Kenji Mizoguchi, Sanshō Dayū [Sansho the Bailiff] (Japan, 1954; 124 minutes)

Kenji Mizoguchi, Sanshō Dayū [Sansho the Bailiff] (Japan, 1954; 124 minutes)

Kenji Mizoguchi (1898–1956) is, along with Yasujirō Ozu (1903–1963) and Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998), one of the three Japanese film directors who are usually hailed as ‘masters’ in the West. Tadao Sato (b. 1930), possibly the most influential Japanese film critic, has noted how feudal hierarchy continued in Japan until the middle of the nineteenth century, and how the strict class system was abolished only much later than in most Western nations. According to him, the continuing influence of the earlier class culture on each of these directors reveals itself in the themes and topics they chose: Kurosawa came from a samurai family and his films express the samurai ethical and aesthetic tradition; Ozu belonged to a well-off merchant family and made films that expressed the petit bourgeois culture created during Japan’s modernisation; Mizoguchi came from a modest middle class (his father was a carpenter), his sister (who had earlier been sold into geishadom) later got him work as an apprentice designer of patterns for Japanese traditional clothes, and his films deal with feminist themes and transfer to the screen the style of kabuki and the tradition of Japanese dance. Although Kurosawa is arguably the most famous of the three, another film critic, Alexander Jacoby, considers him, compared with Mizoguchi, a ‘very much less distinguished’ artist, resorting, for example, to a ‘fashionable brand of sentimental humanism’ and to an emphatic visual style with predominance of rhetorical close ups. The point is that Mizoguchi’s social concerns are presented with subtlety, and that his style is elaborate and delicate (much the same could be said about Ozu’s masterpieces).

Sansho the Bailiff premiered in the West in the Venice International Film Festival of 1954, ‘tossed like a stone into the cultural pool’, where it won the Silver Lion for best direction. Only a few years later, Éric Rohmer (1920–2010) and Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930) would write reverentially about Mizoguchi in Cahiers du cinéma. The film has been seen as a renunciation of the (Japanese) militarist misuse of Japanese philosophical traditions. Set in eleventh-century Japan, during the Heian period (794–1185), it is based on the story Sanshō Dayū (1915), by Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), a high-ranking army surgeon who was also a novelist, poet, and translator of Western literature (mostly German) into Japanese. Ōgai studied in Germany between 1884 and 1888 and developed an interest for Western literature. He also edited several literary journals. His story, in turn, is based on a legend mentioned in early Buddhist tales and medieval puppet plays. One of the most poignant moments in the film comes when Anju, who was sold as a slave, hears another slave, recently arrived at the camp, sing a doleful song that describes Anju’s predicament and that could only have been created by her own mother – sold into prostitution to a distant place. After the slow and painful recognition, Anju simply utters, looking at the other slave: ‘It’s mother!’ The human body, in this case, almost overcomes space and time. But the other human body was not really mother’s (as Anju well knew), and words, coming from last year or from 2500 years ago, do not totally overcome time (or space). The present of each person is carried around by him or her: the fact that two people are next to each other is what allows them to speak of a ‘common present’. Mizoguchi immediately cuts to another failed attempt to escape from Nakagimi, in her own present, in her own location (her own body). The human body can be seen as the ultimate ‘object of engagement’ (in the terms of art historian Stacy Boldrick) when it comes to time – as well as the ultimate symbol for the limits to the overcoming of time. The song is, in the view of film scholar Mark Le Fanu, ‘the centre of the movie’ and ‘above all what the audience takes away from it’. In Ōgai’s tale, we only ‘hear’/read the song at the climax (if anything, even more poignant than the scene mentioned above), climax which is very similar in the tale and in the film. Mizoguchi, however, chose to make the song ‘the keystone of the tale’s moral architecture’ – the song is discovered by Anju when it is carried to the camp by a stranger, and then it is the song that gives Anju and Zushiō heart throughout the film at key moments of their plight. Film director Terrence Malick (b. 1943) briefly adapted Mizoguchi’s film for the New York stage in 1994.

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