Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/06/17

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, November 6, 2017

Utamaro and His Five Women (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1946)

Toshiko Iizuka and Minosuke Bando in Utamaro and His Five Women

Utamaro: Minosuke Bando
Okita: Kinuyo Tanaka
Seinosuke: Kotaro Bando
Oran: Hiroko Kawasaki
Takasode: Toshiko Iizuka
Oman: Kyoko Kusajima
Yukie: Eiko Ohara
Shozaburo: Shotaro Nakamura
Oshin: Kiniko Shiratao
Takemara: Minpei Tomamoto

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Screenplay: Yoshikata Yoda
Based on a novel by Kanji Kunieda
Cinematography: Minoru Miki
Production design: Isamu Motoki

Utamaro and His Five Women is a film about the male gaze, but is it a celebration or a criticism of it? Kenji Mizoguchi is well-known for films like The Life of Oharu (1952) that explore the lives of women with deep sympathy and understanding, so it's easy to read the Utamaro biopic as a criticism, a portrait of the sometimes desperate existence of the women who inhabited "the floating world" of the 18th-century Japanese demimonde that was the subject of much of the artist's work. But the film also teeters over into exploitation even as it's revealing the seamy side of the male-dominated society. There's a satiric edge to the scene in which Utamaro and his assistants clandestinely observe a powerful lord's gathering of young women who strip to their underclothes and run into the water to catch fish. In a long pan down a row of the women, they disrobe in sequence like a chorus line in a musical. Meanwhile, the assistants are obviously taking more than an aesthetic interest in what's happening. Utamaro and His Five Women was Mizoguchi's first film after the war, and was made under the close observation of the occupying forces who were generally opposed to historical films for fear that they would celebrate the values of pre-war militaristic Japan. Fortunately, the film passed muster, probably because Mizoguchi's subject, a famous artist, represented the positive in Japanese culture. Even so, it's a subtle film with a sly double edge.