In the discussion about Mizoguchi Kenji and his works, there will always be such arguments: Compared with Western movies, Mizoguchi Kenji’s long shots have various special features, and this symbolizes his role as a Japanese and even "Oriental". The authorship of "person".
After reading most of Mizoguchi's masterpieces, I am inclined to think that this type of summary made the mistake of partiality. Various signs in and out of the play indicate that there are not many parts of Kenji Mizoguchi's work that have a clear sense of authorship, at least not as much as the argument claims. In fact, in his creative career spanning decades, Mizoguchi has never adhered to a particular “style”.
One piece of evidence is that the gap between certain late works of Mizoguchi, at least in terms of film language, and general Japanese commercial films, and even Hollywood films, has narrowed. For example, in the first scene of "Xinping Family Story", the camera performs a magnificent bird's-eye view and landing movement, and the field of vision slides from one group of dialogue characters to another, explaining the background information, just like the opening scene of a Hollywood masterpiece.
Of course, the "Mizouguchi Kenji's author style" praised by critics is by no means fabricated, and the contribution of these styles to the process of world film history is beyond doubt. However, they may be more from his instinct and intuition than to erect them intentionally. It is precisely because of this that although these styles retain some unchanged cores, in general, they change with the changes in Mizoguchi's life experience and creative experience.
To discuss changes in style, we must first grasp the same. What is unchanged? In that era, when film authors from all over the world used a lot of long shots, what did Mizoguchi Kenji’s work be combined with Italian neorealism films, Dreyer films, Orpheus films, or general Hollywood films? To distinguish?
I think the real uniqueness of Mizoguchi Kenji's long shots is that they always have a character-space intermediary identity. And this is not compromised in the most commercialized "Princess Yang" and "The Story of Xinping Family".
Specifically, Mizoguchi Kenji's lens is connected to the character at one end and the space at the other end.
People are the subjects shot by the lens, and they are also the active subjects in the lens. Most of Mizoguchi's long shots are sports long shots, and the movement of the lens is almost entirely driven by the movement of the characters in the lens. Under normal circumstances, these long shots use shaking or translational motion to follow up the characters, rarely take active actions, and never leave the characters to move alone.
Space is the background of the lens and the environment in which the characters are located. Mizoguchi's masterpieces are dominated by period melodramas ("female films") with female themes. According to the specific era in which the story takes place, the space of the movie is mainly composed of realistic daily scenes such as homes, streets, and villages. Japanese houses are often compactly laid out, with undulating floors and screens and curtains everywhere. Outdoors, especially courtyards, lanes, and forests, objects also present a crowded vision, and there are many obstacles in the space. No matter indoors or outdoors, the movie space has a sense of "mountainous mountains".
As an intermediary between characters and space, Mizoguchi Kenji's long shots always follow the characters' long-distance and tortuous movements in space. As far as the visual effects of images are concerned, the complicated spatial structure firstly provides richer materials for scene scheduling. The lens shuttles through the space, bringing the beauty of perspective changes in the space. This is also an important aesthetic foundation in Mizoguchi's works.
In addition, in his films, the environment is usually not only a visual background, but also a projection of the subject's mood. Even though this kind of projection is rarely presented in direct visual symbols, under the continuous emotional cues in the long shot, the space can be transformed from a pure physical furnishings into a metaphor of the characters' emotions.
This was most evident in the early days of Mizoguchi Kenji's creative career. The two early masterpieces of Mizoguchi, "Sisters of Gion" and "The Story of Residual Jujube", provide us with many typical models of "Mizoguchi-style long shots".
The extensive use of long shots in these works allows images to be converted from scene to scene from scene to scene without resorting to the power of editing. The way the lens shifts, the way the characters move in the space, the positional relationship of the characters in the space, the spatial structure of different scenes, the set furnishings, and the difference in events all together constitute the visual representation of the emotions of the characters.
Therefore, it is not difficult to understand that the middle scene and the panoramic scene are the most commonly used sceneries in Mizoguchi. The shots taken in this scene range can not only fully show the space where the characters are located, but also show the state of the characters in more detail. Obviously, they are most suitable for establishing the primordial relationship between the characters and the space.
