The Loyal 47 Ronin
Most film aficionados outgrow discussions of the “greatest films of all time.” Not me. For more than a decade I’ve had three favorites. Stan Brakhage’s Arabics, a series of abstract silent films of perpetually shifting colors and shapes and spaces, is one; another is Roberto Rossellini’s mystical, expansive personal documentary India. And the third is Kenji Mizoguchi’s two-part, four-hour Genroku Chushingura (usually translated as “The Loyal 47 Ronin of the Genroku Era”), being shown in Chicago for the first time in several years this weekend at the Film Center.
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Drawing his sword, Asano wounds Kira slightly. And for violating the shogun’s castle with swordplay, Asano is sentenced to commit seppuku, or hara-kiri. The sentence is appealed using the argument that Asano acted according to samurai code, but to no avail. He kills himself, to his wife’s grief, and his retainers are stripped of their rights and become ronin: masterless samurai. After some debate they express their loyalty to Oishi, Asano’s chief steward, because he indicates he’ll never stop thinking of revenge on Kira. At first Oishi does nothing, dissipating himself in bordellos. The ronin bide their time, waiting for the right moment, and eventually (after one year historically, three years in the film) 47 of them attack Lord Kira’s home and kill him. They too are sentenced to commit seppuku, which they do at the film’s end.
This story of lives devoted to revenge might sound ridiculous to Westerners–in the retelling it sounds ridiculous to me. But Mizoguchi brings the tale to life with a visual style as grandly expressive and as perfect as any I’ve seen. He makes no concessions to his audience in this four-hour film with perhaps three close-ups–and indeed, the expensive production was a big flop at the time of its release. Piecing together long takes, some five minutes or more, Mizoguchi gives the film the architectural integrity of a great building, systematically integrating the movements and blocking of characters, narrative events, and the compositions and camera movements.
The film’s carefully choreographed camera movements are related to Japanese architecture of the period, which is elaborately reconstructed in the film. As happens so often in Mizoguchi films, elevated platforms, often on wooden poles in the ground, or forbidden rooms articulate hierarchical social relationships. Mizoguchi’s camera, documenting the shifting relationships of characters to each other and to the architecture, constantly reconfigures each character in new and wider contexts.
But our challenge, after seeing a film in its historical context, is to make something of it for ourselves. First of all, we can’t necessarily accept a film’s values merely because it moves us. At the same time, we should try to see the film in all its dimensions. As Mizoguchi’s camera constantly destabilizes the film’s images, he creates a poetics of space far more general than the specific values of the story. The issues he poses–of the balance between an individual and the social code, between emotion and tradition–are still with us, albeit in different forms. And as we watch one of his intense static compositions, focusing emotion momentarily on one character, transform into a moving shot that reframes the characters or introduces new ones, creating a new context, it becomes clear that the relationship between an individual and his culture is in part the result of the way we see space itself.
