MIZOGUCHI'S MODULATION STYLE

MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION
American films swept the globe in the wake ofWorld War I, and the découpage methods
they employed soon became a cinematic lingua franca. 1 Feuillade and his contemporaries
adjusted to the new norms, anda younger generation-Abel Gance, Jean Epstein, Carl
Dreyer, Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, and many others-embraced them eagerly. The few
Asian films surviving from before 1930 suggest that Japanese filmmakers also developed
assured, idiosyncratic variants of the emerging style.
Fragments from the 1910s indicate that, like Western filmmakers, Japanese directors
used both lateral staging, with figures strung out perpendicular to the camera, anda more
diagonal arrangement (Figs. }I-3.2). Soon carne demands to modernize Japanese cin-
ema. The "Pure Film" movement urged directors to adopt close-ups and crosscutting, as
well as Hollywood script formats. 2 Magazines published explanations of American con-
tinuity practice, and one column habitually compared the number of shots in foreign
films to the cutting rate in Japanese films. 3 Sorne advocates hoped that "Americanized"
filmmaking would force directors to abandon outworn theatrical traditions; other writers
argued that only by adopting foreign techniques could companies find export markets.
New studios, most notably Shochiku, were formed with the avowed purpose of produc-
ing modern, world-class films.
Japanese directors were thus pressured to master continuity editing, and by the mid-
I920s most had. 4 A climactic sequence of The Cuckoo (Makino Shozo, 1922), for exam-
ple, displays notable subtleties of cutting and camera angle (Figs. 3-3-3-4). Apart from
the unusual variety of angles, the scene illustrates a characteristically Japanese interest
MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION 83
3.1 Sorne scenes in Makino Shozds Chushingura (1913 3. 2 Maldno al so stages actions in marked depth, as
or 1917) recall European cinema of the period in staging when Lord Kira leaves the corridbr with his attendants.
their action in parallel horizontal rows; the kneeling (Compare Figs. 2.17 and 2.87.)
vassals bring the two disputants into prominence. ''
(Compare Figs. 2.1 and 2.14-)
3. 3 The Cuckoo: several do se views show Namikds 3·4 In a striking aperture framing, one woman's face
family gathered around her sickbed. is enclosed by the curving bedstead.
in the decorative dimension of the image. The curving iron bedstead, partly hiding the
family's faces, becomes a vivid graphic component, adding a purely pictorial dimension
to the mournful tenor of the scene.
The modernization of Japanese cinema was accelerated by a 1923 earthquake that de-
molished large stretches of Tokyo. There carne a call to rebuild Japan on a scale com-
mensurate with the glittering metropolitan West. The major cities began to sport office
buildings, coffee shops, comic books, jazz, flapper styles, and other marks of urban so-
phistication. 5 Film companies eliminated remnants of theatrical tradition, such as the oyama
(female impersonator). Production accelerated toan astonishing sixhundred to eighthun-
dred films per year, making Japan's industry the world's most prolific. Into the studios carne
a new generation of men who admired foreign films and who were aware of contempo-
84 M 1Z O G U C H 1, O R M O D U L AT 1 O N
3. 5 A triumph of the pictorialist trend: servants gather
outside while the Abe brothers discuss their future after
their father's death (The Abe Clan, 1938). Compare Fig. }I.
rarytrends in theater, a1t, and politics. Kinugasa Teinosuke, Ito Daisuke, Maldno Masahiro,
Mizoguchi Kenji, Ozu Yasujiro, Naruse Mildo, Gosho Heinosuke, Uchida Tomu, Shimazu
Yasujiro, Shimizu Hiroshi, and others forged modern Japanese film. Beginning their ca-
reers in the 192os and early 193os, they defined their country's cinema for thirty years. 6
Directors found varied solutions to the problem of catching up with Hollywood and
Europe. Many films surviving from the period straightforwardly obey the premises of an-
alytical continuity. Beyond this baseline three distinct tendencies emerged. Most arrest-
ing is what we can calla calligraphic style, showcased in the swordplay films (chanbara).
Here swordsmen hurl themselves into combat at hyperaccelerated speed, popping in and
out of the frame unexpectedly, glimpsed in swift, often bumpy panning and tracldng move-
ments. Cutting is very rapid, often flamboyantly disjunctive. A much calmer technique
is on display in what we can call "piecemeal" découpage. Here each scene is broken into
many distinct medium shots and close-ups, not only of faces but of hands, props, and
details of setting. The Shochiku studio cultivated this American-Lubitsch approach, and
it is on display in the silent films of Ozu, Naruse, and Gosho. A third style is predicated
on distant shots, meticulous compositions, and graceful camera movements. Mizoguchi
may have helped solidify this "pictorialist" approach, which became a marker of prestige
in the late 193os (Fig. 3·5).7
Although all three approaches derived from classical continuity, each fostered exper-
imental impulses too. The calligraphic style encouraged camera tricks and hectic cutting,
sometimes with little concern for anything but visceral arousal. The result is a frenzied
pictorial style that has few counterparts in Western cinema until the 196os. The piece-
meal approach allowed Ozu to expand Hollywood's 18o-degree dramatic space into a cir-
cular arena of action and then cultivate a playful approach to framing, setting, and shot
design. 8 The pictorialist tendency, as we will see in Mizoguchi, permitted the filmmaker
MJZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION 8S
to cultivate exceptionally delicate staging tactics. Overall; the urge to decorate the stylistic
surface, to embellish even a straightforward scene with momentary flourishes, remained
a hallmark of Japanese films. At the climax of Wife, Be like a Rose! (1935), for example,
Naruse constantly tracks the camera up to and away from his players, cutting these sweep-
ing movements together in overtly parallel patterns.
Throughout the world the coming of sound modified the continuity framework. Shots
became lengthier; whereas the typical US film of the 192os averaged around five seéonds
per shot, that duration doubled in the sound era. Several factors slowed cutting pace. Shots
could not be broken up by intertitles, and it was difficult to synchronize dialogue during
editing. Because moving the heavy sound cameras to various setups was time-consuming,
directors tended to sustain their shots. However, once mobile supports were devised to
shift the camera around the set, directors began to utilize more frequent tracking shots
than they had in the silent era, if only to add the visual variety lost through a slower cut-
ting pace. Likewise, depth staging and the deep-focus image were integral to early silent
cinema, but filmmakers from Europe, Russia, the United States, and elsewhere found
that these techniques could also fulfill the demands of dialogue-based production. Many
directors who achieved prominence in the mature sound cinema, from Jean Renoir and
Max Ophuls to William Wyler, George Cukor, and John Stahl, made long takes and stag-
ing in depth central to their aesthetic repertoire. Still, their innovations operated within
the framework of analytical cutting, shotjreverse shot, and judiciously placed close-ups
highlighting the main turns in the action.
Japan's changeover to sound was slowed by indecision about technology and the re-
sistance of the powerful benshi-the commentators who accompanied film screenings
by explaining the story and taking on the voices of the characters. Once sound filmmak-
ing arrived, however, stylistic change paralleled the Western path. The calligraphic trend
died out. Piecemeal découpage survived, as did the pictorialist approach, which now often
favored stately, distant framings and rather long takes. And the baseline remained a more
sober, quasi-Hollywood technique. This last became dominant during the Pacific war
period, stylistically the most conservative years of Japanese filmmaking.
After the war the most ambitious young directors, Kurosawa Akira and Ichikawa Kon,
sustained the vigorously flamboyant approach to filmmaking pioneered in the 192os. Older
masters like Ozu and Shimizu continued to refine their unique styles. Soon, however,
the audience became younger, the genres of juvenile delinquency and yakuza (gambler)
movies arrived, and movie attendance went into a tailspin. The arrival of directors like
Oshima Nagisa and Imamura Shohei in the late 195os definitively marked the end of the
golden age. Still the anarchic, abrasive power of the young men's films and their rebel-
lion against their fathers' cinema should not make us forget a simple fact: on the foun-
dation of classical Hollywood découpage the interwar generation of Japanese directors
built perhaps the most subtle and variegated national film style the world has yet known. 9
In this process Mizoguchi Kenji-arguably film history's greatest exponent of staging-
played a central role.
86 MIZOGUCHI; OR MODULATION
The eye wants to overcome difficulties. One should of course set it tasks
capable of solution; but the whole history of art is proof that this morn-
ing's "clarity" is now boring and that visual art can afford to dispense with
partial obscurity, momentary visual puzzlement, as little as music can dis-
pense with dissonances, false endings, etc. HEINRICH WOLFFL!N 10
Born in 1898, Mizoguchi belonged to what Japanese historians call the "generation of
11 As these young people were growing up, their nation proved itself a military
1 9oo.''
power, seized Korea, launched its first experiment with parliamentary democracy, and
opened its doors to Western culture, both high and low. Although the Communist Party
was weak, Marxism hada wide influence on intellectuals and artists. So too did a stream
of translations, foreign films, and imported visual art. In the midst of this ferment Mizo-
guchi, the son of a Tokyo carpenter, discovered a love of art. As a boy he apprenticed to
a design house, and in his teens he attended a school teaching Western-style oil paint-
ing. All the while he was reading widely and attending the theater. In Kobe he worked in
a publicity firm while writing poetry, flirting with Christian socialism, and founding an
amateur theater troupe. In r92r an actor friend found him ajobas a player and assistant
at the Nikkatsu studio, and he began as a director in 1922.
Other aspects of his life might have furnished the plot for one of his own melodra-
mas. At age seven Mizoguchi saw his father go bankrupt and sell his sister as a geisha.
When his mother died ten years later, he quarreled with his father and went to live with
his sister, who by then had become an aristocrat's mistress. Soon after Mizoguchi started
directing, he began an affair with a geisha who was also involved with a gangster. One
night the woman slashed his back with a razor, an incident that won Mizoguchi notori-
ety and a three-month suspension from Nild<atsu. (He was fond of displaying the scar
and remarking, "You cannot portray women unless you have been stabbed like me!"))
Shortly afterward, he met a gangster's wife ata dance hall and persuaded her to leave her
husband. Once they were married, the couple quarreled bitterly, and from 1941 Mizoguchi's
wife was confined toa mental hospital because of syphilis. 12
Despite his sensational private life, he proved himself an efficient and accomplished
director. After the 1923 earthquake he moved to Kyoto, and there, amid the old Japan of
temples and licensed pleasure quarters, he would reside the rest of his life. His earliest
films appearto have explored a variety of modes: lyrical naturalism, aesthetic experiment,
militarypropaganda, anda quasi-Marxistproletarian realism. Mizoguchi made sorne com-
mercial hits, such as Tokyo March (1929), and his work began to place in the annual "Best
Ten" lists compiled by the film journal Kinema ]umpo. With Taki no Shiraito (a .lea. White
Threads ofthe Wate¡fall, 1933), which placed second in the Kinema jumpo poli, he joined
the front rank of directors. One mark of his new renown was that whereas most direc-
tors worked steadily for a single company, he was able to break with Nild<atsu and mi-
grate among companies from 1933 onward.
By then he was known as a specialist in feminine melodrama. Because Nild<atsu's fore-
most director, Murata Minoru, preferred making films centering on men, the company
had forced Mizoguchi to take up women's genres, but eventually he carne to like the idea.
Literary and theatrical traditions provide any Japanese artist with a storehouse of situa-
tions based on victimized women. Merchants or clerks fall in love with prostitutes or aris-
tocratic ladies, maternal prostitutes sacrifice themselves for men's careers, girls are sold
into bullying marriages. 13 All these pathetic situations, derived from kabuki and puppet
theater, furnished plots for popular novels serialized in newspapers andan emerging form
of theater called shinpa. Shinpa was a romanticized, quasi-modern version ofkabuki that
became hugely popular at the turn of the century. Many plays highlighted independent
women, often in the sex trade, crushed by social obligations and unfeeling men. When
Mizoguchi entered the film industry, any tear-jerking film set in modern times was con-
sidered an offshoot of shinpa. He adapted sorne shinpa plays, and once he went off on
his own, he clung to the shinpa aesthetic for the rest of his career.
Mizoguchi found his greatest degree of independence in working at Dai-Ichi Eiga, a
company he founded in 1934 with the ambitious producer Nagata Masaichi. He made
several important films for Dai-Ichi Eiga, and two 1936 projects, both written by Yoda
Yoshikata, proved to be groundbreaking. "I didn't begin portraying humanity accurately
until Naniwa Elegy and Sisters of Gion." 14 In the Kinema jumpo poll Naniwa won third
place, and Sisters won first. When Dai-Ichi Eiga dissolved, Mizoguchi moved with Nagata
to the Shinko company and then to Shochiku, which placed great resources at his dis-
posal. His film about a kabuki actor in the Meiji era, The Story ofthe Last Chrysanthemum
(1939), won a government award, and he went on to create a cluster of films celebrating
traditional Japanese arts. As the nation mobilized for the Pacific war, he was assigned to
direct a colossal version of the classic 47 ronin tale Genroku Chushingura (1941-1942), ·
the most expensive Japanese film yet made. By now he was motion picture consultant to
the cabinet and head of the Japanese Filmmaking League. One critic called him "the mas-
ter among masters in the Japanese film world .... To talk about this manis at the same
time to talk about the path upon which Japanese film has progressed." 15
Starting out in the 192os had toughened him; directors often confronted lazy crews
protected byyakuza gangs, and shooting might be disrupted by brawls. Mizoguchi adopted
a ferocious demeanor. The "three-clawed fiend," as Yoda called him, was capable of de-
manding that telegraph poles be cut down because they spoiled a composition. He in-
sisted on lengthy rehearsals befare filming, but he refused to instruct the actors; when
their performances fell short, he screamed at them, with furious spasms shaking his right
shoulder. "He drank a lot and hada very foul mouth on the set," one recalled. 16 Coming
in each morning, actors would confront a blackboard bearing entirely new dialogue for
the scene. Mizoguchi sometimes worked his staff through days and nights, keeping a
chamber pot nearby so that he would never have to leave the set. Yoda's memoirs are a
catalog of caprices and indignities. On the day of Yoda's marriage Mizoguchi badgered
him about a new script. 17 Yet after a drinldng bout the fiend could suddenly start pound-
ing his head on the tatami mat, shouting, "This man they call Mizoguchi is an idiot!" 18
88 MIZOG.UCHI, OR MODULATION
He played out political contradictions too, as did many men of his generation. Dur-
ing the late r93os their youthful attraction to Western culture and Marxist politics gave
way to patriotism anda rededication to "national purity." 19 Mizoguchi made several mil-
itary propaganda films and put his name to ghostwritten declarations of faith in Japa·
nese conquest. ("I believe in the film of war.") 20 After Japan surrendered ánd US forces
occupied the country, he executed another about-face. Conforming to Occupation de-
mands, he criticized feudal traditions and pleaded for women's rights in a string of films
that often showcased the brilliant actress Tanaka Kinuyo. He also mounted lush melo-
dramas, usually set in upper-class surroundings. In r953 Mizoguchi joined Nagata Ma·
saichi at his revived studio, now called Daiei, and he alternated contemporary dramas
with historical pieces. Most of his postwar films were received coldly by both the press
and the public, and sorne critics complained about his old-fashioned style and shinpa ro-
manticism, but he continued to occupy the spotlight. He served as adviser to the min-
istry of education, president of the production labor union, a member of Daiei's board
of directors, and p~esident of the Film Directors Association from r949 until his death.
Many of his postwar projects also exemplify that "return to Japan" (nihon kaiki) that
is said to be characteristic of Japanese artists who cast aside their youthful fascination
with the West. 21 Early in Mizoguchi's career he adapted European and American liter·
ary works, and he professed an interest in the films of von Sternberg and Lubitsch and
in the painting of Picasso, Matisse, and de Chirico. His wartime films were required to
project a spiritualized image ofJapanese culture, but he did not swing back toan affirma-
tion of Western values when peace arrived. Instead, he intensified his interest in tradi-
tional Chinese and Japanese art. Accordingly, the Occupation-era project Utamaro and
His Five Women (r946) paid tribute to the great eighteenth-century painter. Mizoguchi
converted to Buddhism and began rereading the Japanese classics. Along with the faith·
fui Yoda he adapted a play by the great Chikamatsu (Chikamatsu Monogatari; a.l<.a. The
Crucí:fted Lovers, r954), drew The Life ofOharu (r952) from a novel bythe satirist Saikaku,
and offered his treatment of Japan's greatesthistorical epicin Shin Heike Monogatari (a.l<.a.
New Tales ofthe Taira Clan, r956). He adapted several other films from well-respected mod·
ern novels.
Thanks lar gely to Nagata's shrewd export strategies, Mizoguchi startled the film world
by winning the top prize at Venice three years in a row, for the historical dramas The Life
ofOharu (r952), Ugetsu Monogatari (r953), and Sanshothe Bailijf(r954). Bythetimehe died
ofleukemia in r956, he was second only to Kurosawa as an emblem of Japanese cinema.
The French, as so often, led the way to his canonization, with Cahiers du cinéma running
reviews and translated pieces, including Yoda's memoirs. Monographs appeared. 22 In a
period in which Ozu, Naruse, and others remained virtually unlmown in the West, Mizoguchi
constituted the only major alternative to the rugged, flashy Kurosawa. The praise ran to ex·
tremes. "Kenji Mizoguchi is to the cinema," wrote Jean Douchet, "what Bach is to music,
Cervantes is to literature, Shakespeare is to the theatre, Titian is to painting: the very great·
est.'>23 His languid pace and burnished imagery embodied that mystique of mise-en-scene
MIZOGUCHJ, OR MODULATION 89
3.6 The Lijé ofOharu (1952). 3 .7 The Lijé of Oharu.
that was central to the Cahíers aesthetic. The ecstasy of Sarris befare Madam Yuki's shim-
mering lake vista, unspoiled by subtitles, belongs to this tradition. Mizoguchi aimed, wrote
Godard, simply "to leave things to present themselves, with the mind intervening solely to
efface its own traces." 24 Jacques Rivette noted that these films, however distant culturally,
"speak to us in a very familiar language. Which one? The only one to which a director must
aspire: that of mise en scene. "25 Thanks partly to the eloquence of the Cahiers writers, Mizo-
guchi has remained known chiefiy through his richly realized costume pictures.
To understand his achievement more exactly, however, we must attend to details. And
then we discover a practice of staging whose visual ambitions are almost without peer in
film history. Por Peuillade, the image was primarily a vehicle for storytelling; pictorial in-
vention, however important, fiowed from that purpose. Por Mizoguchi cinematic staging
was above all a pictorial art-one that, he believed, paradoxically carne into its own only
with sound filming. His task was to integrate bold and intricate visual design with the de-
mands of narration and emotional expression.
A concrete case affords usa good starting point. Earlyin The Lift. ofOharu (r952), the
heroine has been sent home from court after a scandalous affair with a low-ranking samu-
rai. She and her family have been exiled. Before her lover, Katsunosuke, is beheaded, he
sends her a message. He ask~ her to marry a good man for whom she feels tme love,
adding defiantly that he hopes for a day when no lo veis forbidden by social rank. On read-
ing Katsunosuke's letter Oham grabs a knife and rushes outside tó kili herself; her mother
pursues her into the woods and disarms her, leaving both women sobbing on the ground.
The pivota! portion of the scene occurs when Oharu's mother delivers Katsunosuke's
message. The shot begins normally enough, with the two women seated (Pig. 3.6) in a
fairly distant framing. Warning that the father must not learn of this, Oharu's mother
turns from us and rises to keep watch for him. Oharu slides behind a hanging kimono
toread the letter (Pig. 3-7). Strikingly, the kimono conceals her face; but we do hear a sob.
Suddenly Oharu scrabbles toward the lower right of the frame, visible only in a squar-
90 MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION
3. 8 The Lije of Oharu. 3·9 The Lije oJOharu.
ish gap left by another kimono. As the mother turns and lunges behind the kimonos, a
thrashing movement can be sensed in the gap, broken by an intermittent glint (Fig. 3.8).
The central kimono is yanked clown as the women struggle (Fig. 3·9)· Oharu rushes out
of the frame, and now a knife blade quicldy flashes past us (Fig. po). -Her mother runs
after her. Outside, a high-angle camera movement catches Oharu racing out of the house
(Fig. 3.n). The camera follows her as her mother wrests the knife from her (Fig. 3.12).
The two run diagonally into the depth of a bamboo grove (Fig. 3-13) befare collapsing in
extreme long shot, sobbing (Fig. F4)·
It is a commonplace of Mizoguchi criticism that he favors deep space and long takes
(here the first shot runs about forty seconds, the second about seventy). But it is his stag-
ing principies that give the scene its distinct quality. For a start, Oharu's distraught reac-
tion to the message is not presented via elose views of the heroine, music underscoring
her tearful face, or an emphasis on the knife she snatches up. Instead the camera stays
ata considerable distance and lets key actions remain almost entirely hidden. Mizoguchi
has also divided our attention almost perversely. The vigilant mother and the prominent
doorway stir so me expectation thatthe father may discover them (Fig. 3- 7), but he doesn't.
Instead, the drama develops through Oharu's reaction, which is concealed from us bythe
hanging kimono. Her grief is.signaled on the sound track, which yields a sob and then
the frantic rustle of movement. Her pain becomes resolutely private, as if the narration
were reluctant to intrude on the purity ofherrelation to her lover. The knife itself is scarcely
visible, squeezed into a sector of the frame we normally ignore (Fig. 3.8, on extreme lower
right). The mother's cries of distress offer sorne clues asto Oharu's overwrought state,
but the daughter's intentions remain uncertain until the knife flash es through the lower
right foreground (Fig. 3.10), just long enough for us to see it.
As Mizoguchi had confined the knife to an aperture, so now he lets us glimpse Oharu
fleeing the house through a tunnel ofbamboo trees (Fig. p1). He now reverses his scal-
ing strategy, bringing Oharu to the foreground as she gives up the knife to her mother
3. 1 o The Lije of Ohm·u. 3. 11 The Lije of Oharu.
3. 1 2 The LiJe of Oharu.
(Fig. 3.12). Then Oham shrieks, 'Tll go to Katsunosuke!" announcing that she'll find an-
other way to join him in death and mnning off to the distance. The mother pursues her
in a zigzag course and grapples with her in extreme long shot befare both drop to the
ground (Fig. 3·I3)· The urgency of the first shot tapers into something more lyrical as the
women plunge into the grove. Once more Mizoguchi refuses us proximity and facial ex-
pression. It is in the writhing and collapsing of Oharu's body that we grasp her passage
from wild abandon to resignation (Fig. 3-14). Her desolation is made all the more
poignant by the stillness of the grove (crows call on the sound track) and the sedateness
of the camera movement.
Mizoguchi's oblique narration-suppressing Oharu's response, diverting us with the
pretext that the father might catch her-creates a pictorial field that he can charge with
emotion. Starting as a straightforward presentation of the action, the first shot transmo-
grifies into an exploration of the design possibilities of the two hanging kimonos. They
begin as a realistic backdrop; then one becomes a convenient screen for masking Oharu's
reaction; then the other yields a tantalizing aperture within which she seizes the knife.
3.13 The Lift of Oharu. 3 ·14 The Lift of Oharu.
Before our eyes, several zones of space-the doorway, the two kimonos-bristle with the
promise of action and expression. The picture, richly composed without looking stuffed,
bursts into violence thanks to the lures and traps built into it. In the bamboo grove the
placid landscape absorbs Oharu's despair, leaving her with only acceptance; but it also
continues the game with visibility by letting her and her mother veer from the camera
and dodge through the bamboo stems. Mizoguchi has brought the denotative, expres-
sive, and decorative aspects of the image into remarkable harmony.
We could find scores of such dazzling scenes in this director's oeuvre, but broader ques-
tions nag us. We are very far from the trim, lucid world of Feuillade. What historical cir-
cumstances led Mizoguchi to pose such staging problems and solve them so inventively?
How did the problems and solutions change, and why?
Any answers to these questions must be tentative, chiefly because we cannot chart his
overall development with much confidence. Mizoguchi started directing in 1923, and by
the time he started his first talkie, Hometown (1930), he had made no fewer than forty-
three films. All of them are lost save one (Song of Home, 1925) and one condensation
(Tokyo March, 1929). We will probably never see his Arsene Lupin vehicle (813, 1923), his
adaptation of Anna Christie (Foggy Harbar, 1923), his Expressionist film (Blood and Soul,
1923), his first critically praised melodrama (A Paper Doll's Whisper of Spring, 1926), and
his version of a best-selling novel about Townsend Harris's mission to Japan (Okichi, Mis-
tress ofa Foreigne1; 1930). Several works from the next decade have gone missing as well.
Even his years of fame are riddled with lost films, at least two of which- Woman of Osaka
(1940) and Lijf. of an Actor (1941)-are likely to have been masterpieces. In all, of the -d-
eighty-three feature films he completed, onlythirty-one survive more or less intact, 26 and
seventeen of these come from the last decade of his career. We rightly regret the loss of
such treasures as von Sternberg's Sea Gull (1926) and Murnau's Four Devils (1928), but
faced with deprivation on the Mizoguchian scale, one is tempted to despair. .y¡
Still, the surviving films are unambiguous on one score: the man liked long takes. He
named his method "one scene-one cut." (Like US filmmakers of the same period, Japa-
nese often called a shot a cut, as in a cut of meat.) From 1935 to the end ofhis career, the
average shot lengths of Mizoguchi's films range from fifteen seconds to ninety seconds,
with most ranging between twenty-five and forty seconds. Although his 193os contem-
poraries favored somewhat long takes (an average of ten to twelve secondsfor a talkie), 27
his shots are unusually extended for any period or place. Feuillade chose the long take as
the default option, simply the received way of shooting scenes. Mizoguchi, starting his
career at the moment in which continuity cutting triumphed internationally, clung to the
long take against the pull of current practice.
His stubborn adherence to it added to his production difficulties. In sound filming,
with a much heavier camera and all the vagaries of recording dialogue, very protracted
shots were more demanding than in the silent era. Moreover, Japanese studios demanded
that film stock be conseriTed, so most directors could shoot few retakes. Mizoguchi's col-
laborators recalled that an almost suffocating anxiety gripped everyone as the camera was
turned on. The slightest mistake would spoil the shot; time and film would be wasted;
worst of all, cast and crew would face the demon's wrath. "He asked the most of every-
one, and all at the same second," recalled his cameraman Miyagawa Kazuo. "If there was
a characteristic quality of Mizoguchi, it was this tension and its prolongation.'' 28 When
producers complained that the long takes delayed the shooting schedule, Mizoguchi
replied that the actors weren't good enough.
Why cling to the long take in the face of such obstacles? We might be tempted to treat
the device asan end in itself: the longer the take, the more daring (or "radical") the shot.
Yet our Oharu scene prompts us to consider the long take as a by-product of other con-
cerns. The most salient one, it seems tome, is also one of t~e striking features of Japa-
nese cinema of the late 1920s and the 193os: an extraordinary passion for densely com-
posed images.
Consider .a riloment from Naruse Mikio's The Whole Family Works (1939). A factory
worker has fathered nine children, and several of his sons want to continue in school.
One morning he talks with his eldest son about whether to consult the teacher of Eisaku,
his fourth son. By the standards of European and US filmmaking, Fig. J.I5 is an over-
wrought establishing shot. The architecture splits the image into several pigeonholes,
and a foreground figure (Eisaku, with his back to us) serves to further articulate lateral
zones of action. Lighting helps by establishing a gradation of emphasis. The two broth-
ers caught in the lattice of the left wall, being somewhat grayer, become less important
than the father and eldest son conferring in the better-lit distance on the right. Eisaku,
the object of the decision, is given prominence through his silhouette.
The shot presents story information by establishing several brothers watching the fa-
ther's deliberations and by highlighting Eisaku (centered, largest in the frame). But Naruse
adds a decorative surplus. Always adept in composition, he sets himself the challenge of
arranging five figures in three areas of the room, achieving both narrative clarity and an
elaborate visual pattern.
3.15 The Whole Family Works (r939). In the distance
right of center, the father considers letting his son
continue school.
Mizoguchi, trained as a painter, was probably quite sensitive to such compositions, and
he seems to have realized that his peers didn't grasp all their implications. "Filmmakers
must study the film image and its potential for expression," he once remarked. "This is
our primary responsibility." 29 He surely noticed that his contemporaries did not sustain
their omate images for very long, being content to enlist them as establishing shots or mo-
mentary flourishes. (Naruse uses nineteen shots in the scene we've considered, following
the dense master shot in Fig. 3-15 with singles and two-shots linked by eyeline matches.)
By the early 1930s Mizoguchi saw that he could sustain the dense image for sorne time if
he could make it unfold in compelling ways. Citing a psychology professor who claimed
that film images became boring after five seconds, he began to pursue a "one scene-one
cut" method that would absorb the audience for minutes on end. 30 How to accomplish
this? On the evidence of his surviving films, his chief strategy was to offer a.richly modu-
lated image. His peers had developed schemas of elaborate shot design; he would take
such schemas through unpredictable twists and turns. Other directors had made each char-
acter's placement matter visually; he would hold the shot so that a slight shift in position
would gather great power. They created nuanced compositions; he would elaborate such
nuances for minutes on end .. In sum, by means of the long take he could prolong and
probe the pictorially arresting norms that emerged in this period.
Such dense long takes seemed, in Mizoguchi's judgment, especially appropriate to tallc-
ing pictures. 31 Whereas fast cutting suited silent film, dramas of his sort, especially in
the sound era, favored a long-take style. Editing breaks up "the psychological weight or
density that the audience experiences .... If you use cross-cuts, there are invariably a few
cuts [shots] that shouldn't be included. And it's a big mistake to rationalize this by saying
they're short. The hypnotic power has been impaired.'132 More paradoxically: "Cinema
with short cuts is too cinematic." 33 His reference to the "hypnotic power" of cinema in-
dicates yet another goal that the long take fulfilled. Mizoguchi evidently wanted to hold
the spectator in the same sort of rapt apprehension that enfolded his staff on the sound
stage. Late in his career he explained: "During the course of filming a scene, if an in-
creasing psychological sympathy begins to develop, I cannot cut into this without regret.
I try rather to intensify and prolong the scene as long as possible." 34 Certainly this rapt
attention involves feeling for or with the characters, but the design of the shots suggests
that even more is at stake. The image invites the spectator to explore every cranny of the
space, to scrutinize even small movements. The long take, Mizoguchi added, "allows me
to work all the spectator's perceptual capacities to the utmost." 35
Mizoguchi seeks to entrance the viewer on several registers at once, yet his images
offer themselves almost haughtily, indifferent to the viewer's inclinations. The staging
narrates, but it often unfolds the story in an opaque or ambiguous fashion. It offers dec-
orative resonance but with a subtlety that demands that the viewer explore the frame.
And the staging becomes expressive but mutedly so. As the Oharu scene suggests, the
interplay of visual pattern, narrational display, and expressive qualities can become quite
intricate. When Feuillade blocks something and then reveals it, he usually does so un-
obtmsively, just befare we need to see it: an art of clarity. Mizoguchi blocks and only partly
reveals, in a teasing visual tremolo; or he creates an opacity that registers as a refusal to
specify the story point; or he presents the very intermittence of vision as itself a refined
effect worth savoring.
In his narrational games of vision Mizoguchi often relies on characters' dialogue and
exclamations to express the scene's feelings, as with Oharu's unseen sob. In addition, he
seeks to malee his pictures expressive in themselves. Herein lies one of his great contri-
butions to the history of cinematic staging. By the 192os the problem of telling a story
concisely and suspensefully had been solved, both by the European long-take directors
and by their Hollywood peers. Directors faced new tasks, notably that of telling a story
with maximal expressiveness, using all available film techniques. Sorne directors, notably
Sjostrom, had found a way to heighten emotion within the tableau tradition; others, such
as Gance, Epstein, and the Soviet montage directors, achieved emotional expression by
pushing editing to extremes. 36 By the mid-193os filmmakers around the world knew how
to quicken the emotional pace through rapid cutting, presenting a train rushing through
a landscape, a ride on a merry-go-round, a suspenseful exchange of glances. Hitchcock's
late silent films are typical of the ways in which the montage of close-ups had become a
standardized visual rhetoric.
Synchronized sound, for reasons of technology as much as taste, made cinema less
overtly "avant-garde," as André Bazin was among the first to recognize. 37 Classical dé-
coupage, accentuated by camera movements and taken at a slower pace, remained the
norm from Los Angeles and Berlin to Moscow and Shanghai. Cutting and camera angle
usually served to presentthe action neutrally; the expressive dimension of the story would
be rendered through the script, the music, and the mise-en-scene-above all, the actors'
performances. Through his pictorialism, Mizoguchi sought to malee staging more sub-
tly expressive than most directors of the 193os did. The plot traditions that he inherited
g6 MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION
emphasized the slow accumulation of emotion, and in order to mesmerize the specta-
tor, his scenes of suffering grew into long takes that mapped the fluctuations of feeling
onto the movement and positions of bodies in a thicldy furnished space. The oblique-
ness of his visual narration could foster emotional suggestion.
His genre proved helpful too. Because melodrama tends to endow the spectator with
an omniscient range of knowledge, we are able to anticipate a character's reaction to news
we already know. Mizoguchi can play on this foreknowledge in two ways. Sometimes, his
roundabout presentation of a situation can be taken both as tact and as a creative treat-
ment of a stock situation. We have already witnessed the final moments of Oharu's lover,
so we expect her to feel grief when she gets his message. Our expectation is confirmed
even though we don't exactly see it (the mother distracts us, the kimono hides Oharu),
but this in turn makes the image register exactly as a sensitive handling of the moment.
Alternatively, Mizoguchi can transmit the story situation with little impedance, as we will
see in The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum and Uta maro and His Five Women. Such oc-
casions allow him to enrich the conventional moment through microactions and barely
noticeable differences. A lover's farewell ora woman's confession, presented straightfor-
wardly, can play on minute changes of position, glance, shadow. We can take the basic
action for grarited and scrutinize pictorial nuances that other directors never summon
up. "An art of modulation," Jacques Rivette calls it, and Philippe Demonsablon adds a
gloss: "He emits a note so pure that the slightest variation becomes expressive." 38
The long take, then, is notan end in itself but a means of riveting the spectator to the
exquisite image. The result, in Mizoguchi's hands, yields something Westerners have long
considered "purely Japanese." When we point out kindred examples, such as the shot from
The Whole Family Works, sorne may want to say that this, too, manifests a typically Japa-
nese use of space. In what follows I'll be avoiding this inference-or, rather, reformu-
lating it. I'm skeptical of a view that would treat such images as late manifestations of a
panhistorical Japanese taste or worldview. First, there is no single Japanese aesthetic tra-
dition to be transmitted. Western accounts of Japanese aesthetic concepts are notably one-
sided, favoring Zen-inflected art, but this is part of the "Japan" packaged for foreign con-
sumption over the last century. Sorne Japanese traditions indeed emphasize delicacy,
spirituality, and understatement, but there are also traditions of roughness, bawdiness,
and extravagant emotion. 39 (Contrary to clichés about Japanese aesthetic restraint, film
and theater audiences love netsuen, scenery-chewing overacting.) Furthermore, we have
good evidence that the arrival of Western art and media in the nineteenth century made
Japanese artists acutely aware of their own methods. Now they hada new set of choices.
Artists might embrace Western forms (as in shingeki, the Europeanized modern theater)
or blend inherited forms with imported ones (as in shinpa theater orthe "!-novel"). Even
sticking with a received tradition could trigger a search for novelty; by r9oo painters
worked in either the "Western-style" (yoga) or the "J apanese-style" (nihonga), but the lat-
ter could never be confused with the works of centuries past. 40
There are other reasons to be cautious about explaining Japanese artistic practices as
direct continuations of time-honored customs. The artistic concepts purportedly shap-
ing all Japanese art (wabi, yugen, iki, mono no aware) often turn out to have complex and
ambivalent histories, duringwhich theywere redefined for various purposes. 41 More gen-
erally, a great many "distinctively Japanese" traditions, from emperor worship to the rules
of sumo, were devised in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by elite factions forg-
ing new national identities for a modernizing society. 42 We are not in the habit of explaining
contemporary Hollywood style by reference to northern European Renaissance painting,
so why should ancient aesthetic traditions be relevant to twentieth -century Japanese film?
Someone may respond that whereas we have lost touch with premodern customs and
ways of thinking, the Japanese have retained a living relation to theirs. Yet this idea itself
is no 1ess an invented tradition, with sources in twentieth-century Japanese ethnology
and cultural theory. 4 3
It seems likely that the notion of a "purely Japanese" cinematic style is another in-
vented tradition. During the 1910s the trade press called for filmmakers not only to match
foreign technique but also to express "true Japanese" qualities. Writer Tanizaki Jun'ichiro
observed that by making Hollywood-like films he hoped to introduce his nation's "art and
national sentiment" to audiences abroad. 44 This nationalistic view emerged in other coun-
tries at the period, as US films offered both models to copy and rivals to surpass. 45 As a
result, from the 192os on Japanese filmmakers often borrowed from, and even cited, pic-
torial devices found in older arts-all the while inserting these elements into the West-
ern continuity framework. The schemas devised and reworked by filmmakers, harking
back to older ones in the graphic arts, are best seen as tactical choices, self.conscious dis-
plays of pictorial intelligence. In studying Japanese cinema, it seems most fruitful to treat
the flamboyant visual devices we notice as strategic means for achieving specific ends-
one of which may indeed be the evocation of "Japaneseness" as a distinct nationalfcul-
tural essence. Mizoguchi, with his mastery of Western staging and editing, his. eye for
schemas circulating in his milieu, his acute awareness of rivals abroad, and his cultivated
taste in Asian art, exemplifies this process with remarkable clarity.
Although most of his output is missing, the films that we have offer abundant evi-
dence of Mizoguchi's contributions to the art of cinematic staging. 46 All manner of vi-
sual ideas poured from him from the 1930s to the 195os. Almost every one of his works
warrants in-depth analysis, and I regret not being able to explore several of my favorites.
To keep things manageable, this chapter tracks his work across four periods. Roughly, we
can locate a phase of eclecticism befare 1936, an effort toward purity and austerity in his
major films of 1936 to 1945, a controlled pluralism between 1945 and 1949, anda phase
of refinement running from 1950 to 1956. Someone asking other questions could carve
up Mizoguchi's career differently, but these periods enable me to highlight sorne impor-
tant continuities and changes in his staging. To focus things further, I select two or three
films from each period as signposts of distinctive and developing strategies. Sorne films
are better known than others, but each illustrates one problem or point in his career profile.
This chapter will have served its purpose if its roaming-spotlight survey illuminates the
art of a director who set his viewers, and himself, unique challenges.
A young geisha is courted by two office workers and an older patron; she is inclining toward
one of the young men when she learns that he is her half-brother (Tokyo March, 1929).
An opera singer is sustained by the love of a devoted young woman, but when he be-
comes a success, he is drawn toa conniving flapper (Hometown, 1930). A female carni-
val performer supports a young man through his legal studies, while she slips into crim-
inality; when she must stand trial for murder, her case will be prosecuted by her protégé
(Taki no Shiraito, 1933). As rebels terrorize the countryside, a general holds a coachful of
travelers hostage, and several women among them are offered to placate him (Oyuki the
Virgin, 1935). A woman working with a gang of art swindlers escapes with an orphaned
servant boy, and she prostitutes herself to send him to medical school. Years later, wait-
ing for a night train, he discovers her on the platform, a haggard madwoman (The Down-
fall ofOsen, 1935).
With plots centered on lowly heroines who sacrifice and suffer for aman, Mizoguchi's
pre-1936 films place themselves on the melodramatic terrain of popular literature and
theater. The situations evoke shinpa, and it's no surprise that the two most famous films
of the group, Taki no Shiraito and The Downfall of Osen, derive from shinpa plays based
on novels by Izumi Kyoka. Taki is particularly important; frequently adapted for the screen
befare and after Mizoguchi's version, itwas the prototypical shinpa play. 47 Not every Mizo-
guchi film that we have from this period relies so heavily on these conventions, but all
are melodramatic toa high degree. 48 Even The Poppy (1935), adapted from a prestigious
novel, includes scenes that permit shinpa-like emotional reversals.
Stylistically, these films are quite varied. Between the mid-1920s and mid-1930s Japa-
nese cinema was diversifying its expressive means, and fresh influences and technolo-
gies crowded in from abroad. Mizoguchi was exploring a range of techniques and story
materials, so we shouldn't be surprised that his films include flamboyant passages of rapid
cutting, which look European or even Soviet in inspiration but which were by the late
192os common in Japanese film as well. A tennis garue in Tokyo March is rendered in
swift alternating cuts, and .a scene showing Taki no Shiraito flinging herself off a train
presents thirty-three shots in forty seconds. As late as The Poppy, when aman is accom-
panying a woman shopping and meets the other woman he's romancing, Mizoguchi ren-
ders the confrontation in static facial close-ups, trimmed toas little as eleven frames each.
Mizoguchi would soon leave such assertive montage to others, but he continued to
rely on the analytical cuts and shotjreverse-shot matching he had mastered while young.
His earliest surviving film, The Song of Home (1925), consists of well-executed passages
of continuity editing on the American model (Figs. p6-p8). Even when he works with
much longer takes, the catchphrase "one scene-one shot" will prove misleading. Mizo-
3.16 The Song ofHome (r925): Naotaro approaches 3.17 The Song of Home: reverse-angle cut on the father
his father in an establishing shot. hearing his plea.
3.18 The Song ofHome: a reverse angle on Naotaro, 3.1 9 Taki no Shiraito (r933): a variety of angles captures
with his mother out of focus in the background. the heroine facing her judges.
3.20 Taki no Shiraito.
lOO MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION

