If we compare Kenji Mizoguchi's works, we can find that the plots in many movies are similar. To sum up, it is nothing more than a woman sacrificing for a man, and the man finally gets what he wants, but the woman cannot get the reward. This is the basic thread of the film, and the various female stories that extend from it.
In Nihonbashi, Kenji Mizoguchi focuses on a pair of siblings who rely on the money their sister earns as concubines to complete their college studies and have a decent job. After her brother entered the society, the sister felt that her task had been completed, and since then she has been ordained and her whereabouts are unknown. Because the younger brother misses his sister, he places his feelings on the geisha, so that he delays his career.
In "The Waterfall of White Silk", Kenji Mizoguchi still focuses on the men and women in the poor life, a poor young man who completes his studies with the help of a geisha. Geisha kills people by mistake while collecting tuition for young people. After graduating, the young man became a prominent prosecutor and was forced to retry the geisha who had helped him. As a result, the geisha was sentenced to death, and the prosecutor committed suicide under heavy pressure.
In Kenji Mizoguchi's posthumous work "Red Line Zone", he takes geisha as the core character of the film, these women have become geisha because of their fathers, families, and children, they take their own hearts, wander the fringes of mainstream society, rely on their bodies that have not yet died, and carefully manage their own world.
The cruelty of Kenji Mizoguchi lies in the fact that he shows a vivid female ukiyo-e, and we can't see sexiness or read the flow in this living color, only the endless poor life that makes people sad.
The process of modernization in Japan after the Meiji period brought about a strange trend that even the children of poor families could get ahead by reading, which provided the driving force for the development of Japan in the Meiji and Taisho periods. At the same time, it also exposes the social status and existence value of women.
Because only men are allowed to get ahead through reading, women are naturally reduced to stepping stones on the road to male success. As a result, many poorer men in their families are determined to get out of their current lives by studying. Although the example of women having to sacrifice themselves in order to provide for the male students in the family is extreme, this is indeed the aspect of Japan's modernization.
Kenji Mizoguchi keenly captures the changes and characteristics of the times and uses them as his film material:
Women's sacrificial devotion and men's self-interrogation.
The confrontation between the awakening female and the male egoism.
Male pride that leads to success through women.
In The Red Line, Kenji Mizoguchi summarizes his feminism. The story takes place in the 1950s, when Post-War Japanese society was extremely depressed, at a geisha called "Dreamland", where several women gathered, each of whom came here with their own stories.
In order to rescue his father from prison, Hana-e, who treats her husband for tuberculosis, Mitch, who confronts her original family, Yurie, who longs for marriage but meets unladylike, Yumeko, who hopes to get her son's approval... Everyone's suffering looks different, but in fact, they all end in the same place.
When we talk about the film "Red Line", we often can't avoid the four words of women's fate, and around women's fate are often poverty, gender tragedy and the exit of male power.
When Japanese film artists first began to engage in film activities, there were two main contents, on the one hand, they learned Western film technology, and on the other hand, they went deep into society itself, trying to present the current situation of Japanese society through the form of film. Poverty has become the preferred direction for many film directors.
In 1923, Kenji Mizoguchi told a story about poverty in his work Docks in the Mist. The film tells the story of a young seafarer helping an old sailor. The film brings to the eye the human sufferings of Japanese society and reveals a series of social realities such as the economic depression and social unrest of the early 1920s.
In many of Kenji Mizoguchi's subsequent works, the theme of poverty can be seen, such as "The Wife of Kiyosaku", "Daughter of the Night", "Bird of Compassion" and other films. As the founder of modern Japanese cinema realism, Kenji Mizoguchi always focuses on the most authentic side of Japanese society, those living at the bottom of Japan.
Poverty is still an unavoidable topic in The Red Line, which takes place in the 1950s, when Japanese society was practicing customs management and laws were introduced to restrict the business of custom shops. Women who rely on these custom shops to make money, the situation at this time and the predicament they face are not exposed.
On the one hand, women need to survive in this way, and on the other hand, women also need to save their families in this way. This means that poverty comes not only from the outside, but also from within. Perhaps, Kenji Mizoguchi wants to express the multiplicity of poverty here, and the oppression of life and personality alienation that this poverty brings to women.