We can see that in some of Mizoguchi's masterpieces, the basic unit of scene scheduling is the mid-panoramic long shot. In these films, Mizoguchi's "character-space" shots are full of emotions, allowing him to fully portray the psychology of the characters while bypassing the close-up shots. This is a kind of white space at the image level. The works of Kenji Mizoguchi have a widely spread tone of "Eastern impliedness", which may be derived from the implied technique of these works. Except for the two earlier works mentioned earlier, the same is true for the later work "Miss Ayou".
But this is not absolute. As mentioned above, Mizoguchi's creation is always seeking change. Looking at Mizoguchi's creative career, the closer it is to the late stage, the more flexible the lens grammar of his works, and the more difficult it is to simply use "Oriental" to generalize.
For example, in "Nishizuru Generation Girl", which can be selected as one of the best works of Mizoguchi’s career, although the narrative is still based on long shots, there are some very typical early works of Mizoguchi and praised by future generations. It is a "picture scroll" panoramic horizontally-shifted long lens, and there are also long-distance and vertical-moving long shots and close-up long shots that are relatively rare in Mizoguchi's previous works. Compared with the previous works, the lens language of this film obviously has a richer level.
As a result, the increase in the grammatical richness of images has become the evolutionary trend of Mizoguchi Kenji's late works. In "Gion Girl" and later works, Mizoguchi began to insert close-ups and macro close-ups in the editing sequence more frequently, and even used pros and cons extensively.
For example, in "The Woman of Rumor", the editing of fixed shots in different positions (represented by the front and back) has become the main method of narration in the scene, and the depiction of emotions and character relationships relies on composition. Sports long shots take the second place, becoming accents that occasionally appear at critical moments, or a channel to important scenes. The same goes for "Red Line Zone" in general.
If we want to choose a work to represent Kenji Mizoguchi, then it should be more appropriate to choose a work with the richest video grammar than to choose the most stylized (and single-grammatical) work. In my opinion, Mizoguchi's work "Yuyue Monogatari" created in 1953 may be the number one seed player to win this crown.
"Rainy Moon Story" is adapted from a collection of novels of the same name, which is a collection of folk stories. The protagonist of the story is a family of five who made and sold porcelain during the Warring States Period. Another round of war was about to break out, and they decided to venture to the big city to sell porcelain and make a fortune. The plot of the movie started from this, and it developed to halfway. The characters were separated due to accidents, and the drama of the movie was naturally separated into two parallel narrative clues:
The first one takes the elder brother Genjuro, his wife Miyagi and the children as the main characters. Genjuro was seduced by the female ghost Wakasa at the market, indulged in sensuality, and forgot about his wife and child. In the end, his wife was killed by a defeated soldier while fleeing alone.
The second one takes his younger brother Fujihei and his wife Ahama as the main roles. Regardless of his wife's dissuasion, Fujibei wants to become a samurai, pursuing illusory fame and fortune. He caught the head of the defeated general with a blind cat and a dead mouse, so that he was able to be promoted to the title. Although he was ahead of others, at the same time, his wife was raped by brutal soldiers. Because of her unbearable humiliation, she gave up on herself, got caught up in the dust, and lived by selling herself.
We can see that the two narrative lines have a basically isomorphic plot context. They are based on the two novels in the original work, which are cross-integrated into a complete story. In the process of integration, the screenwriter refined and used the common theme implied by the two novels: women suffer because of the guilt of men.
In addition to the common plot structure and theme, the two lines have exactly opposite expressions, one fictitious and one real.
The Fujibei-Ahama Line is one of the lines that is relatively simple and easy to understand. It is more closely related to the general background of the Warring States Period, and it is also closer to a neatly structured and clearly expressed fable. It is the "reality" layer in "The Story of Yuyue".
The suffering of Ahama was caused by Fujibei. On the surface plot, if Fujibei is not moved by the samurai costume and runs away in the market, then Ahama will not fall into the enemy's nest because of chasing him; in the deep text, it is exactly what Fujibei longs for Something—the samurai, in other words, the war—became the culprit that forced Abin to become a prostitute. Don't forget, it was Fujihei's colleagues who raped Abin.
