The Definitives
Sansho the Bailiff (1954)
Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Cast: Yoshiaki Hanayagi, Kyôko Kagawa, Eitarô Shindô, and Kinuyo Tanaka
Rated: Unrated
Runtime: 125 min.
by Brian Eggert
Entered into
The Definitives:
6/5/2007
Original Release Date:
3/31/1954
When Americans view Japanese cinema, we often best relate to Kurosawa, as his Western-influenced and influential pictures take comparatively Americanized representational shapes, at least in contrast to Ozu or Mizoguchi. And though Kurosawa is the world’s favorite for Best Japanese Director (if ever there were such a title), the latter director, Kenji Mizoguchi, is considered the most “Japanese” of Japan’s great auteurs. Regional history and social issues play a significant role in Mizoguchi’s work, though that can be said for Kurosawa as well. Where Mizoguchi differs is that his narratives and aesthetic presentation often derive heavily from Japan’s Noh and Kabuki Theater styles and Japanese spiritualism, bringing traditionalism to the screen directly from pre-established artistic culture.
Sansho the Bailiff (Sanshô dayû, 1954) is considered jidaigeki—a period piece narrative set in Japan’s Edo age. Commonly depicting governments or institutions of power, in addition to other time-specific characters such as merchants, farmers, and most frequently samurai, jidaigeki spotlights pre-modern characters in Japanese history. Sansho follows a family after its head is removed in dishonor. The family’s father, a governor, is exiled after attempting to be civil amidst heartless bureaucracy. Sold into prostitution, his wife falls into disparaging madness while his children are kidnapped and sold into slavery. Zushiô and Anju, the son and daughter respectively, find themselves under the control of Sansho, the ruthless owner of a private manor.
As the children mature, they grow farther apart, separated by their stations and the surrounding landscape. They lose track of their mother, who cries a sad song mourning their absence. Anju remains the idealist, even when subjected to toils inherent to slave women of that era. Only after she convinces Zushiô to escape does he too become an idealist like his father. Zushiô escapes while Anju stays behind, giving him time to get away; she eventually falls into suicidal despair. Through good fortune, Zushiô finds himself in the position of his father, in the station of governor. Facing coldly official logic, Zushiô seeks to illegally free Sansho’s slaves, hoping to unfetter his sister and then reunite with his mother. Unfortunately, he finds idealism is rarely suited for this world.
Mizoguchi’s filmic poem communicates Japan’s unjust slavery system, but like every great story, develops into one about individuals’ emotions. He originally wanted the film to concentrate on the horrors of slavery, with that as the film’s central theme. Ironic, considering how film historians now consider Sansho one of the most significant Japanese melodramas ever produced. The studio wanted Zushiô and Anju’s story arcs leading the viewer down an affecting pathway. The result may not have been the director’s original intended subject, but nonetheless he constructs exhaustingly painful material. Heart-wrenchingly severe, the film’s melodrama crescendos, building with subtle blossom, all the while remaining solemn yet emotionally active.
Conveyed through a painterly attention to visual style, emotions are framed in Mizoguchi’s works, bringing about the idea that certain scenes could be captured and placed on a wall in a museum. Though he is passing down a literary narrative with his film, one written several times in Japan’s printed history, Mizoguchi also realizes the importance of images. Hundreds of year’s worth of Japanese painting is framed by Mizoguchi’s camera. Indeed, there is an evident preoccupation for history in his work. Be it the retelling of an age-old story or the construction of scene wherein an era of visual representation (particularly 14th century Japanese monochrome painting) is expressed, Mizoguchi assured that both traditional values and visuals were present in his work.
Mizoguchi’s traditionalism is perhaps why he was not as popular among many young Japanese filmmakers, or audiences—not as much as say, Kurosawa. Neither Mizoguchi’s use of imagery nor his stories applied, at least not as outwardly as other directors, to modern concerns. Kurosawa, however, flowed with ease between specifically modern stories called gendaigeki and traditional jidaigeki, between films like High and Low (Tengoku to jigoku, 1963) and Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai, 1954). Specifically after WWII, when most directors were using the war-torn Japanese landscape as material for postwar commentary, Mizoguchi held fast to his traditionalist output. After the war, most Japanese filmmakers sought to make gendaigeki, hoping to resonate postwar sorrows with a modern tale. Mizoguchi dabbled in such contemporary narratives prior to the war, unlike most. Only bold filmmakers such as Kurosawa, Kobayashi, and, of course, Mizoguchi, saw the potential for jidaigeki in the post-WWII climate. Ancient stories could be infused with subtle, thus more penetrative, social commentary, often showing how amalgamating the past into modern conflicts would smooth periods of societal and political transition.
