A quick look at Mizoguchi's style

One director that continues to amaze and interest me is Kenji Mizoguchi. His films are not always great, although his best are, but they all contain his unique sense of directing which truly makes him an auteur. I'm writing about Mizoguchi for another web-page, but I thought it might be interesting to look into his styles, using a scene from one of his best films, The Life of O-Haru.



In this scene, O-Haru has given birth to the emperors son, however, the child will soon be taken from her. This is a fairly typical shot for Mizoguchi to do. A wide shot with the main character in the middle and supporting characters on the sides. Mizoguchi will most often use mid or wide shots. When using close-ups he often make them at a high angle and with a wide lens, I remember him doing this a couple of times during Ugetsu Monogatari and Shanshô Dayû.



I think this is a really good move by Mizoguchi. He doesn't often move the camera. Here though he has slightly panned to the left and made the shot somewhat lower. He's managed to empathize the power of the woman standing to the right (who is a rival of O-Haru of sorts). Another thing that Mizoguchi does well is moving his actors fluently on camera. When the main character in O-Haru feels stressed or threatened she will often be surrounded by other characters in the frame. We saw that in the last shot she was calm, and there was a lot of empty air around her. Here she is surrounded, and the picture has a whole other quality and feel to it.



Here he raises the camera as the baby is being taken away, but keeping the main focus and composition of the image, while keeping O-Haru's face obscured. As this takes place the camera pans towards the left following O-Haru as she asks for her child back.



We see the last shot as O-Haru asks for her child back, and this image is left pondering for a couple of seconds. I feel that Mizoguchi creates a great feeling of emptiness in this shot, with the blank spaces, in contrast to the previous setup where there are decorative backgrounds. It's quite common to see a character looking through a doorway or being framed in a doorway in a Mizoguchi film. This whole scene was done in one take and is a fairly typical scene by Mizoguchi, who likes to use these long takes a lot, and we saw several ways he likes to frame things. I really like the way he composed this scene, especially the subtle camera movements are interesting and really changes the emotion of the scene without cutting.

Well, hope you found that interesting, cheers.