Fujibei successfully returned home and passed a brothel on the way. He couldn't resist the persuasion of his subordinates, so he lived in it, indulging in sensuality, but unexpectedly ran into Abin who became a prostitute. This coincidence is the most dramatic section of the film, and it is also the section where the entire fable structure and expression of the Fujibei-Ahama Line surfaced. From this we can see that Japan's notorious but extremely developed prostitution industry and geisha culture from ancient times to the present were born in response to the sexual needs of privileged men like samurai. Therefore, Fujibei not only indirectly caused the violence and degeneration of his wife in the superficial and deep sense, but also indirectly exploited his consumption in the brothel, that is, the consumption of the prostitution industry, in the third sense. Got his own wife. So far, "The Story of Yuyue" has also completely revealed its irony of patriarchal culture.
The idea of Genjuro-Miyaki-Wakasa Line is much more complicated. First, it still has an isomorphic side with the previous line. The similarity in one detail is that Genjuro ran to check the kiln regardless of his life, and Fujibei followed the passing samurai despite repeated persuasion from his wife and brother. From this perspective, Genjuro’s greed for money and his brother’s greed for fame, although the former is more practical than the latter, both are inherently strong enough to exceed the cherishment of life and family. Material desires, therefore, the mental states of Genjuro and Fujibei are actually similar. Moreover, their actions to achieve their goals-taking advantage of the war to accumulate money or taking advantage of the war to steal fame-are essentially acts of speculation. It was because of speculation that fate made fun of the two brothers.
But the difference is that Genjuro is not an absolutely selfish giant like his younger brother. From his daily words and deeds, it can be known that his primary purpose of making money is to bring a better life to his family. At least the starting point is a good one; and after earning the first pot of gold, Genjuro thought of the first thing. The thing is to buy a kimono for his wife. His encounter with the female ghost Wakasa was also unexpected. It was not that his younger brother Fujihei took the initiative to enter the brothel; we can believe that he is a good man who cares for the family on weekdays.
And Miyagi's unfortunate death seemed to be a disaster on the way to escape, because the reason why she didn't walk the waterway with everyone was entirely out of Genjuro's worries about the safety of his wife and children. Her death cannot be directly linked to Genjuro's guilt. This line does not seem to be summed up as a simple fable.
At this time, our eyes naturally shifted to the female ghost Wakasa who "killed halfway". It was she, and the series of ghost story-like plots she implicated, that led the whole story to a level higher than reality—a "virtual" layer shrouded in a strong surreal meaning. Her appearance turned Genjuro's desire from "money" to "sex", and the subsequent plot also broke away from the background of the war, which seemed to break with the "real" layer. But in fact, this is a narrow understanding of her mistakenly regarded as a negative role.
When comparing "The Story of Yuyue" with "Strange Tales from a Lonely Studio", which is also a Zhiguai novel, we must understand one thing: Wakasa's story (at least the movie version of the story) is not from the typical male perspective in "Strange Tales from a Lonely Studio" The story of "Yuxian"; Wakasa himself is not the "fox spirit" in "Strange Tales from a Lonely Studio" who satisfies the sexual desires of men and bears moral condemnation for them.
After Wakasa's ghost identity was revealed, the maid beside her explained and condemned Genjuro. We have learned a heartbreaking truth: The reason why she was incarnate as a ghost to hang around in the world was not to make money and kill her life, but to "hungry for love"-she never had the opportunity to taste the taste of love in her lifetime.
Wakasa was an aristocratic girl in a boudoir, and her thirst for love reflected the confinement of female eroticism in that era-she couldn't get it during her lifetime, so she didn't forget it after her death. When Wakasa was dancing for Genjuro, her singing summoned the ghost of her father Kuchiki Daimyo to accompany her. She immediately showed fear on her face and told Genjuro that her father had been in this room.
This episode can be regarded as a manifestation of the haze of patriarchy. We can boldly imagine that Wakasa's life was another woman whose lust was stifled under the iron law of the feudal system. Her situation is exactly the same as the heroine in "Nishikaku Generation". The identity of the nobility is not the well-being of these women, but a patriarchal iron chain that binds them. This iron chain materializes them as the sexual property of aristocratic men, which is firmly locked and never shared with the inferior. . The love affair between Nishizuru and the attendant, and the love affair between Wakasa and the farmer Genjuro, are absolutely taboo because they broke the rules of class and patriarchy.
