Yang Kwei Fei, Shin Heike Monogatari, Chikamatsu Monogatari, Sansho Dayu, The Life of Oharu, Gion Music, Sisters of the Gion, Genroku Chushingura
, etc.?

Mizoguchi was raised in poverty. He studied painting and worked in newspaper layout before entering the movies. He excelled at period films, but he was equally interested in modern stories. He has no superior at the unfolding of narrative by way of camera movement, and he was a great director of actresses—notably Isuzu Yamada, Kinuyo Tanaka, and Machiko Kyo.

Ugetsu Monogatari
is probably the Mizoguchi film seen by most cinema-goers—and it is enough to sustain his reputation.

Ugetsu
is set at a time of uncomprehended war, perhaps an accurate representation of medieval Japan, but equally the sort of world that a Vietnamese peasant might have experienced in the 1960s. It picks out two potters, Genjuro and Tobei; incidentally, Eric Rhode went to the heart of Mizoguchi’s placid view of human travail when he said that it is unclear whether these men are at the center or the periphery of the world. In other words, as in a fable, the human figures are picked out and universalized, without any note of contrived significance. War has made their ambitions feverish and obsessive: Tobei wants to be a samurai; Genjuro wishes to sell his pottery successfully. Their wives stress domesticity and urge the men to recognize the immediate dangers of leaving the home. Again, without undue emphasis, the women represent the life force, physical continuity, and endurance; while the men are discontented by their own dreams.

Against the warnings of the women, the families split. While Tobei buys amour, his wife is raped. And while Genjuro’s wife is killed by beggars, he is lured to the house of Lady Wakasa. Photographed like any other character, save for the whiteness of her costume and the beauty of her face, Wakasa is a ghost. She asks Genjuro to marry her and they enjoy an enchanted idyll. But reality obtrudes. Tobei is now a samurai, having “proved” himself with the stolen head of a warlord who had committed suicide. His triumph takes him to a brothel and there he meets his degraded wife. Genjuro learns that Wakasa is not real and is reminded of his wife. He returns home at night, and finds his wife and child awaiting him. He drinks sake and goes to sleep. When he wakes, his wife is gone. She too was a ghost for one night. Tobei and his wife return and life continues.

Ugetsu
ends with Mizoguchi’s serene camera craning up from a shot of Genjuro’s son at his mother’s grave to a view of fields beyond being tilled. It is one of the most moving shots in all cinema: the rise of the camera expressing subdued hope and human transience: death and life in one image show the harmony of tragedy and happiness.

That sort of artistic effect obtains throughout the film. The camera is often detached from human action, looking down on it, moving in order to see it more clearly and to explain consequences and feelings. When Genjuro’s wife is killed, it is in a single setup. The camera is high. The woman hurries into frame, her child strapped to her back. Beggars enter the frame. We look helplessly down on the petty, fatal meeting. There is no grand murder, but a scuffle in which the woman is stuck by a spear almost casually. She writhes on the ground, her gasps barely audible beneath the crying of the child. As she drags herself away, the camera draws back to show the beggars squabbling over the scraps of food they have stolen from her. How can such grimness be spared melodrama but by the consuming tolerance of a great director?

The idyll with Wakasa invites beauty more directly, perhaps. And certainly Mizoguchi has made it visually enchanting: Wakasa’s stately dance; the vague dimensions of the haunted palace; the bathing scene, where the steaming water is an emblem of dream and a reminder of the misty lake on which the potters and their wives earlier made their way to town. Exquisite, too, is the diagonal, high-angled pan/dissolve that ends with a shot of their lakeside picnic, spread out on a silken square. But the most beautiful thing about the Wakasa sequences is the way that the ghost is made touching. Her need for a redeeming love prepares us for the later presence of Genjuro’s wife as a ghost. And that last ghostly appearance is possibly the most stunning moment in the film. Genjuro enters his house. It is night and the interior is gloomy. There is a semicircular pan as he comes in, revealing emptiness. But then we pan slowly back to discover the wife sitting in the firelight where seconds before there was nothing. So magical is the shot that we never consider how actress and fire must have been hurried into place while the camera panned. Our immersion in the imaginative life of the film is total.

