Mizoguchi: Naniwa Erijii (Osaka Elegy) (1936)
Tuesday, October 1, 2013 
Osaka Elegy was one of the first sound films by a major Japanese director, and it very much plays as a proposal for a Japanese sound cinema. Elegant and economic in its vision of Ayako (Isuzu Yamada), a young Japanese woman who becomes a mistress to her employer to settle her father’s debts, it’s as much a demonstration of a new medium as of the hypocrisies of traditional Japanese misogyny. Or, rather, the two demonstrations amount to much the same thing, thanks to the way Mizoguchi remediates the role of benshi, professional narrator-entertainers who were considered an integral part of Japanese silent cinema. Most immediately, Osaka Elegy doesn’t exhibit the same incredulity at the sheer fact of the voice as early Western sound cinema – by Western standards, it’s remarkably unphased by its command of dialogue, proof that it wasn’t a matter of Japanese cinema arriving at sound belatedly so much as it being a sound medium all along. What would have been striking, then, to a contemporary audience, is the naturalistic gendering of the voices and dialogue – although a small proportion of benshi were women, their roles and performances were usually inflected through the stylised genderlessness of kabuki. However, not only does Mizoguchi contrast male and female voices, but, in collaboration with screenwriter Yoshikata Yoda, prioritises the female voice: most of the dialogue is devoted to women, while the expository burden of the benshi is deflected and distributed into a series of encounters in which women morph out of their supposed roles as vehicles of entertainment to expostulate on the shame and servitude of those roles. That might make the film sound monologic, or expository, but Mizoguchi’s compensation for the lack of benshi is as much architectural as vocal, as he cements and intensifies the elaborate blocking and framing that would become so prominent in his work, perhaps explaining why he considered this to be his first serious film. Nearly every sequence is framed by multiple planes and fixtures, while the camera glides so as to continually position walls, curtains, windows and other interfaces between us and the action – it’s as if the sudden presence of voices within the mise-en-scene has had a tympanal effect, or Mizoguchi has replicated the reticulated echospace of the theatre within the film itself. At times it’s positively noirish, especially when the crushing, cavernous darkness of the theatre is also projected onto Osaka's deterioriating cityscape – a cityscape that’s only enhanced by the subsequent deterioration of Mizoguchi’s film stock, and further devolution of women and neon into pinpoints of incandescent, self-immolating spectacle.
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