Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi - 1953)

Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
Produced by Masaichi Nagata
Written by Yoshikata Yoda
Cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa
Music by Fumio Hayasaka
Edited by Mitsuzo Miyata
Country/Language- Japan/Japanese
Cast- Masayuki Mori, Machiko Kyo, Kinuyo Tanaka, Sakae Ozawa, Mitsuko Mito and Kikue Mori


Ugetsu or Ugetsu Monogotari, the original Japanese title, is perhaps the most widely seen of all of director Kenji Mizoguchi's films (Sansho the Bailiff is another one). It was an important film for Mizoguchi because it was the first film that brought him international renown.

Ugetsu made its appearance in international film circles closely on the heels of Rashomon, which was an international sensation and gave its director Akira Kurosawa the sort of reputation no Japanese director had enjoyed before. Mizoguchi, who started his career in the 1920s as a director of silent films, was a relative unknown outside his native country. The fact that a Japanese film could appeal to international audiences was proved by Kurosawa's film, which may have prompted Mizoguchi to try the same. 

Incidentally, both the films do share a few similarities. Masayuki Mori and Machiko Kyo, who played the murdered samurai and his wife in Rashomon, also essayed important roles in Ugetsu, the cinematographer and the music composer for both the films were the same, and the plots for both the films were created by combining two short stories. And yes, both films won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

But the similarities end there. When it comes to plot, style, tone and performance, the paths of both the films tread entirely different paths. Ugetsu stays clear of any moralising we may hear in Rashomon, despite the theme being about human vanity. Where the tempo in Rashomon is raised to a feverish pitch, and the acting broad (What else could you expect from someone like Toshiro Mifune?), the tempo and acting in the latter film are restrained. 

Mizoguchi tells his story in a more serene way, in the manner of a Buddhist fable. Set in 16th century Japan, ravaged by civil war, the film is centred on two families, that of Genjuro (Masayuki Mori), a potter, who hopes to make the most of the war for his business, and his brother Tobei (Sakae Ozawa), who is driven by his desire to become a samurai. Their wives, Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka), and Ohama (Mitsuko Mito), are sceptical of their ambitions, since they are motivated by greed. Unmindful of their wives' advice and the eventual tragedy that befalls them, the two carry on. While Tobei becomes a samurai through fraud, Genjuro is enchanted by Lady Wakasa (Machiko Kyo), who vamps him.

What gives the film its uniqueness is its almost uncanny blend of the real and the ethereal, factors that are often indistinguishable in the film. One could argue that it holds true even in real life, where the illusory is often taken for being real. It is not the characters alone who are unable to differentiate the real from the unreal; we, the viewers, are also deceived in our perception of this seemingly two sides of the coin, and credit has to go to the impeccable artistry of Mizoguchi.

By now, it would have become obvious to you that the heart of the film has its roots in Buddhist thought, which abounds with themes of how man is led to suffering as a result of his own desires and vanity. But there is hardly any moralising in the film- Mizoguchi is content with simply presenting us with the story and does not want any character to stand in as a mouthpiece for his views.

The mood that the film evokes is one of mysticism, and this mood is evoked through Mizoguchi's mise-en-scene, his use of graceful long takes and complex camera movements. Kazuo Miyagawa delivers some of the most beautiful images through his magnificent use of the crane shot. The actors are, for the most part, framed in medium to long shot- even in scenes of dramatic intensity, Mizoguchi prefers to keep the camera distant. The only close-up I can recall is that of Miyagi towards the end of the film. The distanced view that pervades through the film embodies a spirit of detachment, which again has its roots in Buddhist thought.

The score by Fumio Hayasaka also deserves to be mentioned, since it is a vital contributor to the film's mood. While his score for Rashomon used a lot of Western themes (like Ravel's Bolero), the music here is largely Oriental (at least to my knowledge).

Though Ugetsu bought Mizoguchi the worldwide attention he so deserved, he was already nearing the end of his career. He would die of leukemia three years later, at the age of 58.

Siegfried Kracauer- Cinema, it's Basic Properties, Tendencies, and the Issue of Art

The German-born journalist, writer, sociologist and cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer is most renowned today for Theory of Film, his dissertation on the aesthetics of the cinema. Among his many elaborate chapters on the subject is his classification of its properties, tendencies and the ever longing debate about whether cinema could be considered "art" or not. 