The other side of patriarchy is the class power of the ruler: the Kuchiki family defeated by Oda Nobunaga is actually a microcosm of the continuous struggle of the upper classes during the Warring States period, which caused the lower classes to lose their lives. Miyagi's life and Ahama's chastity were taken away by such endless wars that were easily launched in order to fight for power. Here we can see that this part of Wakasa's plot seems to be separated from the anti-war and anti-masculinity subject of "Yuyue Monogatari", but it is actually connected with it from a deeper perspective.
Understanding Wakasa as a mere negative role not only misses the opportunity to further understand the text of "The Story of Yuyue", but also reflects a patriarchal cultural inertial thinking that "she seduce me". In fact, Wakasa's "seduce" has made him one of the most subjective and attractive female characters in Mizoguchi's movies.
There is no shortage of female characters in Mizoguchi's movies, but unfortunately, not many of them can be regarded as successful. Mizoguchi Kenji spent his childhood under the care of his sister who was a geisha. We have every reason to believe that it was his experience and knowledge during this period that eventually led him to the creation of "female films". However, although he believes that "women are more noble than men", due to the limitations of the times, this noble portrayal is often biased.
In the works represented by "The Story of Residual Juice", although Mizoguchi has made many criticisms of men and the patriarchal society, he still overemphasizes women's "wife" status in the process of portraying women. The "sublime" portrayed and praised on this basis has actually become the "sublime" paid or even sacrificed for men, such as Ade who sacrificed for Kikunosuke ("The Story of Residual Chrysanthemum"), or for Makizhi A Jing ("Miss Ayou") who died while helping to give birth to a child.
This "great and miserable woman" image points to an ideological discipline centered on sacrifice. This is obviously a far cry from the modern feminist concept based on liberalism and Marxism. For these female characters, the author’s condescending gesture of sympathy actually hides a morally demanding "only such a woman is a good woman". At the same time, this is essentially a part of men's contention with women in the traditional gender division of labor and gender power structure. Kind of vision.
The treatment of the two wives in the script of "Rainy Moon Story" can hardly escape the blame: they easily forgive them after their husbands "turned back" the prodigal son, it seems that their existence is to awaken the so-called conscience of men. The images of these two female characters are single and rigid, and the film's attention to their psychology is obviously lacking, making them completely functional roles and vassals of the male characters.
In contrast, Wakasa is a character with a secret. Her character image is more mysterious and profound, and it is difficult to analyze simply. At the same time, her subjective initiative is also stronger. She takes the initiative in the relationship between the sexes, and always dominates; after being betrayed, she uttered deafening accusations for Genjuro's infidelity, instead of accepting it until death like his wife Miyagi.
It still needs to be pointed out that all the behaviors of the three female characters (including Wakasa) in "The Story of Rainy Moon" are ultimately motivated by "pursuing love" or "pursuing marriage/family happiness", while men have more ambitious ambitions. This is still a cliché in the creation of female roles, exposing creators' stereotypes of feminine characteristics and gender division of labor. Here is another excellent left-wing film by Kenji Mizoguchi, "My Love Is Burning". It not only created several female characters who dared to love, hate, and dared to join the revolution, but also constituted the foundation of the gender structure of male superiority and female inferiority. The system—love and marriage—has been more sober reflection and criticism.
As the work of image master Kenji Mizoguchi, the values of "Yueyue Monogatari" may be outdated, but the energy contained in its images will never be extinguished. In the previous article, I have mentioned that there are two levels of one reality and one fictitious in the film. Here, I will further put forward the most important point of this article: the interweaving of reality and reality in "The Story of Rainy Moon" is more than just The writing technique at the drama level, and this structure is deeply cut into the image texture of the work, which truly becomes the absolute foundation on which the artistry of the film rests.
As mentioned at the beginning of this article: If Mizoguchi really has any persistent "authority", then it is the relationship between the character and space in his lens. The two elements of character and space do not blend equally, but the latter contrasts the former, and the former dominates the latter. "The Story of Yuyue" is no exception; therefore, it is not difficult to imagine that the difference between reality and fiction at the image level is first determined by the difference between the fiction and reality of the characters—or, in other words, the difference between the fiction and reality of the characters' action patterns.
Specifically, there are two types of characters in the movie: humans and ghosts. The former is real, the latter is empty. These two subjects have also differentiated into two visually opposed modes of action, one real and the other virtual. It is they that promote the variation of related images in the opposite directions of virtual and real.