3.21 A depth composition showing the young hero's 3. 2 2 A similar "big-foreground" composition
torment in the gangster's household (The Downfall of from Tanaka Shigeds Three Beauties (1933).
Osen, 1935).
guchi almost never handles a scene in a single shot, so editing must orchestrate the flow
of his extended takes. 49
Like Makino in our scene from Cuckoo, early Mizoguchi inclines toward constantly
changing camera setups. The process is visible in the scene from Song of Home: few of
the shots of Naotaro or his family repeat a camera position. This prodigality is typical of
the whole film; the climax, in which Naotaro is rewarded with a chance to go to the city
and study, consists essentially of altemating shots of him and other characters, but the
twelve images present seven different setups. Similarly, the rapidly cut courtroom scene
of Taki no Shiraito (1933) yields eighty-five images and forty-five setups. Mizoguchi's ex-
aggerated depth compositions underscore the differences between camera positions (Figs.
3-19-3·20). By stringing together such striking pictures, he offers not only a readout of
the drama but also a virtuosic suite of variations. In the early 193os he seems so eager to
vary shot scale and angle that he is willing to violate precepts of eyeline matching (most
obviously in The Poppy).
From 1930 on, shot length increases. Often, as in the late Feuillade films, a long take
is broken by several intertitles. Of the 450 or so shots in The Downfall of Osen (not count-
ing intertitles as shots), about 370 stem from only one hundred setups, so if we clipped
outthe dialogue titles, several sh?ts would run between one and two minutes. 50 The talkie
Hometown averages 9·9 seconds per shot, partly because of its headlong and bumpytrack-
ing shots anda bravura crane shot zigzagging clown a banquet table. Most of Mizoguchi's
silent films contain at least one unbroken take, as when in Osen several complex pans-
and-tracks let the action flow around the camera.
On the whole, though, most Mizoguchi films befare 1936 contain little camera move-
ment, for now staging in depth is becoming more prominent. Already, in the shots from
Song of Home above, we see an effort to keep background planes active in the ongoing
drama (for example, Fig. J.I8). Mizoguchi seems to have used wide-angle lenses fairly
early, occasionally yielding the sort of "big-foreground" schemas that we find elsewhere

3.23 Oyuki the Virgin (r935). 3. 24 Oyuki the Virgin.
during the period (Figs. 3.2I-3-22). Although he seldom combines staging in depth with
long takes at this phase, when he does, he can create dramatic pictorial effects of sus-
pense and surprise, as a scene from Oyuki the Virgin (r935) nicely illustrates.
Coach passengers are taken hostage by an intransigent general, and the barmaid Oldn
offers herself to him in hopes he will free the group. Mizoguchi stages her efforts to se-
duce him in a series of wide shots displaying constantly changing depth relations. Once
Okin is shown into General Asakura's quarters, a ninety-second shot, taken from the high
angle that Mizoguchi will come to favor, allows Okin's sensuality full play. She brazenly
circles his desk, drinks from his glass, and eventually settles in a chair, pouring another
drink as he tries to ignore her (Fig. 3-23). This is the beginning of an erotic exchange that
Mizoguchi's staging will amplify.
A reverse-angle cut presents a new area of space, a room beyond the study (Fig. 3.24),
and Okin drifts into it, passing offscreen (Fig. 3-25). Cut toa brief shot of her perched
temptingly on the bed (Fig. 3-26), which serves as a pivot toa new depth image, a marked
foreground composition putting Asakura close to the camera (Fig. 3.27). In the distance
Okin stretches out on the bed and lights a pipe. A r8o-degree cut reverses the depth
arrangement, putting her in the foreground as he comes to the threshold (Fig. 3-28). Will
he succumb to her? No; he clases the shoji (Fig. 3.29). She plops a cavalryman's cap over
her face and lies still for several seconds. The suspense would seem to be over. But then
murmurs are heard, and she rises. When Okin slides open the door, over her shoulder
we can see another passenger, the daughter of a rice merchant, standing sobbing before
the general (Fig. 3-30). In the course of this fifty-three second shot the depth relations
have squeezed from an ample foreground and full background to a distant dramatic zone
wedged between the shoji and Okin's shoulder. Overall, the narration has restricted our
knowledge to Okin's tour of the quarters, and the revelation of the new victim is made
all the more pointed for obliging us to discern her in a thin slice of space.
This sequence from Oyuki the Virgin also exemplifies Mizoguchi's creative recasting

3.25 Oyukí the Vírgin. 3.26 Oyukí the Virgin.
3.27 Oyuki the Virgin. 3. 28 Oyuki the Vírgin.
3-2 9 Oyukí the Vírgin. 3.30 Oyukí the Vírgin.

3. 31 Utamaro Kitagawa, Monkey Peiformíng in a Wealthy Household, from the series Young Ebisu, 1789.
Color woodcut. Elvehjém Museum of Art, University ofWisconsin-Madison. Bequest of John H. Van
Vleck. r980.32n.
of sorne schemas circulating in his milieu. The slot that allows us to glimpse the weep-
ing girl aptly illustrates Japanese directors' proclivity for aperture framing. Tantalizing
partial views were a convention of graphic art, encouraged by features of indigenous ar-
chitecture, such as gridded rice-paper walls and various sizes of screens (Fig. 3.31). Mizo-
guchi's contemporaries exploited this tradition (Fig. 3-32), and it's likely that the popu-
larity of Josef von Sternberg among Japanes e filmmakers lay partly in the way his shots
sacrifice narrative disclosure to such pictorial ornamentation (Fig. 3-33). Mizoguchi ad-
mired Sternberg's films and met with him during Sternberg's 1936 visit to Kyoto. 51
Mizoguchi would employ aperture framing throughout his career. In this early period
he already goes somewhat beyond the one-off flourishes of his contemporaries, perhaps
because the aperture tactic lent itself to that perceptual absorption he sought. The device
allowed the director to act~vate any crevice of the frame and rewarded the spectator's scan-
ning of a dense field, while also providing expressive echoes of the main action (Fig. 3·34)·
In Hometown aperture framing in taxicab windows becomes a motif (Figs. 3-35-3-36). Por
the Oyuki scene in the general's quarters, he at once makes the aperture daringly slender
and reserves it for a climactic point in the action. Here the game of vision both mutes
the melodramatic revelation and gives it subtle pictorial salience.
Another move in the game of vision proposed by both von Sternberg and Japanese
filmmakers is a playwith intermittent visibility-letting characters pass through shadow-
mottled areas; or momentarily blocking the action with foreground lamps, doorways, or
other items; or just letting people turn from us briefly to arouse a des ir e to see them again
104 MIZ.OGUCHI, OR MODULATION

3. 32 A straightforward aperture framing in Town 3·33 Shanghai Express (1932).
ofLove (1928). Compare Fig. 3+
3·34 In The Poppy (1935), while Fujio's mother and 3·35 When the opera singer of Hometown achieves
Munechika's father discuss finding a groom for Fujio, success, an aperture framing shows the predatory
the daughter of the household eavesdrops, her silhouette Ayako eyeing the hero.
visible in a square on the far right.
3-3 6 After he has fallen under Ayakds spell, his faithful

!ove, Omura, waits in vain for him to meet her.

