[In the following essay, Andrew examines the ways in which Mizoguchi's later films showcase a worldview of stoic contemplation and acceptance through revolt against injustice.]

Representative both of artistic grace and social rebellion, women are at the center of virtually every film Kenji Mizoguchi made, pursuing the values of futile revolt and tragic acceptance which he himself prized. He filmed them implacably with unblinking eye until they would stare back accusingly as at the end of Sisters of the Gion and Osaka Elep. But he also filmed them sympathetically in pathetic surroundings and with unquestionable feeling in the movement of his camera.

How can we put together the rebellious social side of Mizoguchi with the nearly stoic metaphysical side? When Okita, at the conclusion of Utamaro and His Five Women, murders her lover and his mistress and then prepares to end her own fated existence, she tells Utamaro that she has practiced in her life what he developed in his art, a refusal of all compromise and a drive to go to the end of an action no matter what its consequence. If women have revolted against the system of prohibitions, exchanges, and hierarchies established by men with the congenital blindness suited to the self-centered banality of their ambitions, it is because women alone see right through to the end of this system, sensing its futility. If they have anything to teach us, it is the transpersonal, transhistorical, essentially artistic comprehension of the absurdity of such existence. Their vision goes well beyond those responsible for their personal plights. They see through the system, through the audience, and into the structure of an impersonal cosmos. Revolt thus leads the way to a kind of stoic contemplation which in his late films Mizoguchi pursued with fanaticism.

While certain male characters embody one or the other of these functions (think of the "sacrilegious hero" of the Taira clan saga or of the essentially passive artist-hero of Ugetsu), only Mizoguchi's females unite these impulses and do so to a degree that is beyond expression. As artist and iconoclast, Mizoguchi takes his inspiration from the stories he tells and the actresses who portray these stories for him. His least heroine, we feel, has gone further than reform or art. In their very way of walking is asserted a comprehension not even a lifetime of art could equal. Mizoguchi was obsessed with the gait of women, with their swoons, with their averted or penetrating gaze.

The dual nature of his women, and Mizoguchi's fluctuating attitude toward them (recording them naturalistically only later to identify with them), pose special requirements for the viewer. At the same time this offers a potential and rare reward by providing an interval in time and space within which the spectator can move, oscillate. This is the interval between the borders of identification and interpretation, an interval that encourages us to re-think some of the key aesthetic issues of our era.

It is precisely the absence of such an interval that contemporary philosophers and critics have tried to expose in western fiction and film. Identification has been analyzed as an effect of a text striving to produce the illusion of presence and plenitude with the emptiness of differential signs. Under the banner of deconstruction contemporary criticism has waged a war against the illusions of identification and of full representation, whereby the spectator is overwhelmed by an undeniable picture of reality. Against such standard art a tradition of modernism is promoted: Lautréamont over Zola, Mayakovsky over Gorki, Vertov over Vidor, Oshima over Kurosawa. Modernism has come to mean the arbitrary play of signs in a text that promotes the free construction of meaning. The viewer or reader's