Kracauer classified the properties of the motion picture into two- basic and technical.

Basic Properties

The basic property of film is very much the same as that of photography in that both the media attempt to record and reproduce physical reality, the only difference being that the former records the world as it evolves in time whereas the latter is frozen in time. It is this ability of the motion picture to capture movement that makes it suitable for recording events and preserving them. But it cannot be counted as making use of the creative potential of the medium.

Technical properties

Of all technical properties that can be attributed to the medium, Kracauer considers editing to be the most significant (It was, undoubtedly, one of the earliest properties that was discovered by filmmakers). Editing helps the filmmaker, through the arrangement of various shots, to communicate an idea. This is where cinema and photography diverge- although photo montage can come close, it does not offer such potential.

Moving from the properties of cinema, Kracauer lists some of the main tendencies of the medium and moves on to list two tendencies, realistic and formative.

Realistic tendency

When the motion picture camera was first invented, the earliest pioneers were content to use a stationary camera and record the movement that was presented before it (Kracauer called such movement external movement). It paid off initially, since audiences were enthralled by the very act of seeing photographed movement. Over time, the novelty wore off and filmmakers were constantly in search of newer ways of expressing themselves.

In this search for newer possibilities of the medium ,filmmakers were quick to realise the potential hidden in subjective movement like a panning, tilting or travelling camera to reveal objects that would otherwise have been left unnoticed. Equally significant was the ability to communicate ideas through by arranging different strips of film in the appropriate manner.

When it comes to presenting an incident on film, staging becomes an important factor. In cinematic staging, it is very often not only the action that demands staging; the surroundings in which the action is staged also deserves attention. Owing to the nature of the medium, it is obligatory that the surroundings in which a scene is staged needs to be as faithful a reproduction as possible as the real world so that the viewer is deceived into believing that the world presented on celluloid is a real one.

Staging an event for the camera can sometimes make an event look more convincing than it would have been were it shot on real locations. An example for this would be Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. Barring the first scene, the rest of the film was shot entirely in a studio, and it looks quite convincing. Chaplin could never have made the film the way he wanted to if he had shot it entirely on location in the stormy mountains of Alaska. But there are situations where the opposite is also true. A famous example for this would be Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, which could never have been shot in a studio.

Formative Tendency

Right from the inception of motion pictures, filmmakers have constantly strived to go beyond merely recording and reproducing physical reality. George Melies can be considered to be the first person in the history of the medium to have explored this tendency of the medium, wherein a non-realistic world is created entirely using photographic means. Since then, many filmmakers have constantly tried to create films that are anything but realistic. The experimental or avant-garde film is one such genre which explores such possibilities of the medium.

As many films have demonstrated over the past century, it is possible to bring both the tendencies together in one film. As a result, you have realistic films that include dream sequences and those where the hero suddenly bursts into a song. Not that they always make an effective combination- there are several examples of films where the two tendencies have been used in woefully mismatched ways –but they can be brought together in several ways that are aesthetically valid.

When is cinema “cinematic”?

Kracauer believes that a film can claim aesthetic legibility if they build from their basic properties, that of recording and revealing physical reality. But there have been reactions against this property, chiefly from the German Expressionist cinema, which revelled in highly stylized, almost dreamlike imagery. But over a period of time, such films have come to be considered less “cinematic” than the ones that draw on physical reality, the reason being that films of the latter type provide a certain degree of insight and enjoyment that the former cannot. Yet there have been films produced time and again that do away with realism and still become popular among the audience.

It is exactly for these reasons that it is good not to be single-minded about the potential of the film medium. In short, there is no standard definition for what can be considered “cinematic”. The essence of cinema lies in how efficiently a filmmaker uses his creative faculties to make the best use of the medium’s potential.

The issue of art

The very concept of cinema as an art form misleads many people into placing it on a par with the traditional art forms. This is untrue since most art forms are free from reality whereas the very nature of film is its function of recording and revealing physical reality. This very function of the medium provides the raw material out of which the filmmaker can make his composition. While it is true that cinema can draw a lot from the other arts like painting, music, literature and theatre, merely transferring them to the camera is a neglect of the medium’s intrinsic potential. If that were so, the world would never have seen films like Battleship Potemkin and Nanook of the North, which would not have existed if there never was a movie camera.