by Philippe Demonsablon
The output of a Mizoguchi film, already old in addition, an event may seem a bit thin to justify the publication of the texts that follow . Have not we had several times over the last five years the opportunity to express our admiration for the Japanese director, and when to see it grow, too rarely in our discretion, we will find him a new work? To those of us who could not attend festivals, his films which participated regularly since 1952, a retrospective at the Cinémathèque finally allowed to take the full measure of talent that we knew very large. "Mizoguchi began," we wrote then. In our list of "twelve best films of all time," Tales of the moon wave figure prominently, and the author of these lines did not hesitate to assign them the first.
Mizoguchi begins: at least depends on it, to do so, the willingness of a distributor. Too many of his films are still unpublished, which are too well in France of subtitled copies for several years. If the universality of genius is less than that applied to any contact at all, then we are dealing here with the work of a universal genius. Her voice deserves to find another audience than specialists, and accents that do not concern only the educated public, but simply speak to the man of the highest idea of man.
A panoramic landscape of fields and mountains, the superimposition of a brief sunny lake, and continues on a scenic hamlet, stops in general, a peasant couple busy loading a cart. Would we ever seen of men? The only appearance of this man and this woman occupied the most common gestures is enough to fill us with an emotion that owes nothing to the drama and everything to enlightenment. From the first minute of Tales of the moon vague, so here are two anonymous, two players who may be as supernumeraries, and by instinct we understand that we had previously been known to humans, but not yet seen the man with this intensity.
This force
blinding Mizoguchi which shares the privilege with very few filmmakers reduced to the dimensions of the picturesque as films touted as Paestum, and for the same reasons, relegated to the decorative as famous monuments. What part can indeed claim psychology, when the slightest gesture refers to man through the individual, how much the story or the accident, also coincide closely when the magnitude that is the copy and the precision is the individual? Between the blandness of the novelist who too often does not know that seduce us by his creatures that have the most singular and drought of the moralist, by what they have more general, Mizoguchi takes the high road of the poet, where virtue contemplative alternate going back and forth dialectic based on the sparkle of the singularities of the same type splendor and substance into one another. Each of the acts and events here a universal resonance. When the bands of soldiers creep through the village, we see not only a group of farmers in the grip of war, nor an instructive example of the war, but a shortcut in which the invention is surprising, the figure even all wars. The motions of work, tenderness, fear and vanity, modesty and nobility, the languor and easing up before us the figure of human destiny. Only palates might happen baffled, meeting with themselves when they wanted a change of scenery. Thus
Mizoguchi speaks of the most simple and most familiar: life, death too, because it is no art to live where does the thought of death. And it has the delicacy to speak familiarly, without pomp and without primer. This is the most natural way he brought us things like themselves: the secret of the masters found books we read in each frame of his films and this is not the slightest reason why Tales of the moon wave remind the Odyssey. In both masterpiece, a proud civilization refinement lingers note the polished surface, the texture of a fabric, the taste of a drink - but we always refer to the man. Whatever the luxury of the decor or the intensity of the drama, the breath comes to tell the air temperature or the timbre of her voice, its density.
But there is more work to man's height is the ideal man whose these Tales draw the figure, the eternal scheme of the route. This used to discover a life lifestyle, how many fables have they not invited to follow the path, the details matter less than the term, since it is only through the appearances and full of purpose and reason, etiquette according to the truth. So is the potter shaping the same vessel to bring it to greater perfection, and Mizoguchi himself repeating the same story, modestly ("this is just a distraction, but they are my children and I love them "), but the only story that matters, the one that also called Murnau and Rossellini, man reaching acquiescence and through him to the unit. Modestly than herself Empress Yang Kwei Fei goes to his execution, that they are conducted, serene, lovers celebrated by Chikamatsu, an old beggar with a broken voice sings from the palace of his son, all this does he not self and why add the emotion that the protagonists have their study to master? "Miyagi, why are you dead? "Asked the potter less fortunate Odysseus after his long journey. But the question is in itself the answer, if death is a passage: here the red clay of marine Cemetery is the same one that shapes the potter, the farmers that till the mid- tombs ...
Acquiescence reconciliation in all of Mizoguchi's work, especially in this film that are sum- Tales of the moon wave talks about unity. Yes, the accumulation of their adventures take us to the characters of interest other than compassion. And if there's fable, even profuse, not to the absurd repetition of perpetual motion that guides our thoughts. The movement tends to its own extinction, arranged around the idea of a balance that can escape the movement instead being based on it: focus on that which remains is also out of the Hell dialectic. And certainly, it is tempting discern a reflection of the Greek philosophers in what is clearly the imprint of thought boudhique; Parmenides is this staged or rather the sermon at Benares? So what if the staging ready for either a new luster: the thought feeds the artist, but the feeling is mutual. If Bergman's films are primarily meditation on man and those of Preminger's foremost meditation on the staging, the films of Mizoguchi are meditation on man, posed in terms of staging. What is man? But also, what is staging? Here two questions arise if we meet as inextricably linked one is to respond to another. Not a plan of Tales of the moon wave belies the beauty of the opening is not less than the ambition that it reads: to achieve by more concerted movements to erase the device by splendor of truth. For this refined art does not refine its own prestige, thus avoiding the pitfalls of preciousness rude. He contrasts the number of quality, rhythm harmony. About one defines its research make a note so pure and strong that the slightest change to become expressive. An art, "said Jacques Rivette, modulation.
Philippe DEMONSABLON.
Papers Cinéma du No. 95, May 1959, p. 1-3
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