Mizoguchi: Gion No Shimai (Sisters of the Gion) (1936)

In some ways, Sisters of the Gion plays as a companion piece to Osaka Elegy – it was made less than a year later, features the same cast, and also plays out at a little over an hour. Unlike Osaka Elegy, though, it’s set squarely within the walls of the Gion – Kyoto’s historical geisha district – and that tightened focus moves it away from the realist social commentary of Osaka Elegy towards the fatality and grandeur of high tragedy. In essence, it revolves around a pair of geisha sisters and their attitudes towards their profession – where Umekichi (Yoko Umemura) is traditional, and mindful of her obligations towards her patrons, Omocha (Isuzu Yamada) is more sceptical of her patrons, and more strategic in the way in which she handles and manipulates them. Both approaches lead to tragedy, and both beg the question of what it is that a geisha actually does, or is supposed to do, since Mizoguchi makes it clear that patronage is very much a thing of the past. In part, that’s because patronage depends on a patriarchal authority that’s entirely absent from Mizoguchi’s universe, perhaps clearest in the case of Furosawa (Benkei Shigonoya), Umekichi’s patron, who moves in with the sisters after he goes bankrupt, has all his possessions auctioned, and flees his family in embarrassment (none of the men in the film seem capable of approaching the greater gravitas of shame). Mizoguchi opens with a slow, extended pan past this auction, and uses the entire film as an opportunity to develop his tracking-shots as cool decimations of patriarchal authority, continually evoking perspectives and vantage points that supervene the father’s panoptic stasis and stability as head of the family. At some level, that grants most of the film’s mobility to women – unless they’re fleeing responsibility, in a burst of sudden, incongruous energy, men just tend to sprawl in one place, like drunk children. As a result, we rarely see a man move further than a single room, unless escorted or propelled by a woman – a scenario that’s brutally reversed in the film’s tragic conclusion. At the same time, however, movement isn’t necessarily easy for women either – they tend to be most elaborately blocked, constricted and compartmentalised by Mizoguchi’s mise-en-scenes, meaning that there’s an oblique ingenuity and opacity to their movement, much like that of Mizoguchi’s camera itself. And it’s the ingenuity that comes from being a geisha in a world without patronage – for all their differences, Umekichi and Omocho are forced to continually displace the impossibility of patronage, rather than seek patrons per se. That also means displacing the impossibility of paternal authority, the impossibility of husbands, perhaps explaining why’s there’s no standoff between geisha and wife as in Osaka Elegy – in Sisters of the Gion, geishas are wives, and wives geishas, and the film's greatest fear is that Japanese women are destined to become both.