(Figs. 3-37-3-38). Mizoguchi turned this schema into something quite idiosyncratic, push-
ing depth staging beyond denotative functions and toward obliquely expressive ends.
Often a scene's crucial nairative action will have concluded, but Mizoguchi continues
to play out remarkably indirect staging patterns. His shinpa ·flavored scenes exude shame
and sorrow, which drive characters to hide their faces and slump in a heap. An early ex-
ample occurs at the climax of Tokyo March, which forces three characters to collapse or
turn from us, all within a setting that further conceals one of them (Fig. 3-39). This ar-
ray of poses is held fairly briefly, but Mizoguchi soon began to prolong and even flaunt
various ways of impeding our vision for expressive ends. One climactic scene of Taki no
Shiraito makes blocked visiona source of pictorial suspense. Shiraito confronts the young
man whom she has financed through law school; now he is her prosecutor. At first she
faces him (Fig. 3.40); but eventually shame overcomes her, and she kneels, turning away
from him (Fig. 3-41). Then, astonishingly, Mizoguchi has Shiraito bend down behind the
table until onlythe verytop ofher head is visible (Fig. 3.42). The table edge acts as a bench-
mark measuring her act of shrinking, making her shame palpable.
A less flagrant but more sustained version of this approach dominates a tearful scene
in The Poppy (1935). Back in the village the young tutor Ono had pledged his love to Sayoko,
but now in Tokyo he has fallen under the spell of Fujio, and his friend Asai has cometo
tell the bad news to Sayoko and her father. The entire scene is played out with characters
reacting in anguish by doubling over. The scene's final shot carries the principie to a cli-
max by setting the camera at a distance and letting the father's movements in depth ere-
ate ever more minute ways of concealing his and his daughter's misery (Figs. 3·43-3·46).
By hiding the faces-the most emotionally informative part of the body-the staging
forces us to find heartsickness written in nuances of posture and gesture.
In most films by other directors expressive qualities of style heighten denotation, the
depiction of salient story information through speech and facial expression. But Mizoguchi
found ways to play down these cues in favor of other indices of emotion and a more te~s
ing treatment of them. Perhaps he was drawn to stories of "fallen" women partly because
the ready-made sentiment brought along a behavioral repertoire. The genre demanded
that betrayal, humiliation, and loss yield romantic suffering, which could in turn be dis-
played in postures. When devastated, people who live on the floor will crumple and curl
up like snails. In a culture of shame, people betrayed or humiliated will turn from the
camera. They will retreat behind sliding doors and sink behind tables and chairs. More
and more Mizoguchi built his mise-en-scene up to moments in which characters come
together in misery but struggle to conceal their facial expressions, only to have their bod-
ies suggest their feelings. A staging that both stifles and prolongs signs of acute sadness
is only or;te tendency in the earliest surviving films, but it becomes a dominant strategy
in those of 1936 onward.
Mizoguchi's breakthrough films of I 9 36 were promoted and received as works of harsh
realism. Naniwa Elegy (known in English as Osaka Elegy), advertised as a "meticulous
analysis of the atmosphere of Naniwa," highlighted local color. It showcased the distinctive

3·37 Shanghai Express: characters' faces slide 3.38 Intermittent vision in wo,ooo Ryo Mystery (1939):
unpredictably across rectangles of space, intermittently bold verticals 'slice off a foreground body and segregate
blocked and revealed. a distant figure. Compare the screens splitting the
bodies of the watching women in Fig. 3.31.
3.39 The old rake Fujimoto, having told Orie she 3 -40 Taki no Slúraito: stages of shame.
is in !ove with her half-brother, must now tell his son,
who confronts both (Tokyo March, 1929).
3.41 Taki no Shiraito. 3.42 Taki no Shiraito.

3-43 The Poppy: the father sees Asai out, both men's 3-44 He hurries back to his room, where he kneels;
reactions concealed by distance and position in the both he and Sayoko are slumped and turned from us.
frame.
3·45 As he begins to cough, she rises and comes 3.46 They embrace, half-hidden, vowing to return
to him, covering him with a blanket. to Kyoto.
Osaka dialect (identified with the crassness of local merchant culture), and it included a
scene at the city's famous puppet theater. Sisters of Gion is set in "low Gion," the more in-
elegant pleasure quarters of Kyoto. "l brought to these films the things I had observed in
the streets and showed them as they were-the vulgar as the vulgar.'' 52 If Mizoguchi and
Yoda intended to shock, théy succeeded. They had to negotiate with the police over Naniwa
Elegy, and when it was finished, the distributor gave it little publicity; in 1940 it was banned.
As for Sisters of Gion, which included prostitutes in its cast, Kyoto's high-level geisha
protested the film in the newspapers, and government censors declared it "decadent." 53
Although received well by the critics, the two films probably hastened the collapse of Dai-
Ichi Eiga.
Their bluntness was not wholly unknown in the current milieu. The "neoromanti-
cism" of shinpa-ftavored literature had lost ground to novels of "neonaturalism,"
inftuenced by Germany's Neue Sachlichkeit movement. "Demi-monde fiction" (karyu

shosetsu) and "love-talk literature" (jowa bungaku) centered on waitresses, prostitutes,
and geisha struggling for survival in a grim urban milieu. Unlike the innocent andpas-
sive heroines of shinpa, these cynical women fight baclc. Cinema had also featured such
protagonists, particularly in "tendency films" like Whát Made Her Do It? (1930), the tale
of an oppressed woman who rebels by setting fire to a chapel. American imports like
Bondage (1933) were flaunting unrepentant gold diggers. Films, popular literature, and
high literature were all explicitly criticizing woman's place in society. "Under the kind
of social conditions that exist at present," writes the protagonist of the novel The Wait-
ress (1931), "such a thing as a woman's helplessness can be understood only by women.
Only while she is the object of a man's pleasure does the latter try to please her with a
curious grinning lóok." 54 The authorities began to object to this bitter view of modern
Japan. In 1939 an official history of current literature classified the neonaturalist trend
as a branch of yuto bungaku-pornographic writing. 55 Mizoguchi and Yoda's hard-boiled
heroines sauntered into cinema justas right-wing politicians were deploring the decline
of traditional values.
Naniwa Elegy centers on Ayako, a telephone operator at a pharmaceutical company.
While the company owner Asai tries to seduce her, his wife has her eye on Ayako's
boyfriend, Nishimura. Ayako needs money to pay her shiftless father's debts, so she suc-
cumbs to Asai, who installs her in a modern apartment. Asai's wife finds out, and he
leaves Ayako. Now worldng as a geisha, Ayako beguiles money out of Asai's executive,
Fujino, to help pay her brother's college tuition. She invites Nishimura to her apartment
to confess her transgressions, hoping that he will marry her anyway, but Fujino storms
in to demand his money. Ayako is arrested. Nishimura abandons her, and the police re-
leas e her to her father's custody. Although she has been supporting the family, they dis-
own her, ánd she indignantly stalks out to an uncertain life on the street.
Sisters of Gion presents a double plot: a gold-digging maga brazenly uses men, while
her geisha sister clings loyally to her bankrupt patron. Naniwa Elegy combines both sis-
ters' impulses in its protagonist. Like a shinpa heroine Ayako has proven herself a loyal
daughter, and she longs for a respectable married life. But like her sisters in neonatu-
ralist literature, once she is cast out, she spares no tears for her kin, her lovers, or her-
self. In the last shot (Fig. 3·47) she strides toward the camera, almost smiling, deter-
mined to survive.
Stylistically, Naniwa Elegy is a mixture. Like the early 193os works, it employs a good
deal of cutting, but by now Mizoguchi has given up the orthodox over-the-shoulder shot/
reverse shot, and the results are sometimes choppy and disorienting. It is as if, having
overlearned the norrns of continuity, Mizoguchi felt confident enough to assemble a con-
versation out of awkwardly matched and oddly decentered images. Often, though, these
images include dense compositions with bold foregrounds. (See box.) Ayako's final meal
with her family consists of nineteen shots, each from a different setup, thrusting a new
fa ce under our nos e (Figs. 3.48-3-49). The film also contains neatly rhyming crane shots,
paralleling Nishimura's visit to Ayako's apartment with Asai's. Mizoguchi's eclectic style

3·47 Ayako stalks toward the camera in the last shot 3.48 The dinner-table conundrum solved in Naniwa
of Naniwa Elegy (1936). Elegy: the family are gathered to eat, with Ayakds
brother on the right upbraiding her.
3·49 Another angle puts the father in the foreground.

The variety of angles recalls the courtroom scene in
Taki no Shiraito (Figs. P9-3.20).
has led at least one critic to judge it artistically regressive. 56 Yet Naniwa Elegy pushes
further the experiments with distanced framing, opacity, and muted emotion that
emerge sporadically in the. earlier films, letting these techniques shape both denotation
and expression more fully.
Japanese directors' game with visibility included not only aperture framing and inter-
mittent revelation. More common than big foregrounds was an inclination toward curi-
ously empty ones. In many Japanese shots significant planes of depth begin in the middle
ground and stretch into the far distance, as already seen in our shots from The Abe Clan,
The Whole Family Works, and Iwami jutaro (Figs. 3-5, 3·I5)· (Such shots have the advan-
tage of putting more planes in focus; it is easier to keep focus from, say, twelve feet to
infinity than from four feet to twelve feet.) 57 Mizoguchi employed this distant-depth
schema in his earliest surviving films (Figs. 3·30, 3-39, 3-45), and it is exploited in the first

AGGRESSIVE FOREGROUNDS AND RETICENT DEPTHS
During the 1920s, filmmakers around the world tried out deep-space compositions, and
experimentation continued once they regained flexible shooting options in the sound era
(Fig. 3.50). Bazin credited chiefly Orson Welles ard William Wyler with pioneering "deep-
focus," whereby significant dramatic material was placed fairly dose to the camera while
other elements were situated in zigzagging depth, and all planes were in acceptable fo-
cus.58 Certainly Citizen l<ane (1941), The Little Foxes (1941), and other films helped popu-
larize this compositional device (Fig. 3.51). Bazin did not know, however, that other tradi-
tions had already systematically exploited, and occasionally subverted, the big-foreground
schema.
The bold foreground was, for instance, a hallmark oflate Soviet montage cinema. The
device carried over into the sound era partly, it seems, through the influence of Eisen-
stein's courses at the film academy. (Recall the murder of the pawnbroker as an instance
of "mise-en-shot" in chapter 1, Figs. 1.31-1.32.) With the spread of Socialist Realist doc-
trine in the 1930s, Russian film became heavilytheatrical. As in other countries, directors
seem to have felt that staging in greater depth and longer takes solved the problem of
dynamizing talky scenes. Few countries, however, cultivated a sen se of depth as extrava-
gant as that found in such Soviet films as Lenin in 1918 (1937) and The Great Citizen
(1938-1939) (Fig. 3.52). "Wellesian" depth beca me a hallmark ofStalinist cinema through
the 1940s and 1950s.
Aggressive foregrounds can be found in japanese woodblock prints, particularly those
of Hiroshige, and they reappeared in many Japanese films of the 1920s and 1930s (Figs.
3.22, 3·53). Mizoguchi eagerly experimented with these schemas (Figs. 3.21, 3·54) ,59 but he
seems to have largely given them up around 1937. He explores the resources of another,
more prominent Japanese schema: that in which the foreground is unemphatic and the
most important action occurs in background planes-some ofthem remarkably far off (Fig.
3·55). This more subdued handling of depth may be tal< en as a rebuke in advance to the
Welles-Wyler tradition, which can seem at once flashy and heavy-handed.

3. 5o The flamboyant depth shot in Hollywood: a gun 3.51 Citizen Kane (1941).
wired to fire into a prizefight audience in Mr. Moto's
Gamble (1938). The woman's face is inserted via a matte
effect.
3.52 A clenched depth composition for spies and 3·53 As in Fig. 3·50, an opticaleffectcreates a gigantic
wreckers in The Great Citizen, Part 2 (1939). foreground (Kaiki Edogawa Ranzen, 1937).
3. 54 Mizoguchi experiments with the exaggerated 3·55 Iwami jutaro (1937): townsfolk call on the
foreground (Naniwa Elegy). swordsman. In a characteristically Japanese composition
the foreground area is set far baclc, and many layers of
depth stretch into the distance.
112 MJZOG'UCHI, OR MODULATION

3.56 Naniwa Elegy: when Asai and Ayako confront his 3·57 Naniwa Elegy.
wife, the characters shift around a small zone, each one
occupying central position in turn.
3.58 Naniwa Elegy. 3·59 Naniwa Elegy.
shot of our Oharu sequence (Figs. 3-6-po). Such shots force the spectator not only to
sean the screen but to scrutinize rather small patches of it. Again, most directors used
the empty foreground to create a picturesque establishing shot that initiates an edited se-
quence. The composition could also serve as a prolonged epilogue for a scene, as in The
Poppy (Fig. 3-46). Mizoguchi~ however, saw still other possibilities.
In Naniwa Elegy an entire scene may be played out quite far from the camera, as when
Asai's wife discovers him in Ayakds apartment (Fig. 3-56). More daring is a later scene in
the same setting. Ayako has just told her boyfriend, Nishimura, that she has been Asai's
mistress, and his reaction has been concealed in ways I'll examine shortly. As Fujino ar-
rives to wrest his money from Ayako, she disguises Nishimura as her "tough protector"
and sets him clown facing away from Fujino. She quarrels with Fujino in a dining room
in the distance (Fig. 3·57), and the camera holds on the composition while he leaves
offscreen. Nishimura eventually rises and goes to the rear to talk with Ayako (Fig. 3-58).
Here Mizoguchi holds the end of the shot long enough to make sure we see him-just

barely see him-slump slightly in his seat. He is already defeated, and a cut to another
long shot confirms that this tired, frightened silhouette will never agree to marry a tar-
nished woman (Fig. 3·59)· As in The Poppy, the long take joins forces with whatwe might
call "distant depths" to make characters' postures salient; but now the take serves not as
coda but as revelatory clímax.
Staging the action at such a distance creates a psychological opacity that is deepened
by the lighting. In the early 1930s films Mizoguchi had worked occasionally with patches
of darkness (Fig. 3.27), and his Dai-Ichi Eiga cinematographer, Miki Minoru, was adept
at providing silhouettes and chiaroscuro. Given the atmosphere of Naniwa Elegy's story,
shrouding many scenes in darkness evokes the sordid life Ayako pursues and al so leaves
certain things to thé imagination; but as in Figs. 3-57 and 3·59 it obliges us to notice
Nishimura's posture.
Nowthat the entire scene can be narrated through selectively lit long shots, Mizoguchi
can add expressive overtones at every moment. When Asai propositions Ayako early in
the film, the shot begins at his desk and shows her dodging right and left until he pur-
sues her to the rear of the room. Her evasive embarrassment is, as so often in Mizoguchi,
conveyed through a movement away from the camera. This "dorsality" tactic forms the
basis of a climactic scene later, when Ayako confesses to Nishimura that she is Asai's
mistress. The shot has an empty foreground, and Ayako leaves him at the tableas she
turns from us, walking slowly to the rear (Fig. 3.6o). Eventually she goes into her dress-
ing room, and Nishimura follows (Fig. 3.61). Then Mizoguchi starts the process all over
again, as she shrinks from him (Fig. 3.62), goes to the middle ground (Fig. 3-63), then
goes to crouch in the rear, at the farthest point from him possible (Fig. 3.64). He offers
no consolation, standing-also with his baclc to us-mute and impotent. The whole pas-
sage yields a powerful sense of Ayakds shame, expressed less through facial expression
than through her plaintive monologue and the arrangement of bodies in space.
The tone of the scene shifts to desperation. In the comer she twists to her feet and
rushes to Nishimura, her face frontal and hotly lit as she begs him to marry her (Fig. 3-65).
Now it is Nishimura's facial reaction that becomes important. Many directors would han-
die the scene by letting Ayako draw him toward the foreground and swivel his faceto the
camera so that we look over her shoulder at his face. Not Mizoguchi. Ayako pulls her re-
luctant suitor away from us and downward, kneeling with him in the middle ground and
continuing to plead (Fig. 3-66). A cutaway to Fujinds arrival outside keeps Nishimura's
reaction unknown-although his silence and passivity suggest that he is shocked and
afraid, and further hints to this effect will soon arise from the compositions we've already
considered (Figs. 3·57-3-59)·
In their sustained rigor the scenes in Ayakds apartment go beyond Japanese norms
and Sternberg's pictorialism. They achieve both denotative richness-a suspense and un-
certainty about Ayakds confession, about Nishimura's reaction, about Fujinds retaliation-
and pervasive emotional tints, conveying, in a film noir atmosphere, the heroine's alter-
nating shame and braggadocio, oblivious to her lover's paralysis. They also require an

3.6o Naníwa Elegy. 3.61 Naníwa Elegy.
3.62 Naníwa Elegy. 3.63 Naníwa Elegy.
actress (the jaunty Yamada Isuzu) willing to forgo the glamorous close-ups most would
expect. Brilliant though these scenes in Ayako's apartment are, the staging is notably sim-
ple. It is as if Mizoguchi, hitting on a way to sustain and develop the "distant-deptb"
schema, wanted to limit his variables for greater control. Having set himself a unique
problem, he would soon make things harder on himself and his collaborators.
With Japan's invasion of China in r937, films like Naniwa Elegy and Sisters ofGion be-
carne politically unwelcome. The failure of Dai-Ichi Eiga drove Mizoguchi to the Shinko
studio, where he accepted assigned projects, sometimes shinpa-flavored, sometimes pa-
triotic. He filmed a story about traveling actors based on Tolstoy's Resunection (The Straits
ofLove and Hate, r937), a home-front film about a soldier's family (The Song ofthe Camp,
r938; lost), anda village romantic drama (Ah, My Home Town, r938; lost). Mizoguchi
then moved to Shochiku, where he was given higher-profile projects. He made a series
of Meiji-mono (dramas set in the Meiji era, r868-r9r2), which commemorated practi-
tioners of traditional arts-kabuld performers in The Story ofthe Last Chrysanthemum
(r939) and The Life of an Actor (r94r; lost), puppeteers in Woman of Osaka (r94o; lost).

3.64 Naniwa Elegy. 3.65 Naniwa Elegy.
3.66 Naniwa Elegy.
Mizoguchi has said that he ran to the Meiji-mono as sanctuary from propaganda duties,
but the government smiled on these celebrations of indigenous culture and Shochiku
recmited him for the two-part Genroku Chushingura (The Chushingura Tale ofthe Genroku
Era, a.k.a. The Loyal47 Ronin, I94I-I942). Based on the nation's most distinguished heroic
legend, featuring the formerly Communist kabuki troupe Zenshinza, adapted from a cy-
cle of plays by the distinguished Mayama Seika, 60 Genroku Chushingura was the most
prestigious "national-policy" nlm. Although it did not garner acclaim, Mizoguchi was
sent to scout China for projects. Soon, however, studio resources and film stock began
to dwindle, and on tiny budgets Mizoguchi completed another kabuki biography (Three
Generations ofDanjuro, r944; lost), two films honoring famous swordfighters (Miyamoto
Musashi, r944; The Famous Sword Bijomaru, r945), andan episode in an all-star patriotic
vehicle, Victory Song (r945).
In the surviving films up through r942 we can see a steady effort to both complicate
and purify the most demanding aspects of Naniwa Elegy. Now Mizoguchi builds nearly
every scene on long takes. The average shot length increases dramatically, from twenty-

three seconds in Sisters of Gion to ninety seconds in the first part of Genroku Chushingura
(and eighty-three seconds in the second part). Sisters of Gion pushes farther into chiaro-
scuro, and although it does not dispense with analytical editing, a great many scenes are
played out in fixed, distantly framed shots (Fig. 3.67). With The Straits of Lave and Hate,
shotfreverse-shot cutting and big foregrounds are abandoned in favor of sustained long
shots that develop in crowded depth (Fig. 3-68). Mizoguchi carries many figures through
apertures and patches of darkness, and the results are virtuosic (Fig. 3-69). To this pie-
tonal richness, enhanced by the multilevel backstage are as of kabuki playhouses, The Story
of the Last Chrysanthemum adds a gravity of figure and camera movement. The rhythm
becomes even more majestic in Genroku Chushingura, in which the canonical tale ofbloody
retribution becomes a tribute to patience and self-sacrifice. The forty-seven vassals' re-
venge on the corrupt Lord Kira is perpetually delayed and then (against every convention
of previous versions) kept offscreen. Instead, we are given monumental tableaus, stat-
uesque scenes of deliberation, ceremonies conducted with a serene poise, vignettes of
characters enduring and fulfilling the samurai code (Fig. 3·70). Mizoguchi's experiments
with pictorial opacity and obliqueness give way to a Homeric transparency, in which every
locale, gesture, and stance is articulated crisply-save the heroes' ritual seppuku, tact-
fully hidden in a field of taut screens (Fig. 3-71). At once gorgeous and severe, Genroku
Chushingura bathes bushido in an aura of spirituality. 61
Three moments in The Story ofthe Last Chrysanthemum indicate how Mizoguchi sets
himself the task of purifying and nuancinghis staging during the war period. The plot,
set in the late nineteenth century, centers on the young actor Onoe Kikugoro, whose weak
performances disgrace his adopted kabuki family. None of Kiku's hangers-on dares to
criticize him, but the family maid, Otoku, is frank and offers to help him improve. Their
friendship scandalizes the family, who cast both out. With Otoku Kiku embarks on a
lengthy tour of the provinces to gain more practice. He often despairs or turns lazy, but
Otoku (another version of the devoted shinpa heroine) sustains him. Thanks toan un-
cle's intercession, Kiku gets to display his new skills in Tokyo, and Otoku slips awayto let
him reconcile with his stepfather. Kiku enjoys public acclaim at the very moment that
she dies in a shabby boardinghouse. 62
One turning point occurs when Kiku, left alone with Otoku, joins her in caring for a
baby and eating watermelon,. In one shot she carries the baby inside the house, sets him
down under a protective net, and walks to the distant kitchen, barely visible in a slot (Fig.
3-72). Kiku follows (Fig. 3-73). The next shot, taken ata point 180 degrees to the first, shows
Kiku and Otoku kneeling and silhouetted in the kitchen (Fig. 3. 74). He slices watermelon
for them while she flicks out the seeds with her hairpin. As they shift a bit further back
to eat, he tells her he's never been so happy as the night she told him the truth about his
acting. She is moved and replies that she'll do all she can to help him. Their quasi-love
seene consists of his moving slightly toward Otoku and herlowering her head (Fig. 3-75).
At this moment the family returns, and Kiku and Otoku draw apart (Fig. 3-76). Otoku
hurries out left and returns, bending again but turning to watch Kiku's aunt behind them.

3.67 Sísters ofGion (1936): Umekichi is consoled 3.68 The Straits ofLove and Ha~e (1937): a backstage
by Omocha after her patron has abandoned her. area, with actresses making up in the nearest plane,
actors passing onstage and off in the background, and
the drama played out in a distant middle zone.
3. 6 9 Backstage clutter reminiscent of von Stemberg 3.70 Many scenes in Genroku Chushingura (1941-1942)
is revealed by the grave camera movements of The Story consist of gathered samurai, shifting their positions
ofthe Last Chrysanthemum (1939). slightly to sustain a long-take shot.
3.71 The ritual suicides that conclude Genroku

Chushingura.
118 M 1Z O G u' C H 1 , O R M O D U LA T 1 O N
3. 72 Story of the Last Chrysanthemum: the first kitchen 3·73 Kikufollows.
scene begins as the maid Otoku passes from the baby's
play area into the depths of the house.
3. 74 A reverse-angle cut shows them in the kitchen, 3. 7 5 Facing eaeh other to eat, Kiku tells Otoku
where he slices watermelon. At moments the baby is how grateful he is for her frankness.
visible far in the distance.
She pulls aside, as if worried she's getting too close to Kiku, while Kiku (in an echo of the
cowardly Nishimura) turns away, embarrassed (Figs. 3-77-3·78). In the next scene the
aunt will fire Otoku.
The dim foreground, characteristic of mid-193os Mizoguchi, creates a threshold be-
yond which light traces a welter of crisscrossing planes. Thanks to a 18o-degree camera
shift, like that in Oyuki the Virgin, the same area of the house is made to yield two rich
fields of corridors and hideaways. As Kiku follows Otoku, she is barely visible in a dis-
tant aperture; in the reverse shot the distant plane is occupied by the baby. The arrange-
ment allows Mizoguchi to present a delicate play of blocking and disclosing. When Kiku
slides toward Otoku, his gesture takes place at screen center, masldng the baby (Fig. 3-75).
The family returns, and Otoku's head withholds, then reveals, the arrival of Kiku's aunt
(Fig. 3-76). The same ballet is repeated when Otoku pulls away from Kiku and reveals the

3.76 They edge apartas Kiku's aunt arrives. 3. 77 Otoku busies herself, coming and going, blocking
the aunt... ·
3. 78 ... unti! she is revealed watching the young

couple.
aunt, grimlyunwrapping her obi (Fig. 3-77-3-78). As a whole the shotis at once busy and
purified. The mazelike background and cluttered foreground are more dense with in-
formation than in most of Mizoguchi's films before 1936, yet the middle-ground drama
is a suite of microactions conveying the warming of a man and a woman to each other.
Nishimura's slight slump in Naniwa Elegy has become an entire repertory of minute shifts
of position.
The full shot and long take yield not just apertures but pathways. Looking at the final
image of The Poppy (Fig. 3.46), we can recall the father's and daughter's trajectories. The
stages of Ayakds humiliating confession in Naniwa Elegy are implacably mapped out as
phases of her progress through two rooms (Figs. }60-3.66). Thus can the dense, static
image preserve the traces of the characters' movements; cutting up the scene would wipe
out these spatial memories. In our Last Chrysanthemum scene the angle makes us notice
how Kiku follows Otoku's path to the kitchen, and in the reverse shot their traversa! of

3. 79 Story of the Last Chrysanthemum: the second 3. 8 o He comes to the kitchen area, now filled with
kitchen scene, without Otoku. Kiku passes the boy, servants. The shot 'recalls the one shown in Figs.
now a toddler. Compare Figs. 3.72-3.73· 3·74-3-75·
3. 81 Once more the aunt arrives in the background,

echoing Figs. 3-76-3.78; but now Otoku is gone.
this space hovers, ghostlike, behind them until Kiku's aunt works her own variation on
it. The plot actually builds a second moment on this spatial memory of brief intimacy.
Years later, as the family celebrates Kiku's triumphal return, he wanders into the same
room. The baby is now a little boy. Kiku goes to the kitchen (Fig. 3-79), and in reverse
shot we get another repetition. A cook is chopping bread where Otoku and Kiku had sat,
and maids scurry about in silhouette (Fig. 3.8o). Now the aunt comes in from a different
angle and summons him to the party (Fig. 3.81). No need for a close-up of Kiku's cha-
grin: our memory of the figures' movement through these spaces echoes his awareness
of the loss of the woman who enabled him to succeed.
A third powerful moment, also foreshadowed by the first kitchen scene, comes after
Kiku learns where the ill Otoku is staying. She has witnessed the performance that as-
sures his fame, so she can die fulfilled. While her landlord Genshun fans her anda pulse-
like hammering comes from a neighborhood artisan's shop, Kiku kneels beside her. In