Other Mizoguchi films only confirm the conviction, based on
Ugetsu
, that he was a master. I cannot offer a proper survey of his work except to say that
Chikamatsu Monogatari, The Life of Oharu, Sansho Dayu, Princess Yang Kwei Fei
, and
Shin Heike Monogatari
are the films most likely to be available. Any one of them offers the eloquence of
Ugetsu
. The use of the camera to convey emotional ideas or intelligent feelings is the definition of cinema derived from Mizoguchi’s films. He is supreme in the realization of internal states in external views. At a time when Japanese cinema is deservedly in fashion, it is necessary to repeat Jacques Rivette’s claim that one cannot compare, say, Kurosawa and Mizoguchi: “You can compare only what is comparable and that which aims high enough. Mizoguchi, alone, imposes a feeling of a unique world and language, is answerable only to himself.

“If Mizoguchi captivates us, it is because he never sets out deliberately to do so and never takes sides with the spectator. He seems to be the only Japanese director who is completely Japanese and yet is also the only one that achieves a true universality, that of an individual.”

Gaston Modot
(1887–1970), b. Paris
Modot was a painter once in Montmartre, acquainted with Picasso and Modigliani, and tempted to be a film presence or actor as early as 1909. From then until the end of 1914, the IMDb claims that he appeared in nearly two hundred short films. He seems to have played in serials and series based on heroic figures—Onésime, Zigoto, and Calino—and he made a number of French westerns.

His “modern” credentials begin with
Mater Dolorosa
(17, Abel Gance) and
La Zone de la Mort
(17, Gance). He was in Germaine Dulac’s
La Fête Espagnole
(20) and Luis Delluc’s
Fièvre
(21);
La Terre du Diable
(22, Luitz-Morat);
Nène
(24, Jean De Baroncelli);
Au Secours!
(24, Gance);
Le Miracle des Loups
(24, Raymond Bernard);
Carmen
(26, Jacques Feyder);
Die Stadt der Tausend Freuden
(27, Carmine Gallone);
Geheimnisse des Orients
(28, Alexandre Volkoff); as Mondego in
Monte Cristo
(29, Henri Fescourt); as the Englishman Lord Glasdall, in
La Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne d’Arc
(29, Marco De Gastyne); as a thief in
Sous les Toits de Paris
(30, René Clair).

It was then that Modot took the role of the Man in
L’Âge d’Or
(30, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí). In its portrait of romantic nobility and brutish depravity (at the same time) this was maybe the most radical role that film had yet offered—and Modot committed to it with a rare intensity. He played Peachum in
L’Opéra de Quat’sous
(31, G. W. Pabst), the French version of
Die Dreigroschenoper; Fantômas
(32, Paul Fejos);
Quelqu-un a Tué
(33, Jack Forrester);
La Mille et Deuxième Nuit
(33, Volkoff);
Crainquebille
(34, de Baroncelli);
Quatorze Juillet
(33, Clair);
Torture
(34, Roger Capellani);
Taxi de Minuit
(34, Albert Valentin).

As the 1930s progressed so he became a mainstay character actor:
Les Chaînes
(34, Jury Ronna);
Lucrèce Borgia
(35, Gance);
Le Billet de Mille
(35, Marc Didier); in the Foreign Legion in
La Bandera
(35, Julien Duvivier);
La Vie Est à Nous
(36, Jean Renoir);
Pépé le Moko
(37, Duvivier);
Cargaisons Blanche
(37, Robert Siodmak);
Mademoiselle Docteur
(37, Edmond T. Greville);
La Grande Illusion
(37, Renoir);
Le Jouer d’Échecs
(38, Bernard);
La Marseillaise
(38, Renoir);
La Maison du Maltais
(38, Pierre Chenal);
Accord Final
(38, Ignacy Rosenkranz);
La Fin du Jour
(39, Duvivier); and as the anguished gamekeeper, Schumacher, in
La Règle du Jeu
(39, Renoir).

He remained in France during the war:
Une Idée à l’Eau
(40, Jean-Paul Le Chanois);
Montmartre-sur-Seine
(41, Georges Lacombe);
Patrouille Blanche
(42, Christian Chambourant);
Dernier Atout
(42, Jacques Becker);
À Vos Ordres, Madame
(42, Jean Boyer);
L’Homme de Londres
(43, Henri Decoin);
Le Brigand Gentilhomme
(43, Émile Couzine);
Le Bossu
(44, André Hunebelle);
Les Enfants du Paradis
(45, Marcel Carné).