This is not to say that Mizoguchi’s films are repetitious, that each postwar jidaigeki film is strictly a modern allegory—far from it. Each period-film deals with its own set of visual tropes, as different but as similar as the world of a master painter. As his career moved, Mizoguchi moved with it. He avoided monotony, criticizing other Japanese directors for embracing their own levels of comfortable filmmaking. Great filmmakers rarely strive without a challenge. Even Hitchcock, who innumerably made the same movie over and over again, faced diverse material on each, creating the believable illusion of something new. For every Mizoguchi film, audiences receive a mold on which intaglio detail has been inscribed. It is the joy of losing ourselves in those details that makes Mizoguchi’s films so consuming.
Keeping with the director’s head for traditionalism, consider Sansho the Bailiff less a film and more a solidification of a story, a remembrance, otherwise traditionally told by word of mouth. Jidaigeki or not, Mizoguchi’s film points out the effortlessness of memory, of time, for the human spirit. Memory and nature transcend tangibility, making them magical in the face of mortality. As much as Mizoguchi deals with ghosts (as in Ugetsu) or fate (Sansho the Bailiff), his films are not fantastical. Mizoguchi once said, “I portray the extraordinary in a realistic way.” Sansho the Bailiff remains grounded by the director’s voluntarily-endured set of conditions leaning him toward traditional filmmaking, but with an air of otherworldliness throughout—making drama into a spiritualistic yet recognizable experience.
Shot on location in Kyoto and at Kashikojima Island, Sansho the Bailiff breathes a harmony between landscape and the characters in it, as though memories are one with any given setting. Water becomes the metaphor for channeling thought through time, for life and death, for Zushiô becoming an idealist like his father, and for the passage of all things. We become very aware of the river or ocean as more than bodies of water, but vast celestial bodies consuming us and needing to be consumed. These ideas are symbols of ancient Japanese storytelling, iconography that also runs the world over, told with a distinction of elemental transcendence. Every passage of Mizoguchi’s beautifully shot fable addresses the ongoing life of the natural world in relation to the brief moment of human existence—the convergence and destruction of humanity in nature. No matter how cruel the twist of fate, we are consumed in the natural world.
Look at the scene where Anju walks into the river. At once peaceful and horrifying, we watch as she steps further and further in. We do not regret her actions, though tragic, since she returns to nature. Anju blends with her environment like a stream returning to its ocean, almost melting into the river as opposed to being swallowed by it. Though she is corporeally defeated, her spirit is restored to a more absolute state.
Which brings me to Mizoguchi’s affection for depicting strong women, a theme apparent in a number of his films. Perhaps it is their ability to create, juxtaposed by their historically lesser position in the structure of Japanese social and familial history, which creates for Mizoguchi a saddening historical irony. Or perhaps Mizoguchi’s troubled home life had an effect on his women characters. His parents gave up his eldest sister due to financial troubles; she was eventually sold to an okiya to become a geisha. Mizoguchi’s father viciously beat his mother and other sister, causing a lingering conflict between him and his father. As a result, women in Mizoguchi’s work tend to be the strongest and most wise characters, but conclusively the most abused and punished—the director either consciously or unconsciously pondering his own familial issues. Often suffering unimaginable emotional torment, his heroines survive by accepting their fate, proving the strength of the female spirit. Liberated by their more agrarian sense of fatalism, Mizoguchi’s women often die, but do so without submitting to a limited existence.
Keeping in line with the director’s fondness for the natural way of things, Mizoguchi wants actors to embody their characters, making the actors’ reactions the reactions of their character. This was a voluntary process on the part of the actor; Mizoguchi did not force growth. He was preoccupied with the concept of “reflecting,” an idea referring to the exchange between two actors consumed by their roles. If an actor “reflects,” he or she responds naturally in a physical and emotional sense, evoking his or her character in any given scene. While shooting, Mizoguchi was known to ask, “Are you reflecting?”—hoping actors were naturally exchanging as characters, rather than performers.
I noted that memories link with nature in Mizoguchi’s films. For him, memories outweigh human experience, defeat time and space, and pummel the idea of limited effect on the ever-changing flow of the world. Storytelling represents humankind’s most profound victory over such hindrances. The story of “Sansho the Bailiff,” along with other legends such as “The Tale of the Loyal Forty-Seven Ronin,” are common narratives in Japanese culture, as they contain a timelessness, unlike modern-specific gendageki. Mizoguchi’s jidaigeki films often contain that same sense of eternal meaning, which itself matures over time like a memory, becoming individualized, idealized, and eventually that which we hold onto dearest.
Sansho the Bailiff left me with a prolonged feeling of sadness when watching it for the first time, perhaps because Mizoguchi’s film ponders more than just drama but an empyreal element relative to the human spirit. Humankind becomes an allegory for nature, and the inverse. Stories such as this, which are passed down in the oral tradition into more tangible media, meander through time like a river. We get the sense that Mizoguchi’s film doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme, that someone will tell “Sansho the Bailiff” a hundred years from now without benefit of the cinema. This in turn makes the film all the more important; such an orphic cinematic message beyond the importance of “film itself” is rarely presented in motion pictures.