3.82 The Story ofthe Last Chrysanthemum: 3.83 The Story ofthe Last Chrysanthemum.
at Otoku's deathbed.
3.84 The Story ofthe Last Chrysanthemum. 3.85 The Story ofthe Last Chrysanthemum.
3.86 The Story ofthe Last Chrysanthemum.

a shot lasting nearly six minutes, with no significant use of depth, Mizoguchi renders
the tenderness of woman's sacrifice and the man's recognition of it, which always comes
too late. Everything here turns on minute changes. Kiku passes to the left edge of Otoku's
pallet, and the camera obligingly ares to resettle him. When Kiku says that they can now
marry, she turns her head slightly and the fan stops (Fig. 3-82). Kiku insists she'll get well,
again Genshun ceases fanning (now to wipe his eyes), and Kiku moves slightly so that
his shadow falls on her face (Fig. 3-83). The fan stops and starts; she tells Í<iku to go to
his public; he hesitates. Otoku stretches out her arm, whispering, "l'm your wife now,
with your parents' permission!" (Fig. 3.84). He bends close over her, pauses, and then
moves even closer-the nearest he has be en to her in the entire film (Fig. 3.8 5). He agrees
to go, rising and paÚsing with his back to us (naturally), then leaves, pausing to look baclc
Otoku twists her head justa bit to see him as he says: "Wait for.me" (Fig. 3.86). As he
and Genshun go out, Genshun's daughter resumes fanning.
After all the shots draped in darkness, all the labyrinths exposed behind the kabuki
stage, all the intricate blocking and revealing of barely visible depths, Kiku's farewell to
Otoku offers a heightened simplicity. Compared to the nuances of posture, gaze, andas-
pect here, the couple's byplay in the kitchen looks broad. Yet that byplay, and many oth-
ers like it, have prepared us to see much in little, and now Mizoguchi tests our training.
He strips his setting, his composition, and the performances to the drama's emotional
core. He seems determined to discover how much expressiveness he can summon up
from the simplest ingredients-faces and barely moving bodies observed ata discreet
distance.
The same blend of density and purity pervades Genroku Chushingura: within massive
castles and corridors, solemnly moving figures and grand tracldng shots achieve very grad-
ual changes of angle and aspect. The wartime swordplay films Miyamoto Musashi and
The Famous Sword Bijomaru occasionally offer kindred, if paler and less demanding, mo-
ments of pictorial gravity. Forged under new political demands for cultural sobriety, Mizo-
guchi's style accorded well with a "national aesthetic" compounded of Zen and other signs
of sacred traditions. 63 For us its place in the history of cinematic staging lies in its ex-
pressive ambitions. In seeldng to mesmerize the viewer by dwelling on tiny gestures within
richly packed spaces, Mizoguchi's images become at once reserved and moving, sump-
tuous and austere.
At the war's end the Allied occupation, led by the United States, began to remake Japan.
MacArthur and his staff reformed the Diet, strengthened political parties, broke up con-
glomerates, gave land to peasants, legali;z;ed labor unions, and expanded women's rights. 64
Occupation authorities forced all filmmakers to avoid "feudal" subjects (no more sword-
play movies) and authorized only films that illustrated liberal and democratic values. Un-
der this system Mizoguchi made several films that more or less overtly promoted the new
ideology. Two were guardedly optimistic affirmations of women's rights: Victory ofWomen

(1946), which centered on a woman lawyer defending a mother charged with causing her
baby's death, and My Love Has Been Buming (r949), the story of a Meiji era feminist. In
somewhat the same vein was The Love of Sumako the Actress (1947), based on one of the
most colorful women of the 191os. Utamaro and His Five Women (r946) presented the
woodblock artistas aman of the people, scorning aristocratic patronage and recording
the fugitive charms of the "floating world" of brothels an'd teahouses. Believing that ¡apa-
nese culture had encouraged people to suppress affection, Occupation censors encour-
aged filmmakers to break sexual taboos; soon the first films to show kissing were re-
leased.65 To this trend Mizoguchi contributed Women ofthe Night (1948), a neorealistic
cross-section of women forced to sell sex amid the rubble of a starving Tokyo.
Many critics, at the time and since, have dismissed most of these films as weakened
by their propagandistic purposes, 66 but all are of interest to the student of filmic story-
telling and style. The stories are occasionally thin and didactic, but the passions run high,
and the mise-en-scene is usually admirable. Toa certain extent the 1946-19 50 films also
constitute a new phase of experimentation. If we call the earliest films eclectic and the
1936-1945 films ascetic (as well as, curiously, replete), we can see the immediate post-
war years as a phase of intelligent, somewhat extroverted pluralism. Por one thing the
emotions are less contained; there is less sobbing and more shrieldng. Mizoguchi ad-
mitted that he was now making more "barbarous" films, claiming that he had to release
the resentment he felt toward wartime authorities. 67 Moreover, now this director knows
what he can do best. He will never return to the wild days of quid< montage. In the wake
of Welles many directors were embracing aggressive foregrounds, but Mizoguchi with-
drew to other terrain. Secure in his repertoire of staging strategies, he now carefully ex-
tends them. He subtly tests boundaries, tacldes fresh tasks, and flexes his craft. The films
of the late forties are made by aman in his late forties, and he brings to them a confidence
not quite ready to settle into routine.
So, for instance, he tries out new patterns of staging in relation to camera movement.
In most of his prior work he had tracked characters laterally through a space or, in Gen-
roku Chushingura, swooped and spiraled aroundfixed figures. One nearly eight-minute shot
in Victory ofWomen (1946) achieves a spike of expressive power through figures driving
abruptly toward the camera, forcing it back, only to retreat abruptly into the distance be-
fare returning to the foreground (Figs. J.87-3-89). The close framing and thrusting action
here offer a remarkable reversál of the principies informing Ayako's confession in Naniwa
Elegy, yielding not muted pathos but almost hysterical passion. Another rearward tracking
shot acquires different dimensions in My Love Has Been Buming. Here the heroine tries
to reach her lover after a meeting of his political party. As he and his cronies descend a
stair and stride expansively toward us, she plays hide-and-seek with the retreating camera
(Figs. 3·90-J.9I). Mizoguchi's characteristic game of vision has turned symbolic, putting
the feminist, the true progressive, on the periphery of men's making of history.
No such splendid camera movements grace The Love ofSumako the Actress, which harks
back to the opacity and asceticism of the late 193os. It consists largely of long shots-
124 M 1 Z O G U C H 1, O R M O D U L AT 1 O N
3.87 Víctary afWamen (1946): a woman whose baby 3.88 After collapsing below the frame line, she rushes
has just died crawls toward us, frantically explaining to the rear, to fall in a heap. The shot holds on a distant-
to a female lawyer how it happened. She half-rises, depth composition as the lawyer goes to the rear room.
clutching her breast, filling the frame with her
desperation.
3.89 The camera moves forward as she guides the 3.90 My Lave Has Been Buming (1949): Eiko behind
woman to the middle ground, and the advance to the the men who make history.
camera resumes, culminating in a close two-shot.
3.91 My Lave Has Been Burníng: blocked by the shifting

positions of the men, Eiko can occasionally be glimpsed
looking on.

3.92 The Lave afSumaka the Actress (r947). 3·93 The Lave afSumaka the Actress.
3·94 The Love ofSumako the Actress.
deep, dark, uncommunicative images that swallow up the characters. But there are also
a few closer views, and these participate in a carefully judged pattem across the film. One
might expect that the theater scenes would be handled in wide shots, the offscreen drama
in close-ups. Almost willfully, however, Mizoguchi reserves the closest shots of Sumako
for performances or rehearsals, as if to sharpen the difference between theater and life.
After the death of her mentor and lover, Sumako kneels at her shrine to him and asks
him how her performance _was tonight (Fig. 3-92). Getting no answer, she doubles over,
then shrinks from the camera, as if trying to press herself through the wall (Fig. 3-93).
Now dorsality anda retreat from the camera express not shame but loss and fearful soli-
tude. Sumakds suicide will take place offscreen, but this scene does duty for it, showing
her pain pushing her into oblivion.
Yet the purely private emotion seen here is abruptly countermanded. The next shot is
a bluntmedium close-up of Sumako onstage as Carmen, facing the camera and brandishing
her rose (Fig. 3-94). Her aggressiveness seethes through the rest of the scene, with her
voice and gestures trembling on the verge of hysteria. Soon she will frantically hurl an ac-
tor to the floor backstage; as Carmen she will be stabbed; and after the curtain falls, she

3·95 Utamaro and His Five Women (1947): Utamaro 3. 9 6 Drawing Oran for the first time: the screen's half-
tries to persuade his pupil to give up licentiousness. hiding of Oran rriay cite the original artist's famous
technique of "veiled views," but the schema was also
used in Japanese films (see 3.38).
will hang herself. The harsh shot-change marks the stylistic registers distinguishing the
offstage drama from the performances, while immediately suggesting Sumakds swing be-
tween despair and defiance. She is at once a Japanese woman stilllooking to her sensei for
approval and a Carmen-like artist finding giddy liberation in a burst of creative energy.
Mizoguchi's willingness to blend his more muted staging patterns (retreats from the
camera, glimpsed bits of action, distant objects of significance) with strategic close-ups
is apparent in Utamaro and His Five Women. A better title would be a straight rendition
of the Japanese: Five Women Surrounding Utamaro. The famous Edo print designer sits
at the center of the plot, threading five lives together. The least important is Oshin, his
publisher's fiancée. There are also Yukie, a painter's daughter thrown over by Utamards
disciple Seinosuke, and Orin, the lovely woman with whom Seinosuke eventually elopes.
There is Takasode, whose ravishing back inspires Utamaro to designa tattoo for her. Most
important is Okita, who seduces Seinosuke but also competes with Takasode for the fa-
vors of the vacant, beautiful boy Shozaburo. The shifting love triangles overlap on Uta-
maro and his passion for glorifying the female form. The film's actual title not only evokes
his gravitational pull on other fates but also recalls the original artist's bijin-ga ("beauty
pictures"), which included many series based on numbers ("Six Selected Types of Love,"
"Ten Studies in Female Physiognomy").
Uta maro vividly illustrates the new pluralism of Mizoguchi's early postwar work. Plenty
of scenes exploit reticent depths, as when Take tries to retrieve the drunken Seinosuke
from Okita (Fig. 3·95)· When Uta draws Oran for the first time, the shot employs both an
aperture anda screen that tease us with glimpses of this extraordinary beauty (Fig. 3-96).
Yet Mizoguchi sets himself new problems as well. How, he asks in effect, can one coordi-
nate several people crisscrossing a fixed frame? The initial drawing duel between Utamaro
and Seinosuke conveys brisk energy by stitching a welter of differently paced trajectories
through layers of depth, with superbly synchronized pauses. The film's final scene, as Uta-

3. 9 7 When Utamaro returns a free man, his followers 3.98 As they regroup,to bring food and wine, he pivots
surround him. and slides closer to us.
3. 9 9 They reenter; he shrugs offhis jacket and, 3.1 o o As they start to eat in the distance, he bends
springing up, tells them he simply must draw! eagerly over his paper in the foreground.
maro retums from prison and starts to draw again, offers another instance of effortless
group choreography (Figs. 3·97-3.100). Mizoguchi can now handle crowds without re-
sorting to stasis orto solemn unison movements (as sometimes in Genroku Chushingura).
His long shots radiate the assurance that they can render any rhythm, any dramatic tum.
When Mizoguchi cuts up a scene into closer views, he is self-consciously pursuing
particular ends. Granted, Yoda records that Mizoguchi said, "I hate close-ups. "68 But we
do have him noting in 1952: "Close-ups can't be avoided. Though long shots can convey
psychological conflicts, close-ups are indispensable for more complicated nuances." 69 The
close-ups in his earliest films were usually brief, simply composed in the American man-
ner, and part of a string of reverse shots or eyeline matches. In the 193os the close-up
became more complex, as an aggressive foreground or, as at the close of Naniwa Elegy
and at moments in Sisters ofGion, a singularized image standing out from the surrounding
long shots. One scene in Utamaro shows Mizoguchi experimenting with the sustained
close view "for more complicated nuances."

3· 101 Utamaro and His Five Women: Okita enters, 3.1 02 Okita leaves to surrender to the police.
having murdered her rival and her lover.
Okita (Tanaka Kinuyo) has stabbed both her fecldess lover, Shozaburo, and her rival,
the tattooed Takasode. She staggers into Utamaro's lodgings, where she confesses her
crime and says farewell. The scene consists of two shots, the first running two minutes
and eighteen seconds, the second running almost four minutes. The whole action is sim-
ple and symmetrical, structured on a comingjstayingjdeparting pattern. Okita enters vía
the porch, and the camera follows her leftward in medium shot (Fig. poi) to confront
Utamaro and his housemates. The bulk of the scene consists of her confession, broken
by the scene's only cut. Then Okita rises, determined to surrender to the police, and goes
out, followed in a rightward tracking shot and the film's biggest close-up (Fig. po2). Oth-
ers rush to follow her out, but Utamaro stays behind, writhing in his handcuffs and gasp-
ing, "I want so much to draw!" Like Mizoguchi himself, Utamaro seeks the expressive
image: Okita's suffering lends her the pathetic beauty he longs to capture.
The close-ups leading Okita in and out of the room bookend a remarkable stretch of
staging, itself also filmed at fairly close range. Once she is in the room, Utamaro asks if
she has gone mad. She drops to her lmees befare him and denies it (Fig. J.I03)· Then
Yukie and Oshin come in to squat behind her. After declaring that she won't accept a
lukewarm love, Okita slides toward Utamaro, demanding: "Doesn't your portrait of me
express the same thought?" (Fig. }I04)· On the line Mizoguchi cuts toa medium close-
up (Fig. pos).
The cut underscores the dialogue point: Okita acknowledges that Utamaro's art has
captured her heedless search for perfect love. Curiously, though, the cut shifts us only a
little closer to the action and without a change of angle. Eisenstein and other Soviet di-
rectors had exploited this sort of axial cut, and so had Kurosawa, but in the sound era
most directors avoided it because it makes the scene jump out a bit spasmodically at the
viewer. And here the change of scale is so slight that we don't doubt that Mizoguchi could
have sustained the previous shot. So why this new framing? Evidently Mizoguchi does
not want Utamaro to be visible in the next phase of the action, which will center on Okita.

3.1 03 Okita sits. 3.1 04 Okita comes dos e to Utamaro.
3.105 Cut in to Okita; now Utamaro and his publisher, 3.106 She speaks ofher love for Shozaburo, glancing
Take, are merely on the edges of the action. off at each man and asking: "Is love like this?" Her
answer comes not from them but from behind.
3.107 Yukie raises her head and slides a bit forward. 3.1 o8 Yukie lowers her head and Oshin speaks up
As the image racks focus to her, Yukie says she from behind: "I too."
understands and now knows "the path a woman must
follow."

3. 1 o 9 As Oshin lowers her head, the framing tilts 3. 11 o At this the women behind lift their heads again.
down to Okita, who stiffens and declares she will turn
herself in to the authorities.
3.111 In the next phase of the se ene Oldta says her 3.112 Then Okita lifts her head, draws back, and
farewells. She bows to Utamaro, now made prominent thrusts herself closer to Utamaro than ever before,
by a slight pan and the fact that the women all hide saying: "Uta, after I die, please be nice to the woodblock
their faces by bowing. print of Okita!" After this she rises, trudging out via the
close tracking shot already shown (3.102).
Yet to have Utamaro pull away from her would be out of character, for he is keenly con-
cerned about her fate. So the cut simply chops him out, at least until the climax of the
shot. And for reasons that will become clear, Mizoguchi cuts directly in because he wants
to preserve the slightly downward angle.
The rest of the scene (traced in Figs. 3.w6-p12) reminds us of what Feuillade al-
ready knew: close framings need not simply carry one piece of information, such as a
character's facial reaction (Figs. 2.74-2.75)· Mizoguchi's prolonged medium close-up can
offer sorne of the same expressive resonances we find in shots like Otoku's death in Last
Chrysanthemum. He builds Okita's confession out of minimal movements (her turning
of her head or sliding a few inches left or right), with other faces concealed by being
offscreen (Utamaro, Take), by being blocked by Okita, or by being lowered (the women

behind her). The closer view can also aid the hypnotic effect Mizoguchi seeks. He shifts
our attention from point to point through focus changes and the upturned faces of Yukie
and Oshin before creating a clímax out of Okita's thrusting her face closer to Utamards
than ever before. (The tactic echoes Kikugords bending over the dying Otoku.) Now we
can understand the final ambivalent close-up of the departing Okita as the pictorial
crescendo, aimed at clinching the "complicated nuances" ofher state of mind (Fig. po2).
And the high angle that Mizoguchi retains after the cut-in closer view keeps the other
women in the action so that their reactions offer poignant echoes of Okita's confession.
The shot may also allude to the "comer illusion'' central to Japanese art: the view looking
downward into a room, with figures arranged to hide the joints among walls, floors, and
screens.7° This portrait of an Edo artist mayal so be quoting the schemas at which he was
so adept.
When the American occupiers departed in r952, Japan's film industry was in high-speed
growth. Despite US efforts to break up conglomerates, six major studios ruled, with five
controlling theater chains. The firms quicldy reinstated the "feudal" swordplay films (chan-
bara) and expanded their lines of romances and comedies. Output swelled from about
two hundred titles in r950 to more than five hundred in r956, reestablishing the Japa-
nese film industry as the world's most prolific.
Severa! generations competed on this crowded field. Ozu, Naruse, Gosho, and other
senior directors maintained the piecemeal-découpage tradition in the protective shadow
of studios like Shochiku and Toho. Men who had started directing during the China war,
such as Kurosawa, Kinoshita Keinosuke, and Imai Tadashi, carne to the fore, as did slightly
younger ones like Ichikawa Kon, Kobayashi Masaki, and Shindo Kaneto. Many directors
eagerly embraced the wide-angle, deep-focus aesthetic that was becoming an international
norm, complete with aggressive foregrounds. A few younger directors occasionally in-
corporated dense compositions on the model of prewar pictorialism, as well as display-
ing one-offvisual innovations. (Kurosawa excelled in the latter.) Most of the young men
proved versatile, shifting among various genres and techniques; none, it appears, probed
a core of stylistic premises from film to film.
In these circumstances Mizoguchi could only appear a throwback Still widely respected,
he was nonetheless obliged to shift among studios, adapting novels and often adding the
sexual ingredients of which the Occupation approved. In A Picture ofMadame Yuki (r9 50)
a wife raped by her husband guiltily derives satisfaction from his brutality. Miss Oyu (r95r)
concentrates on a discreet ménage atrois. In Lady of Musashino (r95r) aman drawn toa
former lover punishes her by flirting with younger women. Mizoguchi's work had often
featured eroticism, but these films-and Ugetsu Monogatari (r953), with Lady Wakasa's
dreamworld of sensuality-flaunted it. Even with such concessions he declared himself
unable to understand the tastes of the young audience. 71
He was rescued by his old friend Nagata Masaichi. Nagata's Daiei company held few

screens, so after Rashomon (1950) won the top prize at Venice and the Academy Award
for best foreign film, Daiei aimed at the overseas market. Although Japan was still sunk
in poverty, with one-tenth of the per capita income of the United States, it became the
first Asian country to gain worldwide attention for its cinema. Festivals paid tribute to
Mother (1952), Where Chimneys Are Seen (1953), Seven Samurai (1953), and The Burmese
Harp (1956). Kinugasa's Cate of Hell (1954) earned two Academy Awards, one for best
foreign film, the other for best costume design-an event unthinkable even a few years
befare.
Thanks to the festival market, Mizoguchi's fortunes changed. Oharu ranked only ninth
in the Kinema jumpo poll, but it won the top prize at Venice in 1952. He left the Shintoho
studio for Daiei, which backed all his subsequent projects. Ugetsu, placing third in the
poll and earning another grand prize at Venice, clinched his status. He could now com-
mand important subjects and big budgets. After Sansho the Bailijf's Venice win in 1954,
Mizoguchi joined the Daiei board of directors. He was not completely free of studio in-
terference or the occasional forced project (for example, Princess Yang Kwei Fei, 1955, a
coproduction with Hong Kong), and his films still attracted little attention at the local box
office. But for ayear or two after Oharu, critics looked more favorably on his work, which
screened at festivals and began to enter overseas markets. In 1954 Mizoguchi received
an Education Ministry award for lifetime achievement.
The very end, however, was not so sunny. He suffered from leukemia in his final years,
and he was quite fee ble during the filming of Street ofSha me (19 56). His last three films-
Princess Yang Kwei Fei, Shin Heike Monogatari (1956), and Street ofShame-did not place
in the Kinema jumpo poll because, one observer suggests, most critics considered them
"purely commercial efforts, overestimated by westerners."72 His Daiei works struck
many as kitschy exoticism catering to the growing festival circuit. Indeed, Mizoguchi's
postwar output brought his entire career into question. Writers suggested that he was a
romantic pessimist, since his films on social issues dramatized ills without offering cures. 73
Manyyounger critics promotedleft-wing social-problem directors like Imai Tadashi, whose
films consistently beat Mizoguchi's in the Kinema jumpo rankings. Older critics contin-
ued to prefer Ozu, Naruse, and Gosho, who found poignancy shining out of common-
place lives. Mizoguchi's aristocratic elegance, along with his taste for shinpa dramaturgy,
had become old-fashioned.
Those who thought him behind the times had their opinion confirmed by his admi-
ration for classical art. He often compared film to the e-makimono, the picture scroll that
unrolled a scene. 74 Like other directors of monumentaljidai-geki, he had already quoted
the bird's-eye view characteristic of e-makimono and picture screens (Fig. 3.71). The lake-
side romp of the princess and the potter in Ugetsu was modeled on a landscape drawn
from O gata Korin, one of the most famous seventeenth-century painters.75 Unlike most
of the directors praised by 195os critics he clung to the pictorialism of the 193os, when
he and his contemporaries were exploring distinctively Japanese shot designs. In a 1952
interview he spoke of admiring the "density" of Japanese art; he found in ink paintings

of the fifteenth and sixteenth century "an enormous suggestive intensity that I often wish
I could get into a filmo"7 6
He seems not to have regarded his Japanese contemporaries as serious rival so He saw
William Wyler as his only competition on the festival scene, and he fretted that Roman
Holiday would beat Ugetsu at Veniceo When he watched a Wyler film, he timed the scenes
and shotso7 7 Yet he seems not to have worried about competition in the long-take sweep-
stakes (his shots were already far lengthier than Wyler's or virtually anyone else's)o He
told Yoda that he admired Wyler's "vertical framing"-presumably his low-angle depth
shots, which pile faces from bottom to topo 78 By studyingWyler, Mizoguchi seems to have
been considering ways he could squeeze still more into every imageo
Is this compeÜtion or co-optation? Noel Burch has proposed that after The Lave ofthe
Actress Sumako Mizoguchi brought his work into line with "one of the dominant tendencies
in Hollywood at that time: the long take a la Wylero" 79 He identifies Mizoguchi's "repre-
sentational systern" with "radical camera distance, long takes, dolly movements" and then
claims that these evolved into "an academically decorative, opportunistic approach to dé-
coupage, contrived by laying certain traits of his earlier system over the framework of the
Hollywood codes.'' 8°For example, in Utamaro "the long take is largely subservient to the
Western codes and there are frequent close-upso oooOne observes both the temptation of
the codes from the conquering West and the nostalgia for an exemplary past of personal
and national rigour.'' 81
Yet the techniques Burch itemizes aren't the whole of Mizoguchi's styleo He was for
most of his career a variegated stylist (18o-degree cutting patterns versus single-shot
scenes, big foreground close-ups versus empty-foreground depth shots)o 82 For Burch, to
rupture a distant shotwith a close-up is to risk surrendering to Western norms; but Mizo-
guchi was surrendering since the 192os, albeit in distinctive wayso The "Hollywood codes"
were his point of departure throughout his career, along with more idiosyncratic schemas
he shared with his colleagueso Ironically, one could make a case that Mizoguchi most fully
embraced Western norms in low-budget wartime efforts like Miyamoto Musashi and The
Famous Sword Bijomaruo But then Burch's belief that Occupation forces ("the conquering
Wesf') steered Japanese directors toward Hollywood would come into questiono
We shouldn't forget that even in the 19 sos no other filmmaker, apparently not in Japan
and certainly not in the l!nited States, was making films as complex in their staging as
Mizoguchi'so The disparaging comparison with Wyler or Cukor becomes implausible when
we look atthe staging of The Best Years ofOur Lives (1945) or The Marrying Kind (1952)-
fine films but worlds away from the precision and delicacy we find even in a lesser Mizo-
guchi film like Gion Festival Music (1953)0 Let us also recall that Mizoguchi's purportedly
code-complicitous films were received with boredom or annoyance by Western critics who
had not embraced the mise-en-scene aesthetico Of Chikamatsu Monogatari Ado Kyrou com-
plained: "The direction is flato The camera keeps its distance; it is too politeo Good films
cannot be made without close-upso" 83 Of Ugetsu Paul Rotha wrote that by developing his
action in long shots Mizoguchi becomes "a pedestrian filmmakero" 84
134 MI.ZOGUCHio OR MODULATION