After the war, he had a golden age:
Le Silence Est d’Or
(47, Clair);
Dernier Refuge
(47, Marc Maurete);
Antoine et Antoinette
(47, Becker);
Le Cavalier de Croix-Mort
(48, Lucien Garnier-Raymond);
L’Armoire Volante
(48, Carlo Rim);
Le Point du Jour
(49, Louis Daquin);
Le Mystère de la Chambre Jaune
(49, Henri Aisner);
Le Parfum de la Dame en Noir
(49, Daquin);
RendezVous de Juillet
(49, Becker);
La Beauté du Diable
(50, Clair);
Victor
(51, Claude Heymann);
Casque d’Or
(52, Becker);
Papa, Maman, la Bonne et Moi
(54, Le Chanois); Danglard’s valet in
French Cancan
(54, Renoir);
Les Truands
(56, Rim);
Cela S’Appelle l’Aurore
(56, Buñuel);
Elena et les Hommes
(56, Renoir);
Les Amants
(58, Louis Malle);
Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier
(59, Renoir);
Les Menteurs
(61, Greville);
Le Diable et les Dix Commandements
(62, Duvivier);
L’Itinéraire Marin
(63, Jean Rollin).

One strange echo remains: in
La Règle du Jeu
, Modot is the gamekeeper, a hopeless policeman figure. And in
L’Âge d’Or
there is a moment where another gamekeeper shoots his own son (because the boy has annoyed him). It is a devastating moment, done as a game but clearly fatal, and I can never see
La Règle du Jeu
without remembering it. Did Modot and Renoir have the same feeling? The screen absorbs the similarity and leaves us to judge where déjà vu meets outrage. One thing more: there are gamekeeper figures like these in the paintings of Magritte—so calm, so sinister.

Gustaf Molander
(1888–1973), b. Helsinki, Finland
1920:
Bodakungen
. 1921:
En Ungdomsaventry
. 1922:
Thomas Graals Myndling
(s);
Parlorna; Amatorfilmen
. 1923:
Malarpirater
. 1924:
33.333; Polis Paulus Paskasmall
. 1925:
Ingmarsarvet; Till Osterland
. 1926:
Hon, den Enda; Hans Engelska Fru
. 1927:
Forseglade Lappar; Parisiskor
. 1928:
Synd
. 1929:
Hjartats Triumf
. 1930:
Fridas Visor
. 1931:
Charlotte Lowenskold; Fran Yttersta Skaren; En Natt
. 1932:
Svarta Rosor; Karlek och Kassabrist; Vi som gar Koksvagen
. 1933:
Kara Slakten
. 1934:
En Stilla Flirt; Fasters Miljoner; Ungkarlspappan
. 1935:
Swedenhielms; Under Falsk Flagg; Brollopsresan
. 1936:
Pa Solsidan; Intermezzo; Familjens Hemlighet
. 1937:
Sara lar sig Folkvett; Der Kan man Kalla Karlek; Dollar
. 1938:
En Kvinnas Ansikte; En Enda Natt; Ombyte Fornojer
. 1939:
Emilie Hogqvist
. 1940:
En, Men ett ett Lejon; Den Ljusnande Framtid
. 1941:
I Natt eller Aldrig; Striden Gar Vidare
. 1942:
Jacobs Stege; Rid i Natt
. 1943:
Alskling, Jag ger Mig; Ordet; Det Brinner en Eld
. 1944:
Den Osynliga Muren
. 1945:
Kejsaren av Portugallien; Galgmannen
. 1946:
Det Ar min Modell
. 1947:
Kvinna utan Ansikte
. 1948:
Nu Borjar Livet; Eva
. 1949:
Karleken Segrar
. 1950:
Kvartetten som Sprangdes
. 1951:
Fastmo Uthyres; Franskild
. 1952:
Trots; Karlek
. 1953:
Glasberget
. 1954:
Herr Arnes Pengar
. 1955:
Enhorningen
. 1956:
Sangen om den Eldroda Blomman
. 1967: “Smycket,” episode from
Stimulantia
.