The story background of "Rainy Moon Story" is war, so the portrayal of "people" in the movie is always inseparable from violence. Genjuro, Miyagi, Koko, Fujibei, and Ahama, as the most important human characters in the movie, they repeatedly enter and exit the cycle of violence and violence, generating the actual images of "Ametsuki Monogatari" .
The film depicts the two destructions of women in the face of violence: Ahamin, who is looking for Fujibei, was abducted by brutal soldiers in the wild, and then raped in a deserted house; Miyagi, who flees with his child on his back, is snatched for food by the defeated soldiers blocking the road. , Was eventually killed.
These two scenes are respectively located in the two narrative clues of "The Story of Rainy Moon", which are two key plot turning points corresponding to each other in the isomorphic plot-women suffer violence because of men's guilt. In these two scenes, Mizoguchi used similar overhead shots.
The opposite of female violence is male violence. Mizoguchi used a complete long shot to present the plot of the defeated general being mistaken by his subordinates and the killer Fujibei attacking his subordinates to capture the head.
This lens is also an overhead shot, but compared to the above two lenses, the design is more complicated, because it includes the arc movement of the camera body, thereby obtaining more perspectives of the scene; at the same time, it also It is more subtle, because this long shot cleverly uses the different spatial structures presented in the same scene from different perspectives, shielding the moment of violence from the line of sight. In the previous work "Nishikaru Generation Girl", Mizoguchi used similar techniques to deal with violent and erotic scenes, keeping secrets in an invisible place.
Whether implicit or straightforward, violent or violent, in these three shots, the characters are placed in extreme situations and confrontational relationships, performing violent actions that break away from daily experience: running, falling, and violent. Throwing, tearing...Under the exaggeration of Japanese-style performances, we can see that the actors' bodies all show a strong sense of movement invariably.
Regardless of whether it is the abuser or the victim, their actions are directly initiated by physical instinct and emotional impulse, without rational judgment. Therefore, these movements made by the characters are often not continuous and stable, showing the wisdom of human beings as higher creatures, but are chaotic, with continuous changes in speed and direction, just like beasts. In the case of “human action dominates the image” mentioned in the previous article, Mizoguchi Kenji’s overhead shot closely follows the intermittent and intense movement of the limbs, performing the momentary angle (panning) or orientation (shifting the lens). Variety. As a result, the image is divided into several fast moving nodes and intermediate rest periods.
Using these three lenses as templates, and a brief summary of the real-world images in "The Story of Rainy Moon", we can obtain a type of image commonly seen in Kenji Mizoguchi's work-"life-image" (a botched image). Name, but I can’t think of a more accurate naming method for the time being).
Human beings are entities with life. This is scientific common sense, and it is also the core concept of the actual image organization of "The Yuyue Story". How to express the vitality of human beings as a living body? For Mizoguchi Kenji, one of the most intuitive methods is exercise, and it must be a violent and uneven exercise. This kind of exercise first originated in the actor's limbs and then reflected in the images that it affected. The essence of life is will, and the characteristic of will is uncontrollable. From this perspective, stability and balance are the product of control and the movement of the puppets; the uncontrolled development of instability and imbalance is the embodiment of will and the basis for life to appear in the movie. .
"Life-image" is not an abstract concept, but a concrete experience. Every movie fan can find corresponding examples from experience: Feng Tier's handheld and zoom (instability of the scene), Lou Ye's handheld and out of focus (instability of the focal plane), Martel and Ferry Ni’s audiovisual processing of chaotic scenes (moving back and forth unsteadily in "multi-track"), Wong Kar-wai’s frame extraction and Chris Mark’s still photography editing (each frame carries an unstable Dynamic moment)...
Back to "Rainy Moon Story". As shown in the above three shots, in the real layer of the movie, the decisive violence scenes all take place outdoors, while the indoor places always carry the transitional passages of the plot. Of course, violence is always present, and the same is true for these transitional passages, even if its existence is indirect, only manifesting as an unoccurring danger. For example, during a certain transition period, Miyagi and the child hid in a small house on the way to escape and successfully escaped the brutality of the defeated soldiers.