He was nearly always more pluralistic within the long-take tradition than critics al-
lowed: he tested his staging along many dimensions (varieties of shot scale, degrees of
depth, fixityversus mobile camera, static figures versus figure movement). The idiom of
his last phase, I think it fair to say, is closer to that of Taki no Shiraito and Oyuki the Vir-
gin than the severity of Last Chrysanthemum and Genroku Chushingura. If one takes those
exercises in austerity as a benchmark, then anything that is more diversified willlook
compromised. Although I, too, am thrilled by the pushing of limits, to elevate this to a
criterion of excellence seems too narrow a view of style. Simply refusing the close-up is
no guarantee of artistic purity (as witness the lumbering procession of "minimalist" films
since the I97os). Stylistic rigor can become rigor mortis. The critic's task is to weigh func- ~
tions and effects, and in Okita's confession to Utamaro (Figs. 3- ror-} n2) we have already
seen how a closer view can powerfully coordinate an ensemble of details.
It is true that by r950 Mizoguchi seems to have solved the principal problems he posed
himself. He had created one "distinctively Japanese" style that could answer to various
cultural demands, from pricl,e in artistry to political nationalism. He had shown that riches
lay hidden in pictorial schemas his colleagues often left unmined. He had created a hyp-
notic cinema centered on the dense image, governed by unpredictable spatial develop-
ments and slightly changing details. He had made the sustained shot discreetly expres-
sive through shinpa conventions and nuanced performances. Seen from this standpoint,
the last films present distillations of his characteristic staging strategies. They also con-
tinually recall his formative era. None of his peers preserved so integrally, as if in an
archive, prewar achievements in shot design. Whereas Kurosawa and others created a
muscular technique out of the calligraphic impulses of earlier years (freely borrowing
from Soviet and Hollywood films), Mizoguchi's long takes reactivate, with subtle varia-
tions, a panoply of pictorialist imagery. In this sense he is a conservative, but what he
conserves becomes in his hands an inexhaustible resource.
In the r930s and r940s he had refined current schemas; now he refines his refine-
ments. Ugetsu Monogatari uses his veiling effects to evoke the supernatural (Fig. }II3)·
In r947's Utamaro and His Five Women he had shown Okita grabbing a knife to wreak
her vengeance, treating the action in an aperture framing and an almost expressionistic
shadow (Figs. }II4-3·II5)· The Lije ofOharu, as we've seen, almost completely conceals
the knife, then flashes it along th.e frame edge, barely visible (Fig. po). In other films he
stretches his love of lattices in fresh directions (Figs. 3.n6-pr8). He also sets himself
new problems. He multiplies the number of figures whose faces he can hide while push-
ing the action at ever-increasing distance from the camera (Figs. 3·II9-J.I2o). Otoku's
death scene in Last Chrysanthemum had put her fee ble facial turns at-the center of a sparse
frame (Figs. 3-82-3.83); but what, our director seems to be asking, if Lady Musashino ex'
pires in a more crowded frame, with her face even tinier than Otoku's and changing its
position ever so slightly (Figs. p2r-p22)?
If this be academicism, make the most of it. Let every young filmmaker take any late
Mizoguchi film and watch. Let the student see how what is most significant can arrive

3.113 Ugetsu Monogatari (r953): screens and veils evoke 3.1 14Utamaro: Okita rushes behind a screen, yielding
the otherworldly life of the princess. Mizoguchi's characteristic glimpse ofher eye in the gap
between curtain and wall, befare ...
3. 1 1 5 ... her silhouette reveals her murderous intent. 3· 116 In Sansho tite Bailijf(r954) the grid becomes
a motif: the imprisonment of a mother ...
3. 1 1 7 ... who is tortured in the brothel ... 3. 1 1 8 ... is linked to the capture of her son.

3.119 The tormented ménage atrois of Miss Oyu (1951). 3.120 Miss Oyu.
3.121 LadyojMusashíno(1951). 3.122 Lady ofMusashino.
effortlessly before us, often by the smallest resettling of figures or the simplest panning
movement. Let the student observe how what is most dramatically important can shrink
or hide itself-sometimes unobtrusively, sometimes in full view. Let the student plot how
earlier phases of the action leave their traces in pathways and pigeonholes, to be reacti-
vated when needed (often when least expected). If the student wants the camera to m ove
(as all do), let him or her obs~rve the timing by which a simple tracking shot permits
figures, setting, and framing to align, swerve apart, and reconverge: a compact choreog-
raphy of delicate changes, with no pictorial dead spots and none of that hurly-burly of to-
day's walk-and-talks. And above alllet the student consider how almost every image grasps
our attention as a splendid composition (which you want to explore in fine detail), a ves-
sel of dramatic conftict (which you sean for glances, facial expressions, compositional
confrontations, imminent arrivals), anda tensely contained emotional field (which may
erupt into violence or crumple into a zone of private feeling). The "enormous suggestive
intensity" that Mizoguchi admired in Japanese art lies coiled and waiting for us in scene
after scene of his late films. In an era when "visualliteracy" means taking for granted

3.123 Street oJShame (r956): Dreamland's staffand 3. 1 24 Street of Shame: a slight shift of the brothel
habitnés are introduced in distant-depth apertnres. master's head will block the kitchen boy far off and
left of center ...
3.125 ... and activate new zones of space on the right, 3.1 2 6 Shizuko is prepared for her first night.
stretching far into the distance.
3. 1 2 7 Street of Shame: the last shot. 3.128 Street of Shame: a last look. Compare Figs. 3-35
and 3·II4.
MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATJON
those bursts of pointless cutting that purportedly energize a scene, Mizoguchi (like Ozu,
but in a different way) gives us time to see everythingo We could do worse than to treat
this oeuvre as an Academy for the Study of Stagingo
His last film malees a good postgraduate exerciseo Street of Shame has converging plot-
lines in the vein of Utamaro, but now the point of intersection is a brothelo As the par-
liament debates the abolition of prostitution, six women are linked through their work
at Dreamland, in the Yoshiwara district of Tokyoo One supports a sickhusband anda baby;
another has a grown son who is ashamed of her; another is out to bilk meno Into this sor-
did tangle struts Mickey, the fifties equivalent of the moga of Naniwa Elegyo Sashaying in
her tight skirt, flipping her ponytail, scrambling after every customer, smoldng and chew-
ing gum and nibbling snacks (sometimes all at the same time), J\4ickey brings postwar
vulgarity to Dreamland's echt-neoclassical house of pleasureo While offering bitter hu-
mor and genuine pathos, Street of Shame provides a tutorial in how to stage groupso We
have adjacent rooms and apertures laying out scenes (Figo 3-123)0 We have apparently ca-
sual shots that exfoliate into richly articulated planes, and we have bold compositions in
flamboyant depth stretching out from a middle ground, activated by the slightest move-
ment (Figso }124-3-125)0 The idea of the simple close-up here loses nearly all meaning;
even near shots are packed with information (Figo 30126)0
At the film's clase the young serving girl Shizuko-a minar character until now-is
dressed and made up to take her first customero She is sent outside, and Mickey shows
her how to catch a man's attentiono Offscreen a radio announcer reports that once more
the antiprostitution bill has been defeatedo After glancing this way and that, Shizuko
timidly peeks out at us from behind a pillar (Figo 30127), then ducks partway back (Figo
3-128)0 In finally bringing us toa clase view of a character, the shot recalls the last image
of Naniwa Elegy (Figo 3-47)0 But this image is more sustained, and it passes through a
suite of small mutationso Shizuko's expression shifts quicldy from shyness to childish ex-
citement to fearful uncertainty to ooowhat? It is a searing shot with which to end a film,
let alone a careero
No long take, no distant framing, no camera movement, no chiaroscuroo How Mizo-
guchian can this image be? Utterlyo For one last time the game of vision, now borne by
a single darting eye, traces exquisite modulations of emotiono
MJZOGUCHio OR MODULATJON 139

ANGELOPOULOS, OR MELANCHOLY
Theodoros Angelopoulos may be the last believer in a cinema of heroic statement. His
films put on display characterístic agonies of modern dvilizatíon-totalitarían regímes,
the misery of the stateless immigrant, the disenchantment of the Left. They search for
the roots of these conditions in history or, as he sometimes puts it in interviews, His-
tory.1 Each film presents a journey, he asserts, "and the journey embraces all the human
emotions from love and sexuality to hate and war." 2 He freights his scenes with mytho-
logical references (dtations of The Odyssey or Attic tragedy) and portentous symbols. He
draws his dialogue from the poetry of Homer, Eliot, and George Seferis. He employs al-
legory and iconographywith shameless literalness, dramatizing política} confiictthrough
a fiurried dance of street banners, or representing the end of a political movement by a
drifting barge draped with fiags. He doesn't think twice about having the same performer
play severa} parts or suggesting that the action is all taking place in the mind of a char-
acter (a filmmaker, no less)-as if he hasn't heard that these tricks went out with plat-
1+\ form shoes and mood rings. He works on the edge of embarrassment. In Ulysses' Gaze
(1995) a colossal head of Lenin is loaded onto a barge and then fioats down the Danube
to a somber musical score (Plate 4.1); the sequence, Angelopoulos tells us, marks the death
of Communism for him and his generation. 3 His admirers believe that he can capture
modern anguish in monumental imagery; for others it is all bombast.
Indeed, part of the fascination of Angelopoulos's cinema is its almost naive anachro-
nism. This filmmaker, so attuned to history (or History), so sensitive to post-Communist
emigration and the war in the Balkans, appears unaware of how dated his artistic ambi-
l4 O A N G E LO PO. U Lo S, o R M E LA N C H O L Y
tions seem. He can with a straight face propase a trilogy on nothing less than the history
of the twentieth century, keyed to the myths of Oedipus and Antigone. 4 Oblivious to fash-
ion, he never seems to worry that his films will seem ponderous and overwrought. No
postmodern pastiche, tone switching, or self.ironizing here. He will not make a playful
reference to anything; every moment strives to resonate deeply. His lifelong passion for
the poetry of Greek masters like Seferis and Cafavy and the novels of Faulkner, Joyce,
and Stendhal have given his films literary aspirations. Mass culture appears as a vulgar
scrawl on the landscape (the pop song in the dingy café in The Beekeeper), and cinema is
cited only in its gravest mode (Murnau, Dreyer, Bergman). Growing up in an era when
solemn filmmaking was the best proof that cinema could be as exalted an art as poetry,
theater, and the novel, Angelopoulos has embraced all those subjects that are difficult to
lighten up: war, repression, the failure of love. Pretentiousness is the risk he runs for be-
lieving that only high seriousness is worthy of his medium and of the questions an artist
must ask.
I may as well confess my divided affection for these sprawling, majestic, irritating
works. Certain of them (for example, Ulysses' Gaze; Etemity anda Day, 1998) seem to
me deeply flawed, inflating their thematic statement at the expense of narrative density.
Others, such as The Travelling Players (1975) and The Hunters (1977), are remarkable ac-
complishments, but often they read better in critical commentary than they play on the
screen. Four, however-Alexanderthe Great (198o), Voyage to Cythera (1983), Landscape
in the Mist (1988), and The Suspended Step ofthe Stork (1991)-seem tome authentic
masterpieces, attaining grandeur without becoming grandiose. Still, none of the films
lacks awe-inspiring passages, and all sustain, sometimes brilliantly, that tradition of stag-
ing and shooting that is the concern of this book. If I treat Angelopoulos as more a syn-
thesizer than an innovator, that takes nothing from his achievement. In today's thin-
textured European cinema, where formulaic découpage and big close-ups rule nearly as
much as in Hollywood, at least one stubbornly highfalutin artist tries to keep alive the
rich, evocative image.
1think that other Greek directors don't have the same problems as 1 do.
Being Greek, 1am a part ofGreek cinen:a, but not in the localized, provin-
cial sen se; and as far as style is concerned, there's no meeting point.
THEO ANGELOPOULOS 5
Born in Athens in 1936, Angelopoulos spent his youth in the years ofWorld War II and
the Greek civil war (1946-1949). After taking a law degree and serving in the military,
he went to Paris in the early 196os to study film. Back in Athens he began writing film
journalism for the left-wing newspaper Democratíc Change. In 1967 a cadre of generals
took over the government and installed Colonel George Papadopoulos as nationalleader.
Angelopoulos began his movie career under the junta, working as actor and associate pro-
ANGELOPOULOS, OR MELANCHOLY 141

ducer on several films and shooting his first film, the short The Broadcast, in 1968. De-
spite the oppressive political climate, a group of young directors emerged in the late 196os
and were able to circumvent censorship somewhat. Military factions controlled the gov-
ernment until 1974, the year before Angelopoulos's international breakthrough with his
third feature, The Travelling Players. Since then he has been the most famous Greek di-
rector and one of the most honored filmmakers in the world.
Angelopoulos and his generation worked in conditions very different froín that of Greek
cinema's golden age. Out of the rubble ofWorld War II and the civil war, entrepreneurs
built a small but thriving studio system. Production boomed, with over 250 films released
in the 1950s and over 1>400 during the 196os. Comedies, musicals, melodramas, and
pastoral dramas ·(foustanellas), all filled with popular stars, brought audiences into the
theaters. New sound stages were equipped to European standards, not only improving
local quality but also luring in productions from abroad. A film school was founded in
1951, andan archive in 1957- The first national film festival was held at Thessaloníki (Sa-
lonika) in 1960. Greeldilms achieved exporttoo, most notablywith Never on Sunday (1961)
and the dramas of Michael Cacoyannis (Electra, 1962; Zorba the Greek, 1964), and Ca-
coyannis and other young directors became festival regulars. Even the a~rival of the gen-
erais did not immediately stifle output, since the government financed historical films
and patriotic spectacles.
What local critics call the "New Greek Cinema" grew out of changes in film culture in
the late 196os. Cacoyannis and sorne other established directors fled the Papadopoulos
regime, creating space for a new generation. In response to the dictatorship, and in har-
mony with New Left movements throughout the world, young directors began to com-
mit themselves to a socially and politically critica! cinema-at least as critical as could be
sneaked by the censors. In addition, national television arrived in 1971 and immediately
triggered a steep decline in filmgoing. In 1968 annual admissions had hit an.all-time
high of 137 million; by 1973, admissions were only 70 million. As the commercial cin-
ema flagged, the New Greek Cinema offered artistic films of personal vision. The spear-
head was Angelopoulos's initial feature, Reconstruction (1970), which won four awards at
Thessaloníki and became identified as the first mature work of the rising generation. Di-
rectors bypassed the studio system and garnered funding from French, Italian, and US
companies, as well as the Greek Film Center, founded in 1980. 6
Despite accolades and subsidies, the New Cinema did not win baclc the audience. Ad-
missions continued to plummet; by 1993 the annual figure stood at seven million. One
or two dozen films were made each year, but American movies, along with a few French
and Italian imports, ruled the box office. Virtually no Greeks went to Greek films, let alone
to the recondite works of Angelopoulos and his peers. Their films circulated primarily
on the festival circuit, which, however informal and decentralized, was becoming the only
international distribution network comparable to Hollywood's. Angelopoulos no longer
entered his films in competition at Thessaloníki, partly out of concern for dominating
the awards and partly because his proper venue was Cannes.
142 ANGELOPOULOS, OR MELANCHOLY

Angelopoulos's career has a self-fashioned unity characteristic of a 197os filmmaker
aspiring to high artistry. Reconstruction offers a criticallook at dying Greek villages. His
next four films set out to trace his nation's modern history. Days of '36 (1972) examines
the dictatorial rule of General Metaxas (1937-1941), and The Travelling Players loops back
and forth between the period of Nazi occupation and postwar civil strife. The Hunters re-
vives the years from the civil war (1944-1949) to the mid-196os through an .arresting
narrative device: present-day hunters find the corpse of a civil war partisan, as fresh as if
killed yesterday. Alexander the Great completes the cycle by surveying the period from the
turn of the century until the 1930s, tracing a bandit's tyranny over a remote village or-
ganized as a commune.
Throughout this tetralogy individuals tend to stand for larger forces, both political and
mythological. The traveling players are named Electra, Orestes, and the like; Alexander
the bandit is a brutish version of his legendary namesake; the hunters exist only as types
identified with political positions. Voyage to Cythera marks a new stage in Angelopoulos's
oeuvre, since now political forces are embodied in more traditionally drawn characters.
The elderly Communist Spyros, let out of prison, returns to his Macedonian village. This
simple situation is refracted through the imagination of a film director who is meditat-
ing on a .film project and who will, in the film-within-the-film, find in Spyros a mythical
father figure. Further meditations on solitude and age are presented in The Beekeeper
(r986), about a schoolteacher and beekeeping enthusiast who abruptly abandons his fam-
ily and embarks on an odyssey across a bleak, unyielding modern Greece. Landscape in
the Mist offers another journey, following two children convinced that their father is wait-
ing for them just across the border.
Boundaries and migration come to the fore again in The Suspended Step of the Stork.
Visiting a town on the Albanian border jammed with war refugees, a television journal-
ist believes he recognizes a prominent Greek politician who has disappeared. Ulysses' Gaze
projects the same concerns with borders in following an archivist (called simply '1\") in
his search for a lost early film. Ns quest is at once a parallel to the Odyssey, a hazardous
homecoming, a trip into his childhood vía flashbacks to the 194os, an interrogation of
central European history since World War I, anda quest for the historical significance of
the Balkans, all presented through Ns search for the "first image," vanished footage from
the turn of the century. The turbulence of Eastern Europe becomes even more person-
alized in Etemity and a Day, in which a poet in the last days of his life reflects on his past
while accompanying a young Albanian boy trying to return home.
Like Feuillade and Mizoguchi, Angelopoulos brooks no contradiction on the set. "He
is the image of his Alexander," notes his longtime cinematographer Yorgos Arvanitis,
"who ended as a tyrant." 7 To achieve the rhythm the director demands, the actor must
count silently between lines. In order to deflate the tourist ideal of Greece, Angelopou-
los favors filming in winter, when rain and mists domínate; if the sun breaks out, he halts
shooting. While making The Travelling Players, "I was persecuted by beautiful weather.'' 8 f"::::t
His search for majestic locales takes him to rough and remote places. The filming of

Alexander the Great in a poverty-stricken mountain village over a bitterly cold winter led
to underfed extras and crews threatening to defect. 9 On location in the Yugoslavian town
of Mostar during bombardment in the Balkan War, Angelopoulos refused to leave as or-
dered by authorities, until he got the footage he wanted. He has become an Odysseus,
taking cast and crew all over his region. His most daunting expedition was, appropriately,
Ulysses' Gaze, which passed from Greece through Albania, Macedonia, Romanía, and the
Black Sea city of Constanza before ending up in Croatia, with Mostar standing in for Sara-
jevo. "I believe something special happens on location, in the real place .... When I am
in the place I have set the film, all five of my senses are working." 10
Historically, as 'Yell as geographically, the films sink their roots deep into Balkan cul-
ture, as Andrew Horton has shown in a careful study.H Yet by rendering the history of
Greece and its neighbors through imagery culled from mythology, literature, and Marx-
ist thought, Angelopoulos joined a broader tradition. He worked in a vein that was cos-
mopolitan and pan-European, aimed atan elite audience. From the start his films took
prizes at major continental festivals, and soon they were financed by prívate companies
and television chains in Italy, France, and Germany, as well as by EU agencies. In the
198os and 1990s he relied on stars like Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Harvey
Keitel, and Bruno Ganz.
Angelopoulos has thus kept alive a strain of European modernist filmmaking that
runs baclc to the 1950s. But his historical situation obliged him to sustain the tradition
with a new degree of self-consciousness. Inevitably, a filmmaker starting out in 1970
confronted problems that directors had not faced fifteen years earlier. He or she carne
belatedly to the modernist tradition, one that had already acquired a history, a pantheon
of masters, a theoretical program, a rhetoric, anda set of institutions. In a tradition that
prized originality, the novice who wanted to be a film artist was expected to create a
strongly distinctive style; but that in turn required lmowing what others had done. Be-
cause reputations were made principally on the festival circuit, the filmmaker had to
find international financing and distribution and settle for minor festivals before arriv-
ing at one of the Big Three (Berlín, Cannes, Venice). Because critics' comments weighed
heavily, one had to offer them food for thought and participate in intellectually inclined
interviews.
Angelopoulos was well equipped to succeed in this situation. He passed through Paris
in the crucial years 1961-I964, studying film and, he claims, getting thrown out of the
Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC). Like most "young cinema" di-
rectors, he carne under the influence of what w.e might call the Langlois Cinématheque
canon: auteurs such as Welles and Mizoguchi, Hollywood genres such as the crime film
and the musical. The seriousness with which he takes the director's vocation doubtless
derives from the saliency of Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, and others in the cinéphile cul-
ture of the 196os. Gods walked the earth then.
Angelopoulos also grasped the need to shape critical appropriation of his films. A for-
144 ANGEL O PO U LO S, O R M EL ANCHO L Y

mer critic himself, he gave interviews that help us to interpret his works, as when he ex-
plained that his own voice as the offscreen father at the beginning of Voyage to Cythera is
related to the symbolic "search for a father" that rules the film. 12 He can come up with a
lapidary formula that many critics would envy: "Voyage to Cythera evoked the silence of
history, The Beekeeper the silence of love, and Landscape in the Mist the silen ce of God." 13
He has assisted us in understanding the development of his work, tracing recurring pre-
occupations and new shifts of interest. He points out "sorne very obvious obs~ssions":
umbrellas, marriage ceremonies, certain names, the sea, the oscillation between dense
images and empty ones, a preference for silences, and "almost always, the presence of a
little boy." 14
So it is the filmmaker, nota gang of critics, who propases that his work splits into two
periods. First was a forthrightly political phase, in which under the influence of Marx and
Brecht he sought to explore "epic" presentation without psychological identification. Dur-
ing his stay in Paris, he claims, Brecht became "the essential reference point." 15 Then,
beginning with Voyage to Cythera, carne films that were more emotional and existential-
ist, rejecting the certainties of official politics. "Art has become anthropocentric again and
asks more questions for which it has no answers." 16 His declaration of an ethically
grounded humanism chimed well with post-Marxist attitudes of European intellectuals
in the 198os. I'm not suggesting that in packaging his oeuvre Angelopoulos is oppor-
tunistic; an artist's help in deciphering his work is virtually demanded by festival cinema,
which makes the director's career development one of the film's selling pointsP
A cinéphile in the Parisian mold, a thoughtful exegete of his own work, Angelopou-
los also created a trademark technique. Like Bresson, Dreyer, and other classic stylists,
he seems to "process" every script, passing the story action through a series of finely
meshed filters to arrive ata distinctive string of images. Critics commonly point out that
he relies on long shots, long takes, temps morts, and offscreen space, and he has dis-
cussed these techniques at length in his interviews. 18 At the time of his early work he
claimed that the long takes and camera movements created a "dialectic" among different
elements in the shot. 19 He thereby encouraged a Brechtian characterization ofhis style-
one amenable to critical reception in the wake oflate 196os left aesthetics. Ten years later,
however, asked if the sudden rain in Voyage to Cythera was aiming at a Brechtian distancing,
he replied: "Notfor such reasons! but because artificial rain is very beautiful! Itis as beau-
tiful as natural rain." 20
As Mizoguchi discovered in the I 9 5os, the festival circuit rewards individuality of sub-
ject and form. Angelopoulos quicldy understood that his playing field was pan-European.
He delved into concrete Greek issues, but he kept his films from looking provincial by us-
ing techniques already canonized in the intemational milieu. His effort, then and ever since,
has been to achieve a localized cosmopolitanism, casting distinctive national material in
sophisticated modemist shapes. He has experimented with flashbacks and ambiguous time
schemes, devices canonized since the 195os as signs of ambitious filmmaking. He has

also cultivated a style that drains away narrative denotation toa considerable degree, push-
ing instead toward a muted expressivity anda monumental, near-abstract pictorial design.
Angelopoulos's response to his circumstances reflects a new stage in filmmakers' sty-
listic self-consciousness. When Feuillade adopted ensemble staging in the sustained shot,
he was following the norms of his milieu. When Mizoguchi embraced the technique, he
was picldng a secondary option, pursuing it beyond the norms of sound filming in arder
to refine it. But by the early 1970s the long take had a distinguished pédigree, having
be en canonized not only in filmmaking practice but in the criticalliterature. Angelopoulos,
along with contemporaries lilce Wim Wenders, Rainer Wemer Fassbinder, Chantal Akerman,
Maurice Pialat, and Wemer Herzog, knew the debate about mise-en-scene that Bazin had
launched and thát animated 195os Cahiers criticism. In París, during the early 196os, An-
gelopoulos studied with Georges Sadoul and Jean Mitry, and he claims that while work-
ing as an usher at the Cinématheque he acquired his tastes. The films he admired reflect
the Bazin-Cahiers consensus: Mumau, Dreyer's Ordet (1955), Welles (for his "cutting in the
camera''), Renoir (for "deep focus and parallel stories"), Mizoguchi (like Sarris he was "see-
ing many of his films without subtitles, just watching the image"), and Antonioni. 21
His first feature, Reconstruction, tums "new cinema'' devices toward political critique.
Kosta, a "guest worker," retums from Germany to his tiny village, populated by fewer than
a hundred women, children, and old men; virtually all the able-bodied young have found
work abroad. Kosta is murdered by his wife, Eleni, and her lover Christos, and although
they try to keep their crime a secret, gossip spreads about Kosta's disappearance. Soon the
police arrive. The lovers confess, each putting the blame on the other. Both are arrested,
and the village's women scramble to attack Eleni as she is hauled off in a police van.
The story is not, however, told in the arder I have just presented. The opening scenes
show Kosta laboriously retuming to his village and greeting his children (who don't rec-
ognize him). The credits appear over a freeze-frame of the family having their first shared
meal in years. Then we see police questioning Eleni in her home, and she declares that
Christos strangled Kosta as she watched. The plot goes on to altemate fairly brief scenes
of police investigation-the "reconstruction'' of the title-with long episodes from the
couple's efforts to hide their crime. They bury Kosta's body in the cottage's garden, they
flee town and spend a bleak night in the city, and eventually the police arrive, tipped off
by a suspicious old woma:r;t. At the end, after Eleni and Christos are taken off, Angelopoulos
provides an epilogue. He flashes back to the murder but keeps it offscreen by holding the
camera on the family cottage as the children play outside.
This scrambled chronology reworks a template that has characterized European art
cinema since the 195os: the police-investigation-plus-flashbacks. Like Bertolucci's La Com-
mare secca (1962), Reconstruction uses detection to juggle time and shift point of view, let-
ting us know the outcome straightaway in arder to explore the causes leading up to it. In-
stead of providing psychological motivation-Eleni and Christos are barely characterized,
and the final shot carefully prevents us from ascribing passion to the crime-the struc-
ture evokes a broader social critique. The flashbacks suggest that Kosta's death grows out
146 AN'GELOPOULOS, OR MELANCHOLY

