Filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi died 50 years ago this month of leukemia -- still, at 58, relatively young. At the time, his serenely moving period films were beginning to win acclaim at such film festivals as Venice and Berlin, but he had not achieved the worldwide popular following of his younger contemporary, Akira Kurosawa. He remains a minority taste, because few of his films have been widely distributed or regularly revived.

Yet Mizoguchi is relevant now -- especially relevant in complacent times. His work is a spur to action, for those who watch today's atrocities unfold, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur and elsewhere. It is easy to deplore these crimes, then settle back uneasily to do nothing. But Mizoguchi tells us that that is not enough.

For many, Mizoguchi's reputation rests on his style. His films are exquisitely beautiful. His use of camera movement and skill at choreographing actors are unrivaled. Critic Mark LeFanu has argued that he was the greatest master in cinema of the long take: the technique of staging scenes without editing, so that the viewer is drawn into a drama that seems to unfold in real time.

But Mizoguchi was no mere aesthete. He was a humanist, a politician and a champion of women. In his films, actresses such as Kinuyo Tanaka and Isuzu Yamada gave some of the subtlest, most detailed and most realistic performances recorded on camera. His trenchant feminism can seem startling even today. Sisters of Gion (1936) and A Woman of Rumour (1954) are piercing studies of the cruelties of the geisha system. The heroine of My Love Has Been Burning (1949) walks out on her philandering politician husband to found a feminist school.

These films were set in the present or in the relatively recent past. Mizoguchi's masterpiece, Sansho Dayu (1954), takes place in the Heian Period. An opening title ironically describes the film as being set "in the distant past, before mankind awakened from barbarism." Mizoguchi saw that men could still be barbarians. His film is a supremely compassionate response to the atrocities committed during World War II in Japan and elsewhere.

The story, deriving from legend, has a folk simplicity. A humane local governor is exiled for interceding with the authorities on behalf of the peasantry. His family are forced to flee. They are kidnapped; the mother is sold into prostitution, the children into slavery. Confined to a labor camp, the son, Zushio, is corrupted; he becomes a henchman to the brutal bailiff, Sansho. But his sister's faith in him rekindles his humanity. She sacrifices herself to help him escape. Zushio goes to the capital and appeals to a minister who once knew his father. With his support, he returns to the camp, overthrows the bailiff, and frees the slaves. This task accomplished, he renounces his power, and goes in search of his mother.

Though it is a film about human nature, Sansho Dayu does not preach resignation. In acknowledging that it is often our nature to be inhumane, Mizoguchi insists that humane people have an obligation to act. One of the film's more decent characters, the bailiff's son Taro, rejects his father's brutality but does not confront him. Instead, he enters a monastery. He may find inner peace, but Mizoguchi does not endorse the withdrawal. His hero is not Taro but Zushio, the man who actively strives against oppression.

Mizoguchi knows that politics is not the whole of life. Having freed the slaves, Zushio renounces worldly authority, giving priority to a personal quest: the search for his mother. Their reunion, the climax of the film, finds ultimate meaning in the bonds between human beings. But Mizoguchi sees a link between the personal and political: Zushio's moral integrity has earned him the right to personal happiness. In a time of violence and cynicism, this faith that justice will be rewarded may seem naive. But it is a faith that we need to rekindle, and that is why Mizoguchi's art still matters.

The Japan Times Weekly: August 26, 2006
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