In this segment, Mizoguchi Kenji brings us an indoor long shot that he is best at shooting. We saw that the camera first showed Miyagi's side face looking outside the house. In the close-up shot, her face was full of horror. Then, Miyagi retreated, and the scene became a panoramic view. Silhouettes of soldiers flashed outside the house. Miyagi moved to the left of the screen and hid in the straw. At this moment, the camera shook to the left with her movements and followed the trend of the soldiers who were moving to the left. They were defeated. When he was tired and hungry, he invaded the house and searched for food. The camera followed the soldiers. After they left, an old woman quickly entered the painting from the left. The camera was driven by her again, and she shook it to the right, re-focusing on Miyagi and the child on the straw pile.
In indoor scenes with more complex spatial structures, Mizoguchi's ability to arrange scenes and dispatch cameras to visualize narratives is better utilized. If the three outdoor shots mentioned above basically only revolve around one main character and only reflect the "life-image" of a person, then this indoor shot cleverly uses the spatial structure of the house to connect the three in an orderly and rhythmic manner. Group characters (Miyagi and child, defeated soldier, old woman), and completed two dramatic ups and downs in the plot (the defeated soldier breaks in, the old woman saves the field).
This is a "life-image" produced by a group of characters as a whole, which includes not only the physical movements, instincts and emotional fluctuations of the characters themselves, but also the subordination and confrontation between the actions of different characters. The instability of the image, which is the biggest feature of "life-image", still exists, but in this segment, the instability of the image does not come from the instability of a character's actions, but from the instability of the dominance of the image. We can see that the three groups of characters move in different directions and ways. They take turns leading the image in this long panning. The alternation of image dominance leads to instantaneous changes in the state of the image, thus forming an unstable vision. .
"Life-image" originated from the movement generated by human instinct and impulse as a living body. Therefore, any scene with a clear confrontation relationship between characters can produce "life-image", which is not limited to scenes of violence in a narrow sense. The two conflicting scenes of the two husband and wife roles in "Yueyue Monogatari" are typical examples: Genjuro, despite his wife Miyagi’s dissuasion, insists on inspecting the kiln; Fujibei meets Ahama after the brothel, and the two are in Desperate torn in the courtyard.
Based on the same logic, we can also find examples of "life-image" in other works of Mizoguchi during this period:
A long shot of the man in "The West Crane Generation Girl" expressing his sincerity to the heroine. The shot continues to accelerate following the movement of the character, rushing from the locked room to the open courtyard. In "Kinmatsu Monogatari", the wife pursues Shigehei in the mountains. The movements of the two of them take turns driving the movement of the camera, tearing up the image, and inspiring strong emotions. It is also a complete practice of "life-image".
The real layer dominated by "life-image" is only half of the huge image aesthetic system of "The Story of Yuyue". In the other half of the virtual plane, there is still an opposite "inanimate-image".
At the center of the imaginary layer of "Rain Moon Story" is the female ghost Miss Wakasa. Since the first appearance, Wakasa, who is "non-human", has a clear difference in his body movements from other people who are "human": in a distant view, Wakasa passes through the restless people in the bazaar. The sea, walking towards the direction where the lens is. Her unhurried gait distinguished her from the chaotic scenes around her that revealed the kinetic energy of life, like a weightless phantom sliding on the ground.
Furthermore, the image Wakasa summons is also clearly different from the "life-image" surrounding human characters in the real world: the lens matches Wakasa's movements, moving slowly downwards, and the image is no longer full of vitality. Rupture, sudden change, but showing an unnatural and lifeless sense of smoothness and uniformity. This mirror can be regarded as the first construction of "inanimate-image" in "The Story of Yuyue". It is from here that the film has moved from the real layer to the virtual layer.
Wakasa's strange way of movement and performance comes from the traditional Japanese song and dance art "Noh." It is easy to observe that Wakasa's makeup and clothing are completely consistent with Noh's art form; even in the following paragraph, Wakasa directly showed Genjuro a short Noh singing and dancing performance.