4.1 Reconstruction (1970): doorways providing multiple 4.2 Reconstruction: figures in a landscape.
frames for the action.
of the village's frustrating poverty. The film "reconstructs" the social pressures leading to
domestic infidelity and murder-a point underscored in a sequence showing journalists
circulating through town while we hear, as voice-over commentary, guest workers in Ger-
many explaining why they fled Greece. 22
Reconstruction exploits severa! visual techniques typical of the r96os "young cinemas."
Angelopoulos insists on shooting on location, confining his camera to cramped interiors
and providing glimpses of a tavern or bus terminal. The cinéma vérité quality, strength-
ened by the many handheld shots, links the film to the new waves of the r96os. Still,
there are hints of the signature style to come. The average shot length (nineteen seconds),
although much shorter than that of any later Angelopoulos film, announces his reliance
on staging within the frame. The interiors are thickly packed, with doorways providing
pockets of space (Fig. 4-1). Stillness and silence play central roles; the murderous lovers
stand panting over Kosta's body for what seems a very long time. The camera dwells on
landscapes, as a bus churns slowly through the mud oras the couple totter along a rain-
swept highway and trucks roar past them. The plot has time to linger on a quasi-abstract
shot of men dotted around a field, urinating during a bus stopover (Fig. 4.2).
The elliptical treatment of the murder in Reconstruction becomes a pervasive narra-
tional strategy in Days of'J6. A :political prisoner takes a hostage, and eventually the po-
lice raid his cell. But these central events occur offscreen, hidden by stone walls and cun-
ningly angled doorways, all the better to concentrate on the maneuverings of a corrupt
regime. Once again individual motives are minimized, with most shots presenting
groups of prisoners and officials. The film also pushes the long-take strategy much fur-
ther (the AS Lis seventy-two seconds), and long shots predominate so that the prison pro-
vides its own geometricallandscapes and spare choreography (Fig. 4·3)·
It is, however, with The Travelling Players that the Angelopoulos look emerges most
fully. In a typical scene the actors' troupe walks from the beach and up a town street; af-
ter they have passed through the frame, the camera holds on the street, and the period

4·3 Days of ]6 (1972): the abstraction of the prison 4-4 The TI·avelling Players (1975): the shot starts in
setting. November of 1952. The traveling players walk from
the dock ...
4· 5 ... and we follow one as they pass. The color shifts 4. 6 The troupe moves on into the distan ce as ...
slightly toward yellow.
shifts from November 1952 to winter of 1942 (Figs. 4·4-4-10). The distant framing, the
lingering on an empty vista, and the ftashback occurring within a single shot all became
hallmarks of Angelopoulos's style. With The Travelling Players, which has an average shot
length of 105 seconds, ~ngelopoulos also confirmed his commitment to the very long
take as his primary stylistic vehicle.
Such shots rework familiar schemas in fresh ways. Nearly empty long shots had punc-
tuated Antonioni's 196os films and Wim Wenders's Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick
(1972), but Angelopoulos builds entire, slowly developing scenes around them. Flash-
backs within a single shot were known in Hollywood (Cara van, 1937; Enchantment, 1948)
and European cinema (Miss julie, 1951). Yet as Angelopoulos has pointed out, his origi-
nality lay in freeing such ftashbacks from the recollections of a single character and ex-
pressing instead "collective historical memory" or even the echoes of past events linger-
ing in the shot's locale. 23 Likewise, in his reliance on the long take Angelopoulos proved
148 A N G EL O PO U LO S, O R M EL ANCHO L Y
4· 7 ... a motorcycle cart bearing a political pos ter 4.8 ... out of the distance comes a German
passes in the foreground. The camera follows it a bit automobile. We are liow in the winter of 1942.
before it goes into the distance. The color tonalities shift
toward gray as ...
4. 9 The car pulls up past a checkpoint, installed at the 4.1 o A German soldier patrols the checkpoint.
comer we saw earlier (4.6).
a judicious adapter. Few directors had applied the technique to every scene, and none had
applied it so single-mindedly to landscapes. The ftagrantly prolonged shots in The Trav-
elling Players and his later films constitute his efforts to enrich a recognized, indeed can-
onized, tradition. The ostentatious style results in part from an artist's coming belatedly
to a game in which most of the moves have been made, and by very strong players.
A European filmmaker starting out in the late r96os confronted a rich array of stylistic
options. One of the major choices was this: to utilize the long take or not? "The only great
problem with cinema," Godard remarked, "seems to me more and more with each film
when and why to start a shot and when and why to end it." 24 Feuillade's generation was
not obliged to reftect on shot duration asan end in itself, and in the r930s only a few di-

rectors, like Mizoguchi, seem to have graspedits possibilities. Simultaneous with the emer-
gence of Bazin and mise-en-scene criticism, however, a great many directors were put-
ting the long take on the agenda.
The coming of sound encouraged filmmakers to lengthen their shots, and although
this was done fairly unobtrusively in the 1930s, the problem of when to cut could not be
ignored after Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), which highlighted several fixed takes running
a minute or more. Throughout the 1940s and 195os the long take, almost álways in tan-
dem with camera movement, became a salient stylistic option. In American studios, at
a period when the average shot length per film was nine to eleven seconds, sorne direc-
tors favored very long takes: about sixteen seconds for Otto Preminger's Angel Pace and
George Cukor's Thé Marrying Kind (both 1952), twenty-two seconds for Preminger's The
Pan (1949) and Vincente Minnelli's The Band Wagon (1952). The.device was ftaunted in
the very lengthy sequence-shots in Lady in the Lake (1946) and Rape (1948).
Most filmmakers thought that CinemaS cope demanded long takes, so many widescreen
films, especially musicals, were cut rather slowly; Oklahoma! (1955), for example, has an
ASL of nearly seventeen seconds. In postwar Eastern Europe as well the long take was
alive and well, particularly because the Soviet cinema had developed a rather academic
wide-angle style at about the same time Hollywood had (Fig. 4-n). In the late 1950s Pana-
vision lenses eliminated the peculiar distortions of close views yielded by CinemaScope's
anamorphic process. American filmmakers could now return to the over-the-shoulder
framings and strong singles of classical découpage. A few directors-Preminger and Billy
Wilder, then Roman Polanski and Mike Nichols-persisted in employing long takes, but
by the 1970s it was a retrograde gesture. The accelerated cutting of the intensified con-
tinuity style had triumphed, and only "off-Hollywood'' directors like Woody Allen and the
younger independents would consistently rely on lengthy shots.
In the hands of Hollywood directors the long take proved capable of great economy
and unobtrusiveness, but it also suited the elliptical, suppressive narration of European
modernist filmmaking. With causal connections often only hinted at, with character mo-
tivations kept mysterious, the gradually unfolding image gained extraordinary weight.
The spectator had to search for relevant story information, register shifts in emotional
tone, or spot moments that commented on characters' relationships-individual versus
group, interest versus detac~ment. Two inftuential stylists showed that the long take could
sustain this oblique approach to storytelling.
Carl Dreyer had been an editing-based director in his silent films; The Master of the
House (1925) is possiblythe fastest-cut Danish film of the period, 25 and La Passion de jeanne
d'Arc (1928), built almost completely out of suffocating close-ups, became a hallmark of
montage-based silent cinema. Yet in his sound films Dreyer swung to the opposite ex-
treme. From the 1940s he embraced an explicitlytheatrical aesthetic: minimal figure move-
ment, scanning or arcing tracking shots, and steadily lengthening takes:,an ASL of fifteen
seconds in Day ofWrath (1943), seventeen seconds in Two People (1944), sixty-five seconds
in Ordet (1955), ninety seconds in Gertrud (1964). The precision staging in the latter two

4.12 Dreyer recasts the tableau cinema of the I9ros
for Gertrud (r964); compare Figs. 2.9 and 2.35.
4.11 In The Cranes Are Flying (r958) Mikhail Kalatozov

inflated the deep-focus look of the official Soviet style,
creating a kind of gargantuan romanticism. Compare
Fig. r.28.
4.13 Le Amiche (r955): Momina strides into the gallery, 4.14 Quickly Momina turns; the camera reframes
passing the portrait of Rosetta, the woman who has just her, and now she blocks the customer, revealing Nene,
attempted suicide; the camera catches a customer in the the gallery owner. Throughout the long take Rosetta's
distan ce. image and Nene's timid presence will appear on the
edges of the frame.
works constitutes a retrospecthre revision of the schemas of the European cinema Dreyer
entered in the 1910S (Fig. 4-12). His films were often denounced as boring, but his
influence on younger filmmakers such as Angelopoulos was considerable.
Other European directors put the long take on the creative agenda-Luchino Visconti
and Max Ophuls cometo mind-but particularly important for our purposes is Michelan-
gelo Antonioni. 26 Antonioni's 195os films exemplify the richness of postwar mise-en-
scene. Fluid tracking shots pide up one character just as the one we're following drops
away, and other elements in the frame regroup themselves. Emphasis shifts easily be-
tween foreground and background, with only a nudge of the camera or a slightly turned
player enough to create fresh compositions. 27 (See Figs. 4-13-4·14.) The ASLs range from
twenty-two seconds (the film noir Cronaca di un amare [a.k.a. Story ofa Love Affair], 1950;
Il Grido, 1957) toa very unusual forty-three seconds (I Vinti, 1953). In the string of more
famous films beginning with I:Avventura (r96o), Antonioni's cutting pace pieles up and
his camera movements become less dazzling, but these works explore other options to
which filmmakers also proved sensitive.
The long take soon became central to the various Young Cinemas and new waves that
emerged during the r96os. Truffaut, Godard, Alexander Kluge, Jerzy Skolimowski, Ruy
Guerra, and many other directors of the new generation flaunted long takes, often with
generous camera movement. Significantly, however, virtually no directors adopted the long
take as her or his stylistic signature in the manner of Dreyer or Antonioni. Most young
filmmakers favoréd an "assemblage" aesthetic, whereby sorne sequences were handled in
very long takes and other sequences were built out of dynamic cutting. Godard's A bout de
sou.ffle (r96o) typifies this tendency, mixing prolonged camera movements with disjunc-
tive montage. Oshima Nagisa took eclecticism to another level, building one film out of ex-
traordinarily long takes (Night and Fog in japan, r96o; ASL exceeds two minutes), andan-
other out of very short shots (Violence at Noon, r 9 6 6; AS L4-5 seconds). In an era of dawning
film consciousness such pluralism implied that the filmmaker had mastered the entire his-
tory of cinematic technique, from Eisenstein to Ophuls. At the same time, certain techno-
logical factors that had encouraged long takes (sync-sound filming, heavy studio cameras)
were largely gane, so long takes could be sensed as a deliberate effect. After the 196 os many
"new cinemas" would flaunt stylistic pluralism, the r98os cinéma du look of Léos Carax
and Jean-Jacques Beineix no less than the New Hollywood of Spielberg and Scorsese.
Still, the long take is a device capable of serving many different purposes. In Holly-
wood it was used chiefly for virtuosic following shots, as in today's extended walk-and-
tall< sequences. By contrast, sorne postwar European filmmakers exploited it for the salce
of what has come to be known as dedramatization. Between neorealism, with its gap-
filled narratives and unexpected longueurs, and the blank surfaces and diminuendo pacing
of I:Avventura, filmic storytelling changed significantly. Dramas began excising "melo-
drama," moving do ser to the spacious rhythms of the modern novel. Emotions were un-
derplayed, even suppressed. Reallife, critics argued, did not parse itself into tight plots
and smoothly ascending tension. Cinema could break free of Hollywood artífice by ren-
dering in detail the anticlimaxes and wayward incidents of everyday life. Aided by an ap-
proach to storytelling that fostered uncertainty about character psychology and causal con-
nections, dedramatization became one hallmark of ambitious filmmaking.
Dedramatization took two principal forms. Instead of playing an emotionally charged
situation for maximum expressiveness, the filmmaker could treat it in suppressive or
oblique fashion. The paradigmatic example was Rossellini's Voyage to Italy (1953). A mar-
riage is fading, and during their stay in Italy the husband and wife agree to keep away
from each other. She desperately tours the region while the husband seeks out romantic
temptations. As he comes home after several nights away, Rossellini shows the wife ly-
ing on the sofa, listening intently to him undressing and gargling; either she is hoping
152 ANG'ELOPOULOS, OR MELANCHOLY

4.15 Voyage to Italy (1953): the waiting wife.
to avoid a confrontation or hoping that he will come in to find her (Fig. 4-15). The re-
sulting scene is no domestic quarrel; instead, it is merely a tissue of polite lies and half.
formed accusations. Mizoguchi's staging often conceals the emotions that burst out of
his characters, but Rossellini keeps the emotions almost unexpressed. Voyage to Italy
showed that a film could mute its action, even redefine what could count as action, by
keying its tone to the couple's boredom, enervation, and uneasiness-emotional states
dissected in the European novel at least since Alberto Moravia's Time ofindijference (1929)
and Sartre's Nausea (1938) but seldom explored on film.
Directors could dedramatize their plots in a second way: by including moments their
predecessors would have trimmed as waste. Voyage to Italy, almost in the manner of a
travelogue, devotes long stretches to the wife's ramblings around Naples and Pompeii. Film-
makers began wedging in temps morts, the "dead time" between dramatic ares. In place
of the compact dialogue of Hollywood, conversations were broken by prolonged pauses,
often underscored by actors frozen in place. When characters did stir themselves, they
often moved with a slowness reminiscent of the Sjostrom and Bauer classics of the 1910s.
The simple act of walking became prime cinematic material once more; filmmakers
seemed to enjoy just trailing their characters. Bazin praised de Sica's Bicycle Thieves (194 7)
for playing clown traditional plotti~g and patiently observing the two main characters' gaits.
"It would be no exaggeration to say that Ladri di biciclette is the story of a walk through
Rome by a father and his son." 28
The distant long take could support both suppressed emotion and temps morts. By
not breaking the scene into close-ups, filmmakers could maintain a sense of muted drama.
Subtle changes in framing could alert the spectator to the nuances that were replacing
histrionics. And the sustained shot could force the viewer to concentrate on the empty
intervals that filled so many scenes. Dreyer's Ordet may have initiated this trend, but for
most critics it was Antonioni who brought the novelistic, dedramatized, even antidramatic,
cinema to maturity. It is hard for us today to realize how revolutionary a figure he seemed

4.17 L'Avventura (r96o): lovers in a landscape in the
final shot.
4.16 The reunion in Il Grido (1957).
in the 196os. For one French critic his work marked the third great epoch of film his-
tory; after thirty years of silent cinema and thirty years of sound film, we now had "a cin-
ema of behavior." 29 As another writer put it: "Antonioni's people are not tidy, artificial,
comfortably definite bundles of motives; they are always somewhat opaque, capable of
surprises. As we are made to stare at them, and at the intervals of space and time which
surround them, we must assess them as we assess people in our own lives." 30
All of Antonioni's early films narrow their emotional range, but from Il Grido to Red
Desert (1964)-the films that made his international reputation-he goes farther than
his contemporaries in draining the drama out of charged situations. 31 He virtually elim-
inates nondiegetic music, shotjreverse-shot cutting, and optical point of view. More and
more he stages major actions in long shots, presenting figures in landscapes or spacious
interiors. 32 In the beginning of Il Grido, for instance, Aldo returns to Irma after seven
years, and Antonioni presents theirreunion in a veryuncommunicative image (Fig. 4.16).
Perhaps the most famous of his distant shots is the forlorn ending of L'Avventura, which
shrinks Sandro and Claudia to mere streaks in a blocked-out composition (Fig. 4-17).
Antonioni likewise reduces scenes to silences and stretches of dead time in which noth-
ing of traditional dramatic moment is occurring. "I need to follow my characters beyond
the moments conventionally considered important, to show them even when everything
appears to have been said.".33 "Antonioni is so elegant," remarks Jim Jarmusch, "in the
way he can let the scene go past its normallength, or the shot even, and the whole weight
of the scene changes, the essence." 34 He renders acting more impassive by means of a
fairly muted performance style, long-held poses, anda tendency to turn figures from the
camera at moments of dramatic intensity, a "dorsality" reminiscent of Mizoguchi (Figs.
3.6o, 3-63, and 4-16). The result is the "inexpressive" shot that actually expresses lassi-
tude, anomie, suppressed pain, or emotional distances between the characters. The sta-
sis of such scenes alternates with the dilatory walks that consume so much time in L'Avven-
tura, La Notte (1961), and L'Eclísse (1962), all films full of drift. With Antonioni, critics
remarked, the talkies became the walkies.

4.18 Play Time (1967): the waiter in the foreground
describes how the sole is prepared, while the waiter
in the distance uses the same gestures to glue a tile
to the dance floor. ·
Antonioni wasn't alone in exploring subdued emotion and empty intervals within the
long shot. Jacques Tati's Les Vacances de M. Hulot (r953), Mon Oncle (r958), and Play Time
(r967) use temps morts to encourage the spectator to find humor by comparing different
areas of the shot (Fig. 4.r8). (Tati also pioneered the "full-field'' schemas that would be so
importantfor Otar Iosseliani and the r970s minimalists like Akerman.) Nonetheless, itwas
Antonioni's middle-period workthat constituted the paradigm of "dedramatized'' filmmalcing
for Angelopoulos's generation. "When I carne to France," he recalled, "it was the epoch of
Antonioni, of L'Avventura and La Notte. When I was at ID HEC, you' d go every day to se e a
film by Antonioni." 35 Whatwas so impressive? "The considerable length ofhis shots, which
went on justa little bit longer than expected to allow for a deep breath before going on." 36
The difficulty for newcomers was that Antonioni had apparently pushed the dedrama-
tized long take about as far as one could. He was, to borrow Harold Bloom's phrase, a "strong
precursor," an innovator who intimidates his successors. 37 What could a young filmmaker
add to a distinguished tradition that seemed to have already reached its peak? One pos-
sibility was the poetic cinema that emerged in the USSR, most palpably in the work of
Andrey Tarkovsky. Whereas Antonioni concentrated on urban anomie, Tarkovsky strove
to capture the spiritual imprint of naturallandscape on humans who could only partially
apprehend it. He insisted that the film image should be neither obviously denotative, sim-
ply illustrating a story, nor portentously symbolic. He heaped scom on all those schemas
showing lovers split by fences and erring workers retuming to the factory in triumphallong
shots. 38 The film artist should seek out images that cannot be reduced to words or ideas-
images that strike with the force of religious revelation. The long take proved crucial to this
neosymbolist line of thought. Rejecting Eisenstein's conception of montage, Tarkovsky
joined Mizoguchi in holding that sound cinema had no need for découpage that spelled
everything out for the audience. Like Bazin, he believed that time is "imprinted in the shots,"
so a film's rhythm was determined "by the pressure of the time that runs through them." 39
Accordingly, Tarkovsky cultivated an atrnospheric long-take style. Face-to-face en-
counters are filmed in protracted medium shot, but they are punctuated by hallucinatory

4.1 9 As women follow in the foreground, a procession
restages Christ's path to Calvary in the Russian snows
(Andrei Rublev, 1966).
vistas and still-life studies. Humans move through a space of primal starkness (Fig. 4-19).
At the other end of the visual scale the camera caresses quivering petals, murky streams,
greasy puddles glistening on floorboards, or apples scattered across a tabletop, while
breezes or rippling water or drifting snowflakes measure the time running through the
shot. With the triumph of Andreí Rublev (1966) in European festivals, and the praise be-
stowed on Solaris (1972), The Mírror (1974), and Stalker (1979), Tarkovsky became the
emblem of a mystical, quietly ravishing cinema whose long takes invited the spectator to
become absorbed in "the concrete, living, emotional content of the object." 40
Another route out of the Antonioni impasse emerged from the political debates of the
196os. Antonioni, like Balzac and Flaubert, had dissected bourgeois life from within, but
many believed that this was not enough. Directors all over the world sought ways to put
postwar modernist experimentation at the service of more radical political critique. Sorne
filmmakers looked to t92os Soviet filmmaking, but they filtered the montage aesthetic
through the revival of disjunctive editing in the work of the Nouvelle Vague and Brazil's
Cinema Novo. The result was a mordant cinema of collage se en in Fernando Solanas and
Octavio Getino's The Hour ofthe Fumaces (1968) and Dusan Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of
the Organísm (1971).
Other politicized modernists turned to the "dedramatization' tradition. Most prominent
among them was the Hungarian Mildós Jancsó, already strongly influenced by Antonioni
in Cantata (1963). Turning from Antonioni's enervated couples, however, Jancsó revamped
the 192os Soviet conception of a group protagonist. Thus The Round-Up (1965), Silence
and Cry (1966), and The Red and the White (1967) concentrate on specific moments of
historical change but play clown heroes and concentrate on large-scale forces and moment-
by-moment fluctuations in power. The situations are intrinsically charged with dramatic
voltage-guards confronting prisoners, commanders randomly pulling captives for
execution-but Jancsó short-circuits the emotional effect. Exposition is sketchy; second-
ary characters aren't individuated (a device Angelopoulos would draw on), and central play-
ers sometimes don't get characterized until moments before they die. The walkies are here
with a vengeance. Instead of dialogue we get men and women pacing, strutting, marching,
trotting, and dancing, often supplying few hints about their motives or destinations. Jancsó
156 AN.GELOPOULOS, OR MELANCHOLY

4.20 Politics as mass spectacle in Jancsó's Hungarian
Rllapsody {1978).
forgoes nondiegetic music and employs a camera more concerned with group dynamics
than individual destiny, casually picking up and dropping figures in the course of a shot.
Scenes are played out in very long takes; sorne of Jancsó's shots mn nine minutes or more,
consuming an entire camera reel, and sorne of the films consist of a mere ten shots.
In the late r96os Jancsó gave up the pretext of presenting a concrete dramatic situa-
tion, pushing toward ensemble numbers that put abstract conflicts of ideology on display.
Now he aims atan all-engulfing choreography of figures, landscape, and camera. The scene
teems with people, usually young and often naked. They move swiftly, in circular and ser-
pentine patterns, while horsemen circle, musicians wind through the crowd, and banners
flutter past us. Color, used symbolically to sharpen political oppositions, stands out against
the neutrallandscape. All the while, the camera tracks, cranes, zooms, and racks focus to
create a floating, plastic, constantly shrinking and swelling space. Oxymoronic as it sounds,
Jancsó's version of dedramatization is florid, even "maximalist," as became evident with
Red Psalm (r972) and the films that followed. The contending groups have become pure
emblems of social forces, playing out rituals on the bare arena of the Hungarian plains-
cinematic pageantry enacting a neo-Marxist reading of history (Fig. 4-20). 41
Although Jancsó avoids traditional dramatic appeals like psychologized protagonists,
he offers a robust kinetic spectacle in their place. Other political modernists pursued a
more austere approach. Inspir~d by one conception of Brecht's Veifremdungseffekt (es-
trangement effect), sorne took dedramatization toward simplification and severity. Jean-
Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet explored the long-shot technique not only in The Chron-
icle of Anna Magdalena Bach (r967), whose pseudo-Baroque tableaus keep the camera at
a considerable distance from the drama (Fig. 4-21), but also in a series oflandscape films
that included Fortini jCani (r 977). Perhaps the limit of this minimalist tendency is Godard's
"blackboard films" such as Vent d'est (r 9 6 9), but it emerges in less forbidding form as well.
One example is Chantal Akerman's jeanne Dielmann 23 Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles
(r975). In its tracing of a few days in the life of a housewife who works prostitution into

4· 2 2 Geometrical filming of housework in Jeanne
Dielmann (1975).
4.21 A baroque composition in long take for
The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (r967).
4.23 Klaus Wyborny's distant mise-en-scene in Vallas, 4.24 India Song (1975): a mirror plays perceptual tricks
Texas: Afterthe Gold Rush (I970-197I). on the colonial elite.
her daily schedule, the film dwells on mundane activities and temps morts. Through rig-
orous uses of perpendicular framing and 90-degree and r8o-degree cuts, Akerman gives
Jeanne's routines a sober pictorial abstraction (Fig. 4.22).
Even directors not inclined toward politicized modernism opted for long takes that
presented a dry, detachedyictorial design. For example, during the r970s many directors
began to present action in fairly fixed camera positions from a great distance, without
cutting in to nearer and clearer views. The tendency was most evident in the avant-garde,
such as James Benning's 11 X 14 (r976) and Klaus Wyborny's "neoprimitivist" works (Fig.
4· 23). Marguerite Duras's India Song (r 97 5) played out highly melodramatic scenes in dis-
tant, oblique interiors accompanied by languorous offscreen tango tunes (Fig. 4.24).
All these avenues for exploiting the long take-lyrical spirituality, colorful spectacle,
minimalism-were open to Angelopoulos when he began his career. But there was also
a problem. So many people were embracing the long-take technique that originality was
hard to come by, and sheer repetition could sooner or later register as mannerism. An-

- -- ---------------
gelopoulos became, like most of his contemporaries, a synthesizer who developed a dis-
tinctive style by mixing and revising available schemas. He was attracted to the austere
variant of political modernism, and his earliest works explored its resources. In the sec-
ond phase of his career (often with the aid of Antonioni's scriptwriter, Tanino Guerra),
he created ambivalent psychological dramas situated within concrete political and geo-
graphical milieus. Within each stage he preserved Antonioni's dedramatizing tactics but
adapted them to spectacular panoramas. What Antonioni had occasionally done with land-
scapes, Angelopoulos did consistently and at length. Further, he countered the imper-
sonality and coldness of minimalists like StraubjHuillet and Akerman by evoking feel-
ings suitable to grim weather, forbidding topography, and the demeanor of the human
body in a monumental space. His images' characteristic emotional tone-bleakness, fu-
tility, melancholy-took sorne of the stringency out of political módernism. Unlike Tar-
kovsky, he would not let the camera hover over textures and teasing details. Unlike Jancsó,
he would not maintain a restless, headlong rhythm; he would slow the action down, as
he puts it, to the tempo of steady breathing. 42 True, by playing out his dramas in vast
landscapes he recalled Jancsó, but instead of the exuberant rolling expanse of the Hun-
garian plains, Angelopoulos offered rocky mountainsides and overcast seascapes: land-
scapes that exuded mournfulness. In sum, he sustained the European modernist tradi-
tion not only through time-shifting narration and allegorical tales of History but also
through an aesthetic of austere spectacle. By finding a way to innovate within a compet-
itive tradition, he revived and revised staging techniques developed in the 195os and 19 6os.
Angelopoulos's gamble succeeded; he became the foremostlong-take director ofhis time.

