"Story of the Rainy Moon": Panorama at the Two-Dimensional Level

Today I watched "The Story of the Rainy Moon" again. Kenji Mizoguchi won the 1953 Venice Silver Lion Award for his masterpiece. His films are not as well-known as Akira Kurosawa in the international film circle, because Akira Kurosawa shows the kind of intense emotions and shots that are in line with Westerners' aesthetics. Kenji Mizoguchi’s film is in the big east. He shoots every shot in the environment, always the environment first, then the people. Like Chinese landscape paintings, it is always the rolling peaks, 99% of the woods, The creek, one percent of houses and people. The Warring States period in "Story of the Rainy Moon", firstly the mountains, fields, and woods outside the village, and then to the house, and then to the two people outside the house. This "harmony between man and nature" is completely different from Western paintings and dramas that focus on the facial features of characters. When Carlo Dolci painted "Salome", the environment was completely hidden, like a black screen on the stage, covering all the background, leaving only a strong spotlight hitting Salome's terrified and worried face. Therefore, Western painting is three-dimensional, while Eastern painting is flat, and it puts all the figures in a huge background to examine. I have also seen this style in the Chinese movie "That Man, That Mountain, That Dog", so this movie has caused such a big response in Japan.

"The Story of the Rainy Moon" uses such a panorama to easily express the war environment of the Warring States Period. The desolation of the natural environment and the panic in the social environment brought about by the military disaster made it the best stage for a story like Liaozhai. A man who wanted to make money from war, swearing to let his wife and children live a good life, met a stunning woman in troubled times, and suddenly forgot his virtuous wife and young children at home, and the people outside the city. A lonely and eerie elegant mansion in the grass, the shadow of the maid projected on the wall by candles, and the long and stern singing add to the atmosphere of the film.

The whole movie, like "Gion Song Girl", is quiet and beautiful. No matter how violently conflicting or painful the theme and plot are, the camera will always stand quietly behind the scene, describing all of this with the artist's consciousness, as if the author of the long scroll had cut his own painting into sections and placed them in front of the audience. In front of him, and then eloquently told his story.

The reason why the film was able to win the Silver Lion Award that year, in addition to the expression of Oriental beauty, of course, there are the factors of the theme. The two stories in the original work of "The Story of the Rainy Moon" originally had a certain war background. Mizoguchi Kenji mixed them together, which greatly increased the conflict of war and moral torture, which made him express the anti-war and women's feelings. The theme is more prominent. Like "Gion Song Girl", women are always patient, hard-working, and virtuous, while men are stupid, impulsive, and selfish. In the end, women always forgive men tenderly, pointing out the direction of their lives like a beacon. The ideals of women in Kenji Mizoguchi's films, though alien to today's feminism, are moving and sympathetic. When the male protagonist returns home and sees his wife mending his clothes under the candlelight, after all the moral torture, he just wants to sleep beside his family, while the audience outside the film But he was sighing for the heroine and the family.

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