EAST-WEST FILM JOURNAL VOLUME 4· NUMBER 2 The Artist's Desire: Reflections on the Films of Mizoguchi Kenji I LINDA C. EHRLICH Satyajit Ray's Secret Guide to Exquisite Murders: Creativity, Social Criticism, and the Partitioning of the Self 14 ASHIS NANDY Ideology of the Body in Red Sorghum: National Allegory, National Roots, and Third Cinema YINGJIN ZHANG Vietnam and Melodramatic Representation 54 ANDREW MARTIN Melodrama, Temporality, Recognition: American and Russian Silent Cinema MARY ANN DOANE The Romance of Maoriland: Ethnography and Tourism in New Zealand Films MARTIN BLYTHE Man and Revolutionary Crisis in Indonesian Films III SALIM SAID Book Reviews 13° JUNE 1990 The East-West Center is a public, nonprofit educational institution with an international board of governors. Some 2, 000 research fellows, grad­ uate students, and professionals in business and government each year work with the Center's international staff in cooperative study, training, and research. They examine major issues related to population, resources and development, the environment, culture, and communication in Asia, the Pacific, and the United States. The Center was established in 1960 by the United States Congress, which provides principal funding. Support also comes from more than twenty Asian and Pacific governments, as well as private agencies and corporations. The Artist's Desire: Reflections on the Films of Mizoguchi Kenji LINDA C. EHRLICH A PIECE of calligraphy that used to hang on Japanese director Mizo­ guchi Kenji's wall read: "For each new look, it is necessary to cleanse one's eyes."l Like the artists depicted in his films, Mizoguchi was aware that he was the kind of director who had to start anew each time he tried to create an important film. He was never content with merely the realistic, the romantic, or the transcendental. Mizoguchi did not rest content with either the traditional or the innovative; neither was he so fascinated with beauty as to ignore relevant scenes of the most profound horror. Prophetic yet filled with nostalgia, a superior Mizoguchi film can elevate, and yet unsettle, the viewer's emotions. The development of the theme of the artist and desire in Mizoguchi's oeuvre was not a steady one, but rather was one that appeared intermit­ tently over the course of his career. Specific films that depict the struggles, and triumphs, of an artist include: Hometown (Furusato, I92 9) , White Threads of the Cascade (Taki no shiraito, I933), The Straits of Love and Hate (Aienkyo, I937), The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (Zangiku monogatari, I939), A Woman of Osaka (Naniwa onna, I940, no extant print), The Life of an Actor (Geido ichidai otoko, I94I, no extant print), Utamaro and His Five Women (Utamaro 0 meguru gonin no onna, I946), The Love of Sumako the Actress (Joyu Sumako no koi, I947), and Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, I953). The two major lines of development in the lives of artists as depicted by Mizoguchi - success in the world of the imagination and fulfillment in meaningful personal relations - grow progressively closer to each other with each successive film. In the earlier films, such as White Threads of I 2 LINDA C. EHRLICH the Cascade, these two spheres of creative success and personal happiness are of unequal import to the artist-protagonist, who chooses an attach­ ment to a distant lover over survival itself. With films like The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (which I have loosely grouped into a middle period), the creative endeavors of the artists become a higher priority as they also move (albeit tentatively) toward finding a satisfying spiritual partner. Finally, with Ugetsu, the poles join within a sphere of mutuality, after a long and arduous journey in which the artist first descends toward the illusory object of desire and then ascends, transformed. In the nine Mizoguchi films mentioned above, the theme of the journey toward a merging of the creative and the personal is intimately tied to the theme of desire. Julia Kristeva (1984, 131) points out that "desire is the desire of the Other, which includes the subject as divided and always in movement." This state of constant movement in desire impels the desiring one to take risks - at times to embark on a metaphoric, or actual, jour­ ney - in order to approach the Other. Desire is inherently disruptive of the established order - Desire seeks change. To the Mahayana Buddhists, whose thought influenced Mizoguchi as he grew older, desire is delusory, but it provides the fuel of ultimate enlightenment. In other words, desire itself is seen as a means toward the transcendence of desire. No matter how lowly a person might be, he or she is considered by the Mahayana Buddhists to be capable of becoming enlightened at any time. The journey, therefore, becomes a journey within desire, toward detachment from desire. The artists in Mizoguchi's films move toward a transcendence of desire, not by repressing it, but by incor­ porating it into their lives. The journey, with its pattern of embarkation, return, and renewal, is associated in Mizoguchi's films with the working through of a metaphysi­ calor psychological problem concerning the nature of desire. This three­ fold nature of the journey is also tied in with the journey's progression from possession, to loss, to a (partial) restitution of what is lost. It is thus more of a subjective or metaphoric journey than a geographical one, although all of the artists in Mizoguchi's films undertake an actual journey from one place to another during the course of the film. In these journeys, there is a tendency for the central figures to first descend, both in status and geographically, before ascending again, either in a real or metaphoric sense (see Cohen 1980, 313-319). In his discussion of this same pattern in the Japanese puppet drama THE ARTIST'S DESIRE 3 (Bunraku), Andrew C. Gerstle (I986, 64-69) contrasts the rising and fall­ ing pattern of the joruri narrative storytelling, particularly in history plays, with the opposite pattern, the fall through hubris, seen in tragic drama in the West. The Japanese pattern of a journey "downward" in for­ tune, followed by a return "upward" to one's original point of departure, transformed, is especially evident in films like The Story of the Last Chry­ santhemum and Ugetsu, reflecting the fact that these are more fully con­ ceived works. This pattern also mirrors the Buddhist teaching that each person passes through cycles of death and then rebirth as he or she tra­ verses different levels of illusion before emerging spiritually transformed. In addition, this cyclic pattern is also connected to thejo-ha-kyu (slow­ medium tempo-fast) pattern in the five different types of Noh plays.2 As Kunio Komparu (I983, 42) explains: The pattern of a cycle of Noh plays, from the blessings of a god to the salva­ tion of a demon, and then back to the beginning, is an overall configuration that accords with the Buddhist theory of salvation, that aims to achieve artistic realization by weaving together the workings of the human heart under the protective power of the gods and mercy of the Buddha, and, moreover, that reflects the concept of an unending cycle of birth, death and rebirth. Thus, the compilation of five plays in a program based upon the principles of jo-ha-kyu is a linear flow but, understood in the light of this idea, it becomes a circle beginning with the god Noh. Arthur Thornhill (I989, I7) distinguished between three types of mugen (phantasmal) Noh, which are related to this descending/ ascending sche­ ma: (I) visitation Noh, in which the god (of either the ShintO or the Bud­ dhist tradition) descends to earth from a more exalted realm in order to confer blessings; (2) exorcism Noh, in which the demon ascends from a lower level in order to propagate evil; and (3) salvation Noh, in which the spirits (usually ghosts of women) correspond to an "internalized, psycho­ logical portrayal of human souls who yearn for spiritual release." These spirits first appear in the (false) form of a local resident and then, during the second act, reveal their true ghostly nature and their lingering attach­ ment to the human world. With a release from these painful attachments (usually with the help of the waki [deuteragonist] in the form of a priest from the Pure Land sect of Buddhism), the ghost's "descent" to the human world could be followed by an "ascent" to the Western Paradise of Amida Buddha. In this sense, the "ascent" aspect is intimately connected with a 4 LINDA C. EHRLICH view of transcendence and salvation inherent in the newer sects of Bud­ dhism, such as the Pure Land sect. Despite the positive implications of this journey motif, the fact of the artist's actual power in society remains problematic in Mizoguchi's work. The only artists the director allows to survive are those who are able to lower their ideals and become reconciled to their own limitations and to the limitations society imposes on them. Implicit in this reconciliation with one's environment is a political implication that the best artists are those who remain in simpler, poorer circumstances (like the potter Gen­ juro in Ugetsu) or who accept traditional roles (like the actor Kikunosuke in The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum). Those who remain isolated from a supportive community (like the shingeki3 actress Matsui Sumak04 in The Love of Sumako the Actress) do not survive. With a lowering of their motivating ideals, and a return to concentra­ tion on work within a sheltering setting, the Mizoguchian artists acquire an ability to endure and create.