The technique became the basis of his style in his tetralogy, extending the shot from an
average of 72 seconds in Days of'J6 and 105 seconds in The Travellíng Players to zo6 sec-
onds in The Hunters, then stepping back down to 107 seconds in Alexander the Great. In
the first trilogy of his "humanist" phase he cut back, as if shorter shots were better suited
to rendering more personalized psychology: 66 seconds average shot length in Voyage to
Cythera, 78 seconds in The Beekeeper, and 8z seconds in Landscape in the Míst. Then his
shot lengths started to rise again: The Suspended Step of the Stork averages n6 seconds,
Ulysses' Gaze 103 seconds, and.Etemíty anda Day 121 seconds. Despite these fluctuations,
every film remains extraordinary in its avoidance of editing. In a period when a two-hour
commercial film would contain between 900 and 1,8oo shots, all of Angelopoulos' films
contained fewer than 150, and most fewer than 100. Sorne of those shots runa full cam-
era reel. As with Antonioni and Jancsó, awareness of the apparently endless length of
the take becomes an ingredient of the viewer's experience.
Justas pronounced was Angelopoulos's preference for very distant shots. Sorne long-
take films keep the camera close to the figures (e.g., Fellini's 8 1j2, Alexei Guerman's
Khroustalíev, My Car!), but Angelopoulos favors the long-shot and extreme-long-shot range.
He doesn't avoid medium shots entirely, but usually they are incorporated into much wider

views. Even in interiors his camera assumes a considerable distance from the action, and
outdoors it can reduce the humans to mere dots. He relies, with a somewhat anachro-
nistic idealism, on the powers of cinema to present fine detail within a large-scale im-
age. Angelopoulos's films depend so crucially on fine-grained photographic rendition of
immense spaces that much of their impact is lost on a television monitor, where a char-
acter may be only a clump of pixels. He is one of the last directors to design his images
specifically for the theater screen.
Long takes, long shots: the consistency is remarkable, but recognizing these factors
constitutes only a first step toward understanding Angelopoulos's style. How does he use
the long take to achieve his characteristic effects? What functions are performed by the
distant framings? And how do these stylistic patterns revise norms of staging circulat-
ing at his moment?
Most generally, Angelopoulos gains what other filmmakers in this tradition gain: the
simultaneous presence of many elements in the visual field, soliciting the viewer to search
out revealing aspects; the gradation of emphasis that activates secondary elements with
special vividness; the sustaining of rhythm through the movement and stillness of figures
and their coordination with the moving camera. Yet no deep-space directors befare the
196os relied so completely on the long shot and the extreme long shot. Like Braque car-
rying Cubism beyond Picasso, like Hindemith taking neoclassicism past Stravinsky, An-
gelopoulos pursues the dramatic and expressive possibilities opened up by Antonioni's
dedramatized compositions but within a consistently distant view. Still, he must also tell
his story, and the continuous long shot poses problems on this front. Angelopoulos must
now make the shot's narrative development legible-if notas evident as in other stylistic
traditions, at least minimally apparent. As with Feuillade and Mizoguchi, we can thus
ask: How is attention guided and maintained within these images? Angelopoulos em-
ploys several staging strategies, sorne of which we have seen operating since the 1910S,
others of more recent vintage.
Most obvious is centering. A style based in tight framings, such as Hollywood's in-
tensified continuity, will tend to keep the center of the widescreen frame vacant, using
cutting to balance slightly off-center dos e shots against one another (Figs. 1.47-I. 50). But
in a long-shot, long-take aesthetic the central zone becomes an important guide to what
is salient. The more distant the shot, even if it is comparatively empty, the more likely
that key dramatic inform;tion will rest in or pass through the geometrical center of the
picture format. This principie holds good in many Angelopoulos scenes already men-
tioned (for example, Figs. 4.1, 4·3· 4-5). So does the corollary strategy of two rival centers
of interest operating in tension across the middle of the frame (Fig. 4.2).
Like other directors in the mise-en-scene tradition, Angelopoulos uses aperture fram-
ing to guide our attention. Rectangular shapes in the set highlight certain elements. When
Alexander and Voula greet their father in Voyage to Cythera, a "good Gestalt" of the three
figures is created by means of centering, a sparsely furnished frame, the father's frontal-
ity, and the sheltering box of the station doorway (Fig. 4-25). Laterin the film a more dense

4.25 Voyage to Cythera (r983): Alexander and Voula 4.26 In the tavern, rectangles segregate figures
meet their father in the station. (Voyage to Cythera). Compare Fig. 4.r.
4.27 Alexanderthe Great (r98o): atthetemple 4.28 ... so that the guide's small gesture, just left
of Poseidon, tourists pause in a hush ... of center, stands out.
shot of policemen and townsmen gathered in a café is made comprehensible through

severallines and grids. As two policemen, near frame center, explain the deportation of
Spyros, the key action is framed by the windowpane, anda nearly right-angled stovepipe
segregates a secondary batch of listeners (Fig. 4-26).
Alexander the Great boldly e~ploits aperture framing, for the camera is often very far
away from the action. As the British tourists climb to the Temple of Poseidon, from which
they will be kidnapped by Alexander's gang, the camera tilts up with them, framing the
temple from afar (Fig. 4-27). Their guide explains that the Greeks have lost faith in their
gods. One tourist walks to the top, apparently overcome by the aura of antiquity, and says,
"Shh!" while putting his finger to his lips (Fig. 4.28). Remarkably, this gesture is discernible
in our postcard view; Angelopoulos has turned the other tourists from us, raised the
speaker above the others, silhouetted him against the sky, and framed his gesture in a
slot formed by the columns. Just as audacious is the scene of Alexander's bringing his
captives to the Communist village he dominates. Gathered in the town square the vil-

lagers quarrel about how to deal with him, but then Alexander's men become visible be-
tweenhighlyplaced branches in the frame (Plate 4-2). We are cued bythe sudden silence
of the communards, the fact that they all turn from us to look at the horizon, their still-
ness when they see the band, the presence of movement at the top of the frame, and the
patches of bright colors visible on the kidnapped lords. Slowly the bandits come forward
(Plate 4-3), clear a space among the crowd, and put the captives at frame center-a tri-
umphal moment whose majesty is undercut by the opaque means of ren'dering it (Plate
4·4)· Por Feuillade and his peers aperture framing was swift and unforced, its artificial-
ity often unnoticed by the viewer. Here, as with Mizoguchi, it is a self-conscious aesthetic
effect: we are aware of straining to see bits of action within crannies of the setting.
In Mizoguchi that straining is often rewarded with narratively important information,
however diminished and fine-grained it may be. But in Angelopoulos the momentum of
storytelling is invariably dissipated by dedramatization, and the positions of the English
tourists and the villagers in these examples illustrate one distinctive staging tactic in his
repertoire. His people turn away from us, and in an unusual way. Since the late 191os,
mainstream cinema has characteristically positioned characters ata three-quarter frontal
angle. (Interestingly, sorne psychologists have suggested that this is the most informa-
tive posture for recognizing faces and registering eye movements.) 43 In his 195os and
early 196os work Antonioni replaced the angled frontal viewwith an exactly opposite one,
framing characters turned diagonally away from us. In our earlier shot from Il Grído the
dialogue is played with characters' backs to us in two three-quarter views (Fig. 4.16). The
effect is that of an incomplete shotfreverse-shot sequence, withholding the shot that would
showthe characters frontally. This "three-quarter dorsality" minimizes our access to char-
acter reaction-sometimes offering only a bit of cheek or jaw to watch, often obliging us
toread reactions solely from stance and posture.
Tarkovsky occasionally employs such uncommunicative views, but they are building
blocks of staging for Angelopoulos, who insists on holding them quite a while. In the fa-
mous shot from Reconstruction several men dotted around a drab gray field relieve them-
selves in variants of the three-quarter pose (Fig. 4-2), and in The Beekeeperthe hitchhildng
girl dances to the jukebox in the roadside cafe (Fig. 4.29 ). In exteriors camera movement
often works to preserve the three-quarter rear view. Alexander trails the bridal procession
in Etemity and a Day fro~ a distance, the camera angled to keep everyone in extreme
long shot and turned from us (Fig. 4·3o). Angelopoulos's scenic curve often displays a
gradual development toward three-quarter dorsality. Accordingly, frontal or profiled po-
sitions of the figures often serve as mere transitions to the three-quarter resting point
(Figs. 4-31-4.32). In Voyage to Cythera Spyros has returned to his village and meets his
old neighbor on the street, first in a marked three-quarter rear view (Fig. 4·33)· After they
share cigarettes and reflect on their departed comrades ("We were all finished in the civil
war.... Everyone lost"), the neighbor says he has no reason to stay in the village, and the
scene concludes with a rhythmic alternation of dorsal views (Figs. 4-34-4·35)·
The three-quarter rear view, apart from forcing us to infer characters' facial reactions,
162 AN.GELOPOULOS, OR MELANCHOLY

4.30 Etemity anda Day (1998): the wedding
procession.
4.29 The hitchhiker dances in The Beekeeper (r986).
4. 32 In the course of the scene his reactions become

4.31 The Travelling Players: the conversation starts by more inaccessible as he goes to the window and
letting the three-quarter poses of Electra and Pylades presents yet another three-quarter back view.
favor the poet's dialogue and facial reactions.
4·33 Voyage to Cythera: Spyros meets his old comrade.
4·34 As the old friend tums away, the camera ares
4·35 The shot ends with Spyros tentatively advancing
to follow him leaving, swiveling him from one three-
to the fence, creating another'switch of character
quarter dorsal view to another.
position as the diagonals lengthen.
also helps solve the problem of legibility in the landscape shots. The posture allows An-
gelopoulos to mark out human presence but also to coax our eye back to the surround-
ings. Instead of faces, which attract our notice even in very distant images, we get backs
and shoulders-uninformative aspects that can't hold us long. We are obliged to study
the body or, more accurately, study the body's relation to the larger field into which it's
inserted. As with Mizoguchi's distant depths and dorsal views, the three-quarter views in
Angelopoulos encourage us to pass from figure to environment.
So does the sheer paucity of what is present. The Angelopoulos long shot tends to be
sparse. The frame is not literally empty-some human figures are usually visible-but
only a few sectors of space are activated, the rest being neutralized or serving to frame the
action. Thanks to the diminutive scale, the comparative absence of figure movement (the
characters walk slowly or stand in place), anda lack of information about the characters
(reduced in size, seen from the rear, often in three-quarter view), the image goes very still.
It becomes a dead space that invites the viewer to linger over previous developments, to
wait for something new to modify the stasis, or to simply contemplate vacancy.
Antonioni had suggested the possibilities of such compositions (Fig. 4.36), but An-
gelopoulos carried the idea much further. Reconstruction makes eloquent use of the va-
cant shot (Fig. 4-2), and The Travelling Players is filled with such images, most notably the
bookend shots of the troupe's arrival at the film's beginning and end (Figs. 4·37-4·38). In
The Beekeeper the empty shot is often used to present Alexander tending his hives (Fig.
4·39)· A more stripped-down version occurs in Landscape in the Mist, when the two run-
away children part from Orestes on the motorway (Fig. 4-40).
The sparseness of the frame affects the pacing of the long shot. If the viewer is fully to
take in such distant images, they must be held on the screen for sorne time. Yet by refus-
ing to pack them with movement, Angelopoulos brakes the dramatic rhythm. Searching
164 ANGElOPOUlOS, OR MELANCHOLY

4.36 Red Desert: three-quarter dorsality and the spaces
between people. Compare Figs. 4-2 and 4-16.
4·37 The Travelling Players: the first shot, set in 1952.
4.38 The Travelling Players: the final shot, with the 4·39 The Beekeeper.
players starting their journey in 1939.
4.40 Landscape in the Mist (1988): Angelopoulos's high

angle sets the figures in a wedge of unfilled space.

4.41 Alexander the Great: The cqmmunards surrender.
for gestures and telltale alignments of figures, the viewer must test a variety of ways to fill
such hollow shots with meaning. The result, beyond the self-conscious pictorialism, is a
suspension of dramatic progression that allows both detached contemplation anda sense
of dry, understated emotion. In a distant shot communards under Alexander the Great's
command surrender their weapons. We have no access to their facial expressions, but we
can read their defeat from their weary loping to obey his arder (Fig. 4-4r).
Tactics 'of centering and aperture framing highlight the (already attenuated) story ac-
tion while three-quarter dorsality and spare settings deflect us from it. Angelopoulos do es
not, however, stop with this dynamic. He goes on to "preform" his figures, interiors, and
landscapes by means of a consistent set of dedramatized staging options. Here again we
can see his synthesizing role. None of these schemas is unique to him, but he caneen-
trates so single-mindedly on them and explores them so imaginativelythatthey have come
to form his signature, stamping every film as "by Angelopoulos." They give each film a
theme-and-variations structure; one image will cometo be seen as a return to or devia-
tion from another image shown earlier in the film or seen elsewhere in the oeuvre. And
these types of images can be combined, within a single sequence or even within a sin-
gle shot, to maximize their visual and dramatic possibilities. Angelopoulos revises and
explores the resources of two predominant image schemas. (See box.)
Distanced recessiveness, emerging in Europe during the r9sos, continued to be a
salient option throughout the r97os, and Angelopoulos seized on itas a central staging
tactic. He was able to fine-tune it by combining it with the empty frame, three-quarter
dorsality, and strongly perspectiva! settings. When he organizes a recessive shot around
central perspective, as in interiors or on city streets or roadways, the vanishing point can
pull our attention to important action. The rape ofVoula in Landscape in the Mist becomes
all the more shocking because the diagonal plunge of the truck and roadway keeps forc-
ing our eye back to the truck driver's pursuit (Fig. 4-50). But central perspective is seldom

TWO WAYS TO DEDRAMATIZE FILMIC SPACE
Between the late 19505 and the early 1970s European filmmakers explored image schemas
that could mute the flow of drama within a scene. Both schemas also constituted reac-
tions against the deep-focu5 style that had emerged in American cinema in the 1940s.
One sort of image makes use of what the art historian Heinrich Wolfflin called "rece5-
5ive" space. 44 He re figures and architectural spaces present diagonals that shoot from fore-
ground to background. Directors from the 19405 to the 196os had explored a deep-focus
variant of the recessive image by placing the foreground plane quite el ose to the camera.
Welles made this device part ofhis 5tylistic signature, and many directors around the world
embraced the plunging deep-focus look (Fig. 4-42). The neorealists and Antonioni, how-
ever, often presented less-aggressive depth, setting the foreground plane a fair distance
from the camera, as Japanese directors ofthe 1930s had. Wellesian depth hyperdramatizes
the action by thrusting one plane out at us, whereas the milder recessiveness aids de-
dramatization, especially when combined with dorsality and vacant areas ofthe shot (Fig.
4-43). This image could make characters' expressions and relationships less easy to read
at one glance, and by avoiding a loomingface or prop, this compositional device gave land-
scape and architecture more prominence (Fig. 4-44).
During the 196os, recessive, wide-angle depth was contested by another strain of stag-
ing and shootingthat, again following Wolfflin, 1will call "planimetric." 45 Herethe background
is resolutely perpendicular to the lens axis, and the figures stand fully frontal, in profile, or
with their backs directly toward us. We can find early examples-even in Antonioni (Fig.
4-45)-but the technique developed most evidently within the "new waves" ofthe late 1950s.
Young directors gravitated toward a less volumetric, more self-consciously "modernist"
image-flatter, obviously constructed, sometimes posing disconcerting optical puzzles (Fig.
4-46). Political modernists quickly picked up on the device: Godard's to-ca mera monologues
in La Chinoise (1967) became prototypes (Fig. 4-47). The new planimetric image was partic-
ularly suited to that ascetic strain of political modernism. lt is central to jeanne Dielmann
(Fig. 4.22 above), as well asto Fassbinder's most minimalist exercise, Katzelmacher (Fig. 4-48).
4.42 A deep-focus close view from the Egyptian film 4-43 A zigzag use of distant depth in Luchino
The Land (Youssef Chahine, r969). Vísconti's La telTa trema (r948).

4·44 I Vinti (Antonioni, 1952): urbanlandscape
and distant figures.
4.46 Reflections in a coffee-bar counter play on

illusions of flatness and depth (Identification Marks:
None, Jerzy Skolimowski, 1965).
4·49 The long lens reduces depth and makes distant

planes similar msize (I Even Met Happy Gypsies,
4.48 Katzelmacher (R. W. Fassbinder,1969): Alexander Petrovié, 1967).
a planimetric lineup of loafers.
The sources ofthis schema are various. Most proximately, during the 196os, when shoot-
ing on location became more common, filmmakers used long ("telephoto") lenses much
more frequently, and these narrowed the playing area and flattened space into parallel planes
(Fig. 4-49). Once these shots beca me common, many directors began elaborating images
that looked more shallow and perpendicular. Greenbergian conceptions of modernism as
"assertingthe picture plane" and "denying representational depth," disseminated through
high culture in the 196os and 1970s, may al so ha ve steered so me filmmakers to these more
abstrélct compositions.
4· 50 Landscape in the Mist: the truck driver's rape of 4.51 The Travelling flayers: a monologue is rehearsed.
Voula, with the vanishing point giving the event a grim
inevitability.
4.52 The Suspended Step ofthe Stork (1991):

empty space and interrupted gesture.
this deterministic in Angelopoulos. He often creates a tension between a central vanish-

ing point and a foreground, off-center figure. This effect is marked in the declamations
of The TI·avelling Players (Fig. 4·5I), as well as in the handling of the border station in The
Suspended Step ofthe Stork (Fig. 4.52).
Typically, the perspective is not so neatly centered. The endless corridors of the prison
in Days of '.36 and of the hotel in The Hunters remind us that Angelopoulos can evoke a
more oblique sort of depth. He uses recessional perspective to diminish our view of salient
information, further dedramatizing the scene and obliging us to concentrate on very dis-
tant clues to the plot's progress. The spectator must strain to follow the tiniest wrinkles
in the action.
A bold example occurs in The Hunters. Yorgos is sitting in a tavern, his back to us, and
two burly men cometo sit before him in the foreground (Fig. 4·53)· One complains that
the leftists are planning a coup. Angry, Yorgos rises and starts to singa left-wing protest
song as he threads his way into the distance (Fig. 4-54). The camera ares left, keeping
him more or less centered as he uncertainly :finishes the song, his back still to us, caught

4·53 The Hunters (1977): Yorgos confronted by thugs. 4·54 Yorgos retreats, singing.
4·55 Yorgos in the distance, still singing.
in a slim aperture (Fig. 4-55). If the scene had been shot from the opposite angle, Yorgos
would advance to the camera, and this, along with his defiant singing, could malee him
heroic. Here, his shrinking to a tiny silhouette and the weakening of his voice undercut
his commitment, foreshadowing his eventual capitulation to the right-wing forces. Pic-
torially, the composition engages the viewer in a steadily intensifying act of visual con-
centration on a man who will become little more than a speck.
Here the lighting and central placement highlight Yorgos, but Angelopoulos also uses
architecture to shape the frame space. Recessive diagonals can slice a locale into sharply
separated zones. Antonioni explored this option occasionally, but from the earliest scenes
of Reconstruction Angelopoulos made it central to his handling of "empty" shots (Fig.
4.56). Assigning cells of space to characters is easily thematized as expressing division
and incommunicability, but I think that the perceptual dynamics of such shots are more
important, especially in the context of Angelopoulos's distant framings. If foreground
areas can be kept relatively bare, stretching to the middle ground, then far-off gates, doors,
or street corners can mark distant incidents as important (Fig. 4·57)·
Within interiors Angelopoulos frequently creates recessive perspectives around door-

4·57 As the wedding guests of The Beekeeper leave
4.56 Diagonals dividing up frame space the' ceremony in a characteristically open landscape
in Reconstruction. shot, the wedding couple comes out in the far distance,
framed in the gateway.
4.58 After doorways frame the police interrogation of 4· 59 ... and in the couple's reenactment of the murder
Eleni (4-r), similar compositions are used in the lover's (Reconstruction).
confession ...
ways. In Reconstructíon a recurring use of the household's doorway measures the progress
of the action (Figs. 4-1, 4.58, 4-59). And Days ofj6 treats certain scenes as permutations
of recessional views through apertures. The authorities constantly return to the cell in which
Sofianos holds Kriezis hostage, allowingus the narrowest sliver of access (Figs. 4.60-4-62).
This obliqueness is motivated as well by the consistently external standpoint the narration
presents; we are always attached to the authorities outside the cell and are never allowed to
go inside with the prisoner and his hostage. Spatial obliquity becomes narrational opacity.
The zigzag scanning demanded by such recessional shots recalls the wide-angle depth
associated with 1940s trends, but Angelopoulos, starting his career after Antonioni, Jancsó,
and others had developed a more distanced recessiveness, knows the advantages of set-
ting the nearest plane sorne distance from us. In modern European cinema the empty
foreground often signals an aesthetic distance between the viewer and the characters' sit-

4.60 Days of )6. 4.61 Daysof'.J6.
4.62 Days of '.36.
uations. At first glance this strategy of medium-shot depth would seem to recall the
schemas employed by Feuillade and his contemporaries, but it actually inverts the dra-
matic scale of values implicit in their shots. In the r9ros the rising action of a scene pulled
the actors toward the camera, with greater drama occurring in the closest planes. An-
gelopoulos, in flagrant defiance of audience empathy, often malees his characters retreat
from us, as when Yorgos leaves the table (Figs. 4·53-4·55), and the scene's climax may be
played out at the points farthest from the foreground.
The distanced, recessive frame is central to Angelopoulos's mise-en-scene from the
start, but after Days of '36 the planimetric composition starts to develop as an alternative.
Throughout The Travelling Players characters are ranged in friezelike compositions, ei-
ther within the theater (Fig. 4-63) or within landscapes (Fig. 4.64). Several critics have
pointed out that this device·turns many locales into Brechtian tableaux, paralleling his-
torical events with the performance of the players, 46 but we should also note that An-
gelopoulos is adapting a compositional schema that was already circulating in his milieu
(see box). His subsequent films employ the planimetric image to combine both frontal

4.63 The TI·avelling Players: a lateral performance 4· 64 The Travelling Players: the long lens turns
arrangement. a landscape into horizontal bands.
and profile views or to create muted moments through dorsality. He striates landscapes
by spreading ribbons of figures parallel to the horizon, as in the breathtaking wedding
ceremony atthe riverside in The Suspended Step ofthe Stork (Figs. 4-65-4.67). In addition,
the "clothesline" effect of the planimetric image seems to encourage his camera to pan
or track in order to explore all those parallel vectors running through the shot. And aper-
tures play no less important a role in the planimetric image than in the recessive one. In
Landscape in the Mist, when Voula stands at the station doorway and speaks of darkness
and light, railway track workers riding on their handcar are first seen as spectral blobs of
yellow in the right window pane before they coast past the doorway (Plates 4· 5-4. 6).
From first to last, the planimetric imagery of Eternity and a Day slips toward pictorial
abstraction, perhaps evoking the dying poet's yearning for a spiritual "beyond" in mem-
ory or in death. The opening, with the boy Alexander called outside, follows him from
his room toa staircase; the camera lingers on a tall window (Fig. 4-68). Via a cut, the win-
dow frame gives way to another straight-on rectangle, the silhouette of the family's beach
pavilion as the boy rushes in from the front (Fig. 4-69). As he is joined by friends, they
race to the surf, the camera tracking forward and zooming in to create a planimetric im-
age (Fig. 4· 70). Over the film, Angelopoulos turns streets, a construction site, even a mas-
sive ship into planimetric surfaces. Within a single shot, a quasi-documentary image of
Alexander walking along the harbor (Fig. 4-7r) becomes planimetric as he passes (Fig.
4.72) and turns into pure abstraction (Fig. 4·73)· Again and again, through Alexander's
memories we return to the villa and beach ofhis childhood and marriage (Figs. 4· 74-4. 75),
befare the film's final shot pins him to the horizon (Fig. 4.76).
Although the recessional image and the planimetric one may seem to be rivals, Angelo-
poulos exploits both. In his work they form a pair of schemas that can be revised from
film to film. We instantly recognize the Angelopoulos café (recessional, with oblique
depth), the Angelopoulos roadside (recessional, often with central perspective), the Angelo-
poulos beach or riverside (planimetric, with clotheslined figures), and so on. Further, a

4065 Suspended Step ofthe Stork: a couple separated 4066 ooofaces the groom arriving on the other sideo
by a border is about to marryo The bride's retinue on
one side of the river ooo
40 6 7 Another planar composition shows the wedding 4068 Eterníty anda Dayo
ceremonyo
4 6 9 Eternity and a Dayo

o 4070 Eternity anda Dayo
4 71 Eternity and a Dayo

o 4o72 Eternity anda Dayo

4· 73 Eternity and a Day. 4·74 Eternity anda Day.
4·75 Eternity anda Day. 4· 76 Eternity anda Day.
particular image may combine the two options through camera movement or staging
(Figs. 4·77-4·78). The stunning finale of Suspended Step shows the reporter starting off
along the riveras the linemen ascend the poles (Fig. 4-79). But then the camera ares
rightward to create a monumentally planimetric tableau as the reporter pauses at the
river and the men pull the lines taut (Fig. 4-8o). A sharp diagonal has become a lami-
nated landscape.
With sorne sense of Angelopoulos's salient principies of visual design we can reevaluate
our first impressions about his technique. The long take can now be seen as creating,
sustaining, or blending empty shots and three-quarter views, recessional and planimet-
ric compositions. Even when th~ long take does not merge two time periods within the
shot, as in The Travelling Players and The Hunters, it also serves to confine us to certain
sorts of images; very soon we learn that we will not get cut-in close-ups or shotjreverse
shots; we mustworkwith the comparatively distantview. Similarly, the temps morts com-
pel us to concentrate on the gradual changes that constitute the action.
Yet the very scale of what counts as action in these frames poses a problem. The shots
help tell the story but so slowly and sparsely that they outrun standard conceptions of
narrative economy. Our next impulse is to interpret them, but that path is usually no more
rewarding, since the flagrant lack of narrative economy in the images is matched by a
lack of symbolic richness as well. (Hence the objection voiced by one nonadmirer: "O.K.,
S'
L.
4· 77 One shot in The Hunters begins as a horizontal 4.78 As Yannis moves, however, an arcing camera
and frontal setup. creates a recessive composition that puts the figures
in three-quarter back views.
4·79 Suspended Step ofthe Stork. 4.80 Suspended Step ofthe Stork.
we got it, Theo, nowturn it o:ff!") 47 The protracted image outruns its denotative and sym-
bolic aspects, striving instead for both emotional expressivity and formal abstraction.
On one hand this is "mood cinema," like mood music: the story is amplified not only
through the threnodic score but also through the skies, the landscapes, and the bearing
of the humans dotted around the frame. On the other hand the fastidious compositions
and stringent vectors of movement ask to be apprehended as monumental pattern. Lenin's
head, lashed to the barge d.dfting clown the Danu be (Plate 4.r), passing people kneeling
and crossing themselves on shore, soon stops being a symbol of the death of Commu-
nism and forms an occasion for grave emotion, mixing sorrow and a guarded exhilara-
tion. The throb of the barge's engine is overwhelmed by Eleni Karaindrou's briskly pul-
sating seo re, setting a mournful viola and other solo instruments against mas sed and rising
strings. The alternating shots of the barge and the watchers on shore are cut in time to
the variations worked on the brightening, dancelike melody, as if this were a weirdly spare
music video. 48 After nearly three and a half minutes the statue has become a massive
chunk of the landscape, a drifting iceberg counterpointed to the enthralled people on the
bank, themselves turned into a stream of planimetric bands. Mizoguchi's films kept nar-

rative denotation, expressivity, symbolic meaning, and pictorial abstraction in balance,
but Angelopoulos has reshifted the image's weight. He sacrifices storytelling and moves
beyond symbolic purport in order to conjure up a bleakly expressive cinema that also lays
claim to overpowering beauty.
The commitment to long takes, distant views, sparse frames, and temps morts stakes
everything on the unfolding image. Since cuts are unlikely to come, we must wait for the
shot to reveal its mysteries at its own pace. The slackened rhythm allows us to form rather
explicit expectations about how the staging will develop. Feuillade and his contemporaries
had no time for such niceties; they left such expectations tacit, exploiting them for the
sake of fluid visual :r:arration. Mizoguchi balanced compelling plot situations with shots
that might tease us with fastidious changes in design. Angelopoulos is yet more overt,
announcing himself as an impresario of vision. He will show us everything, but in good
time, and ata tempo that drains normal dramatic momentum out of the scene. The shot
will pursue its own spatial trajectory. During the final battle for the village in Alexander
the Great, Alexander's son is struck by a bullet as he runs for cover; he is rescued by a
housewife (Figs. 4.8r-4-87). His pain and her panic are played out far from the camera,
and his escape is further dedramatized by taking place in the most distant reaches of the
shot. Here the spatial are does not match the dramatic one: each rising phase of the ac-
tion takes place farther and farther away.
Endowing the long take with its own spatial structure often leads Angelopoulos to build
the shot toward a purely pictorial climax. That may be a sublime landscape or a grand
enigmatic emblem, like the gigantic stone hand lifted mysteriously from the bay in Land-
scape in the Mist (Fig. 4.88). Or the climax may be a leap into pure abstraction, as we have
already seen in the movement toward planimetric imagery in Etemity and a Day. Sorne-
times the pictorial epiphany will come at the end of the shot, sometimes at a point that
permits a diminuendo into something more prosaic. In any case the visual climax may
reinforce a dramatic climax, or even create one.
Camera movement, present in almost every long take that Angelopoulos makes, pro-
vides help in creating pictorial epiphanies. U sually the camera follows characters in mo-
tion, sometimes picking up one while dropping another. This tactic allows Angelopou-
los to keep the shot alive, to sustain visual interest while also linking or developing his
characteristic compositions, ~sin the Voyage to Cythera and Suspended Step instances al-
ready mentioned (Figs. + 33-4.3 5, 4-79-4-80). But his most common camera movement
derives from a very old schema that he has revised for his own purposes. Recall the scene
from The Travelling Players discussed at the outset of this chapter. The troupe walks to
town from the waterfront, moving diagonally toward us, the camera tracldng to keep
them ata three-quarter angle (Fig. 4-4). Then the camera slows to let them pass right-
ward, panning to keep them in profile (Fig. 4·5)· The camera slows still more, and the ac-
tors walk diagonally into the distance, turned from us in a three-quarj:er view comple-
mentary to that seen at the start of the shot. Sorne earlier filmmakers used this angular
pickupjprofiled passingfangular walkaway pattern, most commonly in scenes shot on

4.81 Alexander the Great: the camera picks up 4.82 ... and pans right with him.
Alexander's son along a diagonal ...
4. 8 3 Another director would have staged the boy's fall 4.84 The woman in the background comes to cradle
while he was close to the camera, but instead the young him as he revives.
Alexander drops in the middle distance, along another
diagonal.
location (for example, Mizoguchi's Sisters ofthe Gion, r936), although closer versions are
feasible in large sets (for example, Renoir's Rules ofthe Game, r939). 49 This schema is
often seen in postwar neorealist movies and in Hollywood films shot on location. (Pre-
minger is especially fond of it in Exodus, r96o, and Advise and Consent, r962).
This come-and-go patt!'!rn allows Angelopoulos to stmcture his scenes around a visual
are that may or may not synchronize with the conventional dramatic one. The simplest
possibility is to use the diagonal-approach phase of the shot to establish the main players
in the scene and to save the visual revelation for the field revealed at the end of the pan-
ning movement. This is more or less what happens in the boy's wounding in Alexander
the Great (Figs. 4.8r-4.87) and the time-shifting stroll in The Travelling Players (Figs.
4·4-4-ro). The diagonal approachjdiagonal withdrawal schema can also generate a certain
suspense: we see characters who are looking at something offscreen, and the camera pans
with them as they move toward something revelatory, a visualjdramatic climax.
A good example occurs in Ulysses' Gaze, when the protagonist, A, follows a woman

4.85 After going inside and returning, she binds his 4.86 ... carries ~im to the patientlywaiting horse ...
wound ...
4.87 , .. and shoos it away at the end of the lane. 4.88 Landscape in the Mist.
down a street (Fig. 4.89). The camera pans to let the two pass then picks them up on the
opposite diagonal, now revealing a vast crowd bearing candles (Fig. 4-90). Here, as so
often, the last phase of the shot shows space on a grand scale. The climax is more visual
than dramatic, or, rather, by being a visual climax it can create a dramatic one, even though
we may be uncertain about exactlywhat plot action is taking place. In this shot from Ulysses'
Gaze Angelopoulos piles on the complications, with police pouring into the midground
as the camera cranes up (Fig. 4.91) and then a crowd of umbrellas pressing into the fore-
ground (Fig. 4.92). After everything freezes into a tableau, the crowd rushes the police.
The shot ends at the height of visual and dramatic intensity.
So the final phase of the diagonal approachjprofiled panjdiagonal retreat schema can
provide a crescendo when something massive is revealed. Just as often, though, An-
gelopoulos reserves the depths of the shot for developments on a somewhat smaller scale.
Take the scene in Voyage to Cythera in which Katerina offers to coax the recalcitrant Spy-
ros out of their home. The sequence starts with her, their son Alexander, and the town

4.89 Ulysses' Gaze (1995). 4.90 Ulysses' Gaze.
4.91 Ulysses' Gaze. 4.92 Ulysses' Gaze.
officials approaching the cottage (Fig. 4·93)· She passes fairly near the camera, but the
closest moment of facial expression in the scene is presented not as the climax but as
preparation for it (Fig. 4·94), leading from a three-quarter dorsal view (Fig. 4-95) to her
arrival at the door of the cottage, to meet Spyros (Fig. 4-96). "Always the same," says Ka-
terina. "When you're afraid, you hide." After another moment they embrace. At this great
distance from the camera, seen through the spindly gate work, Spyros accepts leaving his
home for permanent exile. Whereas the I 9 ros director would stage this climax in the clos-
est plane, Angelopoulos pushes the actors very far back, throwing dramatic structure out
of gear with spatial patterning. The shot, however, is not over. Turning, the old couple
return to the gate tostare ilt the men offscreen (Fig. 4-97). After Spyros says, "Withered
apple" (a phrase he uses to evoke both his lost lands and his relation to Katerina), the two-
minute shot ends. This is another way to round off the action-bringing figures back to
the middle ground as a diminuendo.
In shots such as this, character movement and camera movement participate in a larger
dynamic of opening and filling space ata tempo that allows us to anticipate how the block-
ing will develop. Thanks to the long take, the muted action, and dead intervals, Angelo-
poulos prolongs the process of staging, leaving us plenty of time to recognize that we are
forming expectations about where the character or camera will go next. In this respect
Angelopoulos slows clown 195os Antonioni.

v
PLATE 4.1 Ulysses' Gaze.
PLATE 4.2 AlexandertheGreat:inthefar

distance, beyond the tree branches, Alexander's
band brings their hostages to the village.
PLATE 4·3 The procession approaches the PLATE 4·4 The crowd parts, revealing the captives
rniddle ground, still screened by branches. as they parade through the center of the frarne.
PLATE 4·5 Landscape in the Mist: Voula in the P LA TE 4· 6 ... beco me track workers coasting by.
train station; yellow blobs in an aperture ...
PLATE 4·7 Etemity anda Day: Alexander says P LATE 4· 8 Rushing to the ship at the edge of
good-bye to the Albanian hoy. the frarne, the hoy is fleetingly lit by the car's
taillight, creating another pictorial epiphany.
P LA TE 5.1 Summer at Grandpa's: Ting-ting tumbles P LATE 5. 2 The madwoman scrambles onto the tracks
onto the tracks, losing her toy fan. to save her.
P LATE 5. 3 As the train roars past, we glimpse them P LA TE 5-4 A later view through a train in Summer
through the cars; the fan, miraculously unscathed, tips at Grandpa's.
over and starts to spin in the opposite direction.
P LATE 5· 5 City of Sadness: the district head and his P LA TE 5. 6 As the scene develops, soldiers charge
officers arrive looking for Wen-heung; Grandfather Lin into the area on the far left rear, from which we hear
and his wife confront them in silhouette, with Lin on turmoil. Now the district head blocks Grandfather Lin,
left of center. and family members emerge into the tíny slot tucked
into the left distance.
P LATE 5. 7 Flowers of Shanghai: There is the sound PLATE 5·8 Afterpeeringoutthewindow, Hong comes
of commotion in the street. As Wang drinks in the back to the table as the camera continues its curvilinear
foreground, Hong rises from the table and walks path, catching him and the woman in the same
toward the distant window on the right, his pace aperture shown in Plate 5·7·
fitting smoothly into the camera's rightward are. He can
be seen in retreating silhouette along with a woman.
4· 93 Voyage to Cythera: Katerina comes to the camera 4. 94 The camera slows to let her pass in profile.
in a diagonal medium shot, the camera tracking back
to preserve the angle.
4· 9 5 Katerina continues past us, and the camera tracks 4· 9 6 She goes diagonally to the cottage door (near
her to the gate in a three-quarter rear view. the center of the frame), saying, "It's me." After a
long pause the door unlatches and Spyros comes out.
4· 97 The shot ends with the old couple in the middle

ground.
4.98 Suspended Step ofthe Stork. 4·99 Suspended Step ofthe Stork.
4.1 o o Suspended Step ofthe Stork.
Since the early years of cinema, one prominent staging schema has relied on filling
in the blanks. As we've seen in both Feuillade and Mizoguchi, the director may leave a
vacant spot in the frame and then bring an actor into it, calling attention to the new figure
while also completing the composition. Angelopoulos lays this technique bare by overtly
creating gaps that he will then slowly fill, delaying the moment when the shot clicks into
place. In a café scene in Suspended Step the reporter meets the young bride. The camera
follows him striding toward her through the crowd (Fig. 4-98), but suddenly (and im-
plausibly) a wide stretch of the dance floor opens to allow us an unimpeded view of her
in the background (Fig. 4·99)· We are given several moments to speculate on who will
move next, but then the camera edges slightly leftward, clearing still more room for the
couple; eventually the bride rises and comes to the dead center of the frame (Fig. 4-roo).
Even without camera movement, simply filling a gap can develop and climax the long
take. We've already seen this happen in the blank foregrounds of the street in Ulysses'
Gaze, filled first by police and then, more surprisingly, by the ranks of umbrellas (Figs.
4·90-4-92). In one episode of The Hunters the police fan out across a street but charita-
bly leave a slot that will serve as a window through which we can watch the approach of
the peace demonstrators (Fig. 4.ror), the arrival of the car that will snatch Yannis (Fig.
4.ro2), and then the aftermath of the clash, with the police dispersing and the dead vic-
tim lying in the street at the center of the shot's perspective (Fig. 4-I03). It is as if the en-

4.101 The Hunters: aperture framing with masses 4.1 02 The Hunters.
ofpeople.
4.103 The Hunters.
tire are of the action were known in advance. Watch this space, the shot implies from the
outset, and eventually you will be rewarded.
We study the distant view, we probe those figures turned from us, we sean the hori-
zontal stretch or wait for action ata vanishing point, we form expectations about the tra-
jectory of the camera or the characters. Our patience is often rewarded at the end of a
shot. The visual climax may be somewhat striking, as in this Hunters scene; it may be
nothing short of stunning, as in linemen stretched out like notes on a staff (Suspended
Step, Fig. 4.8o) ora gigantic hand rising from the bay to float over the city (Landscape in
the Mist, Fig. 4-88). It may also be quite muted, as when men in yellow slickers slide ghost-
like through the rain, or when the boy leaving Alexander's car for an uncertain future
rushes past the taillights and his face turns brilliant red for an instant (Plates 4.7-4-8).
In all cases the strategy of building a long take to a moment of heightened pictorial ex-
pressivity, in the context of a drama that muffles the sort of emotional investment so-
licited by mainstream storytelling, has its source in a modernist aesthetic. Angelopoulos
has blended salient techniques of two traditions of European cinema-Antonioni's de-

dramatization and austere political modernism-in order to sustain a refined awareness
of the very act of apprehending the scene, an experience crucial to the tradition of cine-
matic modernism.
His shots, then, curiously halt the forward time of dramatic propulsion; narrative sta-
sis becomes the norm, against which moments of splendor stand out. The plot suspends
itself, like the reporter's leg at the border, for the sake of pictorial and expressive impact-
often on a stupendous scale. The effect arises not only from a canny play with history and
memory but also from fresh revisions of staging principies stretching baclc through the
r95os to the first years of cinema.
To what broader ends? Granting the two-phase periodization of Angelopoulos's work, we

can note that in the films before Voyage to Cythera all the techniques we have examined
accord with the goals of a "political modernism." By concentrating on groups and by stag-
ing in a manner at once minimalist and monumental, Angelopoulos blocks traditional
paths to empathy. This yields a critica! detachment that in turn invites us to reflect on the
larger historical forces at work in a situation. The later work is more concentrated on the
individual, delineating personal crises that express, as the emigrant author of Suspended
Step puts it, fin de siecle melancholy. This tendency toward portrayirig psychological crises
can be seen as well in Angelopoulos's new reliance on major stars, on nondiegetic mu-
sic, andona more self-conscious spectacle. We might consider him to be offering us an
updated version of '~ntoniennui." Both phases exploit slowness of rhythm, the vagaries
of landscape, and sparseness of composition.
I think that the two-part periodization holds good, but it is worth pointing out that An-
gelopoulos's later work has not relinquished political critique. He tacldes concrete polit-
ical issues of his moment: the death of Marxism (Voyage to Cythera, Ulysses' Gaze), the
desperate flow of populations across European borders (Landscape in the Mist, Suspended
Step), and the possibility of a national politics based on honor (Suspended Step). One can
hardly imagine the Antonioni of the r95os making a film about Algeria or the Berlin
Wall, but Angelopoulos unswervingly bears witness to political crisis. Conversely, even
in his "Brechtian" days he gave his work a strong emotional overlay. Jean-Marie Straub
and Daniele Huillet, cmcial~y influenced by Bresson, achieve a discomfiting emotional
neutrality throughout their work, but Angelopoulos's r970s films, operating under the
aegis of Antonioni, are soaked in feelings of solitude, bleakness, and futility. In both
StraubjHuillet's Not Reconciled (r965) and The Ti·avelling Players, cycles of national his-
tory are fractured into a complicated flashback stmcture, but the dedramatization is
achieved in radically different ways. Straub and Huillet rely on disorienting cuts, close-
ups of nonactors stiffiy reciting monologues, and temps morts that refuse to be read as
expressing an atmosphere. Angelopoulos presents long takes, distant declamations, and
stillnesses pervaded by oppression and muted despair.
Across his career certain emphases have shifted, but he has always combined social
184 A N G EL O PO U LO S, O R M EL ANCHO L Y
critique-grounded at first in Marxism, now in humanist ethics-with a tone that, he
claims, is not exactly pessimistic. "1 ama melancholic. And according to Aristotle, melan-
choly is the source of the creative spirit." 50 He sometimes attributes this tone to the lost
196os dream of social revolution orto the insularity of most people today, cut off from
each other and history. 51 But he also suggests that his melancholy has local sources: "We
live in a country of memories, of aged stone, of broken statues." 52
Angelopoulos's achievement shows how a filmmaking tradition can renew itself in
the contemporary moment. He has pushed certain insights of Antonioni to new limits,
encouraged by the achievements of others (Tarkovsky, Jancsó, the minimalist radicals)
and by broader aesthetic currents (Brechtianism particularly). Similarly, he has blended
distinct stylistic schemas available in his milieu-the three-quarter view, the come-and-
go pan, the deeply perspectiva! shot, and the planimetric framing-into an expressive
whole. That he has won such renown suggests that for many viewers the postwar tradi-
tion has not exhausted itself, that it can endow our world of snack bars, video clips, and
ethnic wars with a severe, contemplative beauty. At a moment when European cinema,
both popular and elitist, seems to be aping Hollywood, Angelopoulos's work takes on
unique importance. Sometimes mannered, often majestic, almost always melancholy, An-
gelopoulos demonstrates that, contrary to what the prophets of postmodernity keep telling
us, cinematic modernism can still open our eyes.

MIZOGUCHI'S MODULATION STYLE

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MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION

3. 1 2 The LiJe of Oharu.

3.20 Taki no Shiraito.

lOO MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION

MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION 101

102 MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION

3.27 Oyuki the Virgin. 3. 28 Oyuki the Vírgin.

3-2 9 Oyukí the Vírgin. 3.30 Oyukí the Vírgin.

MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION 103

104 MIZ.OGUCHI, OR MODULATION

3-3 6 After he has fallen under Ayakds spell, his faithful

MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION 105

106 MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION

3.41 Taki no Shiraito. 3.42 Taki no Shiraito.

MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION 107

108 MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION

MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION 109

3·49 Another angle puts the father in the foreground.

110 MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION

MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION 111

112 MJZOG'UCHI, OR MODULATION

3.58 Naniwa Elegy. 3·59 Naniwa Elegy.

MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION 113

114 MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION

3.62 Naníwa Elegy. 3.63 Naníwa Elegy.

MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION 115

3.66 Naniwa Elegy.

116 MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION

MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION 117

3.71 The ritual suicides that conclude Genroku

MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION 119

3. 78 ... unti! she is revealed watching the young

120 MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION

3. 81 Once more the aunt arrives in the background,

MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION 121

3.86 The Story ofthe Last Chrysanthemum.

122 MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION

MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION 123

3.91 My Lave Has Been Burníng: blocked by the shifting

MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION 125

3·94 The Love ofSumako the Actress.

126 MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION

MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION 127

128 MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION

MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION 129

130 MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION

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132 MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION

MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION 133

134 MI.ZOGUCHio OR MODULATION

MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION 135

136 MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION

3.121 LadyojMusashíno(1951). 3.122 Lady ofMusashino.

MIZOGUCHI, OR MODULATION 137

MJZOGUCHio OR MODULATJON 139

ANGELOPOULOS, OR MELANCHOLY 141

142 ANGELOPOULOS, OR MELANCHOLY

ANGELOPOULOS, OR MELANCHOLY 143

144 ANGEL O PO U LO S, O R M EL ANCHO L Y

ANGELOPOULOS, OR MELANCHOLY 145

146 AN'GELOPOULOS, OR MELANCHOLY

ANGELOPOULOS, OR MELANCHOLY 147