The most typical of these is Yumeko, who sold her body for her son, who relied on this job to raise her son, and when she gradually aged, his son refused to live with her, which eventually led to Yumeko's mental breakdown and went to a mental hospital. Yumeko is the victim of poverty, not only the poverty of life, but also the poverty of the spirit.
The first to start filming female tragedies was the Japanese Shochiku Film Company, And Kenji Mizoguchi is one of the directors who is best at shooting films about women, and most of his films depict women, their joys and sorrows, sad spring and autumn, and hope loss.
It is understood that Kenji Mizoguchi's sister was once a geisha, because of the poor family, the sister was forced to become a geisha at a very young age, which brought a great influence to the later film creation of Kenji Mizoguchi. He has made a lot of films about geisha, and all because of his sister's experiences.
Although Kenji Mizoguchi's films are mostly female tragedies, the women in his lens are by no means lambs to be slaughtered, and there are also parts where women's sacrifices are forced and willing. In Kenji Mizoguchi's films, the sacrifice of women is noble and a kind of fulfillment.
In "The Red Line Zone", the flower painting in order to treat her husband's illness is a geisha in a custom shop during the day, and a virtuous wife and a gentle mother when she returns home at night. The flower painting that switches between two different identities is not at all embarrassed, but has a power. In order to save his father who was imprisoned for corruption, the young and beautiful AhHu earned bail at the custom shop, and finally got what he wanted.
It is difficult to criticize the women in Kenji Mizoguchi's shots on a moral level, and when we admire his work, we are encouraged by the women in the film, who, although they themselves represent a tragedy, still burst out of their amazing power.
Mizoguchi's shots flow between different women, and in the small custom shop, Mizoguchi captures a small big world, where there is a floating landscape that envelops sentient beings, and there is also a faint helplessness.
In Kenji Mizoguchi's films, the male authorities are always absent, or in another form, as the makers of female tragedies, forcing women to despair and then leisurely leaving. The male boss in "Red Line Zone" withholds the income of the geisha while advocating his goodness. Yurie, who longs to get married, returns to the custom shop because she is unhappy after marriage.
Japanese women, who had long been under the feudal system, were themselves appendages of male society, and there were many dramatic stories in their life experiences, and even the law was inclined to men - no matter how corrupt men were, they could not be punished by the law, and women had to live with their husbands even if they were humiliated. Therefore, many Japanese women can only complete their self-fulfillment through self-sacrifice.
Kenji Mizoguchi depicts the sacrifice of women for men in many movies, and Ah Chun in "The Daughter of the Western Crane Generation" loses love, loses his family, loses his dignity, and finally lives in a temple. And in the process of these losses, it is her sacrifice and fulfillment of the men around her. The sacrifice of the women in "Red Line" is even more obvious, and every woman comes to the custom shop with a forced helplessness, and the custom shop can only give them a job that is not high-paying.
In Red Line, Kenji Mizoguchi doesn't give any extra shots to the male characters, he gives all the aura to the women in the shots. Let the male power disappear completely in the "red line zone", because at this time Kenji Mizoguchi is very contradictory, women rely on men to survive, whether it is the guests of the custom shop, or their own families, women's sacrifices are doomed.
Although There are many tragedies in Kenji Mizoguchi's films, they always give people hope. As a master of Japanese women's films, we can see all the tragedies about women in Kenji Mizoguchi's films. Part of the filming of these tragedies is the obsession in his heart, and part of it is the responsibility of being a female director.
When the male power completely withdrew, the sacrifice was only a sacrifice, and this sacrifice was sublimated in "Red Line Zone", becoming the world's absolute sound of Kenji Mizoguchi, and the life ukiyo-e of women at the bottom.
In the more than three decades since he entered the film industry in 1923, Kenji Mizoguchi has made more than ninety films, most of which have been lost. His films switch back and forth between tradition and modernity, and although women are eternal protagonists, we can glimpse all kinds of tragedies through the women under his lens.
George Bernard Shaw said that there are two tragedies in life: one is that all thoughts are gray; the other is full of ambition. In Kenji Mizoguchi's films, powerful women can still be full of ambition after all their thoughts have been lost. We have to admit that the reality of the film is greater than the film itself, and to this day, when we look at the status of women, we can still see that women are struggling in the current society, and this is perhaps the most valuable place that Kenji Mizoguchi has left us.