Noh, especially "Noh dance" (the dancing part of Noh performance), the biggest difference in form from ordinary Kabuki performance is that it emphasizes not violent body movement, but static body posture. , The body is tight, the knees are bent, the center of gravity is drooping, and the soles of the feet are on the ground. Accompanied by the gentle music, they are performing slow and subtle circular movements. In addition to the dance paragraphs in the true sense, Wakasa also always follows the way of movement that can dance-restraining impulse and restraining vitality. This not only shows Wakasa’s aristocratic manner different from vulgar common people, but also initially implies his inhuman identity, because the uniform, slow, and smooth visual characteristics of dancing are exactly the same as the "life-" that confirms the identity of "human". "Image" is completely contradictory.
On this basis, Mizoguchi created the most exciting section of "Inanimate-Image" in "Uzuki Monogatari" in Wakasa's Noh performance. Wakasa swayed a fan, spinning and dancing in the room. Her movements were slow and subtle, completely abandoning the power and speed that a normal life body should have when moving. The body seems to have no inertia, as if the image has been upgraded.
In two long shots showing Noh dance, Mizoguchi Kenji used a close-up shot of the upper body that is rarely seen in movies. The camera is like Wakasa's dancing partner, following Wakasa's movements, moving horizontally in space simultaneously. Following the ups and downs of Wakasa's posture, the camera shakes very slightly up and down, as if it is being involved in the gravitational force of her movement. The narrow scenes and concise setting make the specific spatial furnishings and spatial coordinates excluded from the lens, and as a result, the image enters a pure movement vision.
This process has a completely different operating mechanism from "life-image", but it is equally dynamic, but this dynamic does not exist violently and superficially at the nodes of the image, but overflows with subtle changes in details. As a result, we can clearly feel a kind of surreal power, a kind of "inanimate power" from Wakasa's body movement.
In "The Story of Yuyue", "life-image" and "inanimate-image" are not just opposites in a unified whole; when necessary, they exist in a single lens at the same time, each occupying a part of the image , The Chamber resists ceremony. This is also the time when the difference between the two images is best reflected. Since they correspond to two use occasions of the real layer and the virtual layer, the fusion moments of the two image types usually appear in the transition zone and boundary line of the virtual and real layers of the movie.
The most important boundary between reality and imaginary in "Yuyue Monogatari" is obviously Genjuro's "dream awakening" after he escaped from Kuchiki's house and was born. Before that, Genjuro discovered Wakasa's true identity, which led to the climax of the whole film, and it was also the most thrilling character confrontation in the whole film. However, this time it is not a confrontation between humans, but a confrontation between humans and ghosts. So what it leads to is not a simple "life-image", but a "life-image" entrusted to people and "nothingness" entrusted to ghosts. "Life-image" confrontation.
Genjuro jumped up from the ground, drew his sword, brandished his sword in self-defense all the way, smashed through the door, and escaped from the house. His body movements and emotions were so violently released that they were completely in line with the previous "life-image" construction occasion. However, we noticed that Mizoguchi did not use vigorous panning to match Genjuro's actions and performances here, but instead used a static and orderly camera uncharacteristically.
Let's split the image in detail. To show that Genjuro escaped from Kuchiki's house, Mizoguchi used a total of four shots—three fixed lenses, and a slow, constant-direction moving push shot—to present four different scenes of Kuchiki's house. The camera positions of the four lenses are also different, in order: the first is low, the second is high, the third is low, and the fourth is high.
The scheduling method of "Rainy Moon Story" has never been so calm and introverted: the movement of the camera is separated from the traction of the characters, and driven by a certain will, it carries out a cold mechanical movement. Between the shots, there are also jump cuts driven by a certain will.
This gives us a clear indication: Genjuro's violent body movements collided with the calm and introverted camera, in essence, Genjuro is a "human" and is escaping from a certain "non-human" order. So who does this order belong to? Who is driving the lens? What is Genjuro fighting against? Obviously, it is Wakasa who is a ghost.
Although Wakasa and the old woman are evading Genjuro's knife and hacking, they still maintain a dance-like physical movement. The rest of Wakasa’s body is almost still, just backing quickly on tiptoe, seeming to be almost floating backwards, forming a very sharp contrast with Genjuro, who is violently advancing in the same shot; in other words, with The calm and restrained movement of the camera fits perfectly. It is clear at a glance who is the will behind the orderly image.
