Ugetsu 4K 1953

Since ancient times, although tacitly, the cinematography of Japan (and Asia in general) has been divided into male and female cinemas, according to their leitmotiv presentation. The first assumed a rather aggressive form of projection: military-historical epics (dzidaigeki), samurai films (tiambara or kengeki), gangster movies (yakuza-eiga) and horrors (kaiju), at the same time, they clearly borrowed stylistic turns of Western cinema. The second, however, drew from the traditions of the Kabuki and Noh theaters, with their unhurried ritualism and mythical symbolism, inheriting more national motifs and sprouting into genres such as shoshimingeki (realistic drama) and joseiga (melodramas about the plight of women).

Kenji Mizoguchi's films have a strong feminine element, and it is not without reason that philosopher Gilles Deleuze compared him to playwright Pierre Corneille, who wrote his tragedies from the 'female gaze'. At the same time, the Japanese director's handwriting was opposed to theatrical conventions, paying tribute to the visual style of embodiment. Taking the eyepiece of the camera outside the stuffy pavilions of the Daei studio, he exquisitely reduced the natural nature of the Land of the Rising Sun to the elegance of the frame.

The medieval parable-tale 'Ugetsu' cemented Mizoguchi's fame as the island's premier film sensei, able to combine the expressionism of fantasy with the plasticity of realism. In an exercise in small form, he has taken this film to a 'widescreen scale', projecting religious and mystical experiences onto the banal everyday life of the common man.

There is a complete lack of figurative perspective, but this is more a characteristic of the wise 'over-maturity' of Asian art, which frees the image space from contrived objectivity and brings out the metaphysical center with textuality. Like an experienced tailor, the Japanese weaves the shroud of the screen from dream scenes, bringing together the dead and the living in a single irreal and borderline reality.

Shooting all the adjacent plans of the movie from the same angle, he forces the viewer to comprehend the architectonics of reality, not as the truth of existence, but as the verisimilitude of a fable. There is no applied screen of the West or the decayed national consciousness of post-Hiroshima. There is only the personal manner of the calligrapher, who draws a straight line between the memory of the slumbering past and the decorativeness of the present.