J340 Ugetsu Final Thoughts
Ugetsu
Right off the bat, in the opening frames, we hear the sound of Noh chanting, and we see as a backdrop, some beautiful Japanese screens and dyed fabric patterns.
There appears some Japanese writing on the screen--beautiful, calligraphic, painterly.
It is a passage from a literary text:
Ueda Akinari’s Tales of Moonlight and Rain or Ugetsu (1776).
So, there we have our Intertextuality!
Then a voice-over intones:
Mysterious Fantasies continue to enchant modern readers. This film is a new refashioning of those fantasies.
Fade and move to a Long Shot, a pan of a village where we meet two couples.
Note on the Setting for the Film:
Ueda’s Tales were written in the Edo period (late 1700s) but the time frame has been moved back about 100 years to the late 16th century, probably the 1570s. A very tumultuous and fluid period.
The locale is Omi Province, home base of the Great Warlord, Oda Nobunaga, near Lake Biwa.
The main characters:
1. Couple One is loading a cart with pottery packed in straw. This is Genjurô and Miyagi. Genjurô is a potter, a craftsman, an artisan. He works on a potter's wheel--which his wife turns for him--and turns out useful, everyday life utensils.
They hear the rumble of distant gunfire and Genjurô assumes they must be “executing Shibata’s spies” (Shibata is a real historical figure, Shibata Katsuie, 1530-1583, a trusted samurai General of Oda Nobunaga’s).
Genjurô has heard that with the arrival of Hashiba’s forces (another real historical figure, Hashiba Hidekatsu, 1568-1586; Oda’s 4th son) has brought an economic boom to the market town of Nagahama where he plans to sell his wares.
So Mizoguchi is clearly incorporating elements of historical reality here....and in paying such close attention to the artifacts in his films, the settings, the costumes, the art, the crafts, the pottery, the atmosphere, the Daimyo's homes, like the Kutsuki yashiki, etc., he is bringing a real past alive in his films.
But that is not his only point!
Because the Sengoku or Warring States period is a fluid time, opportunities to rise in the world abound, but so do the
dangers.
2. Out of one of the village houses comes the Second Couple: Tobei followed by his wife Ohama who is goading him,
“Go on if you must! Some samurai you’ll make!”
Tobei retorts,
“How high can a man rise if he does not have dreams? Ambitions must be as boundless as the ocean.”
“Stick to your trade, or you will regret it,” Ohama advises.
This turns out to be a prophetic foreshadowing.
In different ways, the onset of War has stirred desires and ambitions in the males and it is the women who will bear the brunt of the suffering.
Speaking to postwar audiences in 1953, it is hard not see all of the references to war and how dreams and ambitions push human beings into making unfortunate decisions as Mizoguchi’s way of getting at what Japan’s push to control most of Asia under the aegis of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere has meant for the Japanese people. Hint: It was not a good thing!
Quotes:
Mizoguchi was speaking to war survivors: those who had approved and enabled the conflict, those who viewed Japan's militaristic and imperial ambitions with skepticism, and those who had not yet come of age but still had to endure its harsh effects.
Filmed somewhat in response to the success that his younger disciple Akira Kurosawa achieved with Rashomon, Mizoguchi's vision embraces the frailty of human nature with a generous tolerance that nevertheless retains both the wisdom and nerve to confront it when our weakness begins to wreak havoc on the innocent.
Ugetsu challenges us to open our eyes, question our ambitions (and those of our would-be leaders) and recognizes that the ghosts that haunt us the most profoundly are those we summon up from our hidden depths.
David Blakeslee
Shinoda Masahiro comments onTwo kinds of Reality in Mizoguchi's Cinema:
Social or Historical/Political Reality v. Supernatural Otherworldliness
I thought that film was about reproducing reality. I knew that literature could be fantastical but I thought movies were supposed to be a faithful reflection of reality. But watching Ugetsu, I forgot all about that. In Ugetsu I felt as if the world of fairy tales had been perfectly recreated in images and this was a huge surprise. So we can say that Mizoguchi was a supreme realist while at the same time, a supreme fantasist. Therefore, he presents to us as an ambivalent figure.
For temporal reality we usually expect three things: Events, Narration and Dramatic Progression. But with Ugetsu, Mizoguchi broke all those rules. He had real time and fantasy time, along with real space and fantasy space completely mixed together; they were all part of a single world.
Ugetsu is the most successful film I have ever seen at moving back and forth between these two worlds, between these two realities. His approach reminds me of traditional Japanese scrolls-emaki. Having his characters move back and forth through spaces like this was unprecedented.
Masahiro Shinoda, Director
People love to comment on the beauty and elegance of Mizoguchi's style, the fluid motion of his camera, his long takes from a boom that sweeps over the landscape the way a Japanese scroll--an emaki mono--unfolds. OK, but without knowing anything about emaki mono we can still SEE and appreciate the sweep of his camera and the various positions from which he shoots his scenes, can't we?
Catherine Russell in her book, Classical Japanese Cinema, says this:
Classical Japanese cinema is a stylish cinema....There is a consistency of elegant composition, figure placement, use of architecture and lighting design. Elegance in conjunction wit the simplicity of everyday life is one of the distinguishing features of this cinema....The stylishness of the visual field indicates a cultural impetus to aestheticize, to raise the status of everyday life to something more meaningful, more harmonious and more beautiful than, in truth it really was or could be. At the same time, this is realist cinema that demonstrates a keen eye for detail, for both the modern world and the historical.
So Japanese "Classical Cinema," she suggests is marked by a wonderful elegance, a stylishness, a strong aestheticism...but it is also (socially) realistic. So it is an interesting juxtaposition. We would not necessarily anticipate that we would find both of these elements juxtaposed like this.
If we think of the impulse to "aestheticize" as being related to the idea that Burch promotes: that Japanese--because of their hybrid writing system--are more inclined to see and appreciate the the "constructedness of meaning," and our willing to be open about it and therefore are less intersted in being "Illusionist."
Something else to which Burch alerts us is that Japanese tend to value "Intertextuality" in their literary and associated arts, and that they don't necessarily see texts and narratives as "bound" by rigid border lines. Rather, things seem more permeable not because of some deep seated cultural practices....but simply because it is what makes the most sense to them as artists! So, literature, music, dance, theatre, painting, chanting, intoning...we should not be surprised to see and hear these things. But nor should we be too shocked if they are not there!
The Final Scene:
Little Gen'ichi takes his bowl of rice and places it on his mother's grave. He brings his palms together in a respectful prayer gesture,
adjusts the flowers and the camera pulls back and pans up to the same landscape scene with which the film began.
The circle is complete.
Life, death, hope, dreams, suffering, learning, struggling and surviving. It's all there, unfolding like in an old fashioned, illustrated emaki scroll.