Looking forward, we will find that the images are more orderly in all the dead wood house scenes. Not only do all the characters (Wakasa, the old woman, and the maid) except Korogenjuro act based on the form of Noh dance, but from the lens design level, we can also see more cut-away character compositions and more close-up shots at a depression angle. And more cool editing points. Without exception, these are constructed around Wakasa and Kuchiki Family—the central characters and scenes of the imaginary plane—to form an "inanimate-image" order.
From this perspective, the process of Genjuro's escape from Kuchiki's house is not just a process of returning from the virtual layer to the real layer in the text; in the overall image system of "Yuyue Monogatari", this is actually exactly the same. "Life-image" is in the process of escaping the order of "life-image". During this climax, the sense of existence and control of the "inanimate image" reached its peak; then, Genjuro and the "life-image" he brought broke through it and regained the dominance of the movie.
Sure enough, after Genjuro woke up, "Yuyue Monogatari" immediately entered a very typical "life-image". Regarding Genjuro’s violent physical conflict with the arrester, Mizoguchi uses violent motion shots to show it. Compared with the previous “lifeless-image” passages of the Kukigi family, it is a double twist of the image style and the narrative tone, from the virtual to the real. .
At the end of this paragraph, the lens first gives a close-up shot of Genjuro's back with a depression angle camera (one of the most commonly used lens types in the virtual layer), and then the lens slowly shakes up with the ballads sung by Wakasa in the background. The scenery gradually opens up and becomes a distant scenery in the natural environment (the more common scenery in the real layer).
This may mean that the surreal journey of Liao Zhai full of "life-images" has finally come to an end, and "life-images" and the fables of the Warring States Period have become the dominant text again. This is also enough to prove Mizoguchi's consciousness of using these two types of images.
Of course, the virtual layer of "Rainy Moon Story" has not really ended here. Genjuro returned home anxiously, but what he saw was a dilapidated empty house. After a round-trip panning, the dead Miyagi suddenly appeared next to the unoccupied kang. Here, another dividing line between the virtual and the real level in "Rainy Moon Story" was born.
If Genjuro's escape from the Kuchiki Family section emphasizes the separation and conflict between the virtual and the real, then this boundary is more intended to lay a quiet transformation of the virtual and the real, and this transformation is contained in a complete shake. In the lens. This place also completes a transition from "life-image" to "inanimate-image", but in a more subtle and hidden way.
The camera initially pans to the left following Genjuro who walks into the house. At this time, the movement of the camera is obviously driven by the characters.
But when Genjuro walked out of the house to look for and the camera turned to the right, because the character was blocked by the wall and could only appear when he passed the window, the camera was temporarily out of the character’s control and wandered between the walls autonomously. At the same time, the speed also increased. Was slowed down. Then, the camera turned to Miyagi, who appeared in the middle of the house, as if she had been attracted by her previous movement.
Shaking back and forth twice gives people a completely different visual experience: the former is to follow a certain entity, while the latter is to search for a ghost that does not exist. The visual transition and the sounding of the ethereal soundtrack together reminded the drama of "Yuyue Monogatari" to turn from reality to imaginary again, completing the progression of levels.
The last "lifeless-image" of "Yueyue Monogatari" appeared in a section where Genjuro and his child fell asleep and stayed up late to mending clothes in Haremaki. Miyagi's slow wiping of tears, long silence, and the unnaturally slow and introverted feeling in his words and deeds remind us of Wakasa's dance-like body movements. She walked by her husband silently, picked up the clothes on the floor, and then lit the lamp, the camera slowly followed her in the space shaking.
While Miyagi was mending clothes, the camera from a distance sank at a speed that was so slow that it was almost imperceptible to the naked eye, and then captured the sunlight coming in from the gap outside the door. In this way, the film quietly completed a transition from night to dawn, compressing and advancing time. This kind of lens movement, which is difficult to detect because its subtleness exceeds the threshold of human perception, will reappear in the beginning, end and climax of "Silence Light" by Regadas in the future, and it is also used to express the quiet passage of time.
Regadas used this technique to rewrite the "miracles" of the resurrection of the dead in Dreyer's "Words"; on the contrary, for "Yuyue Monogatari", this paragraph is as moving as Wakasa's Noh Dance "Inanimate-Image", an inhuman, motionless movement, an "inanimate force" reflected from the shadow of death. Even if the character of Miyagi is still thin, the image of Mizoguchi Kenji is enough to give her a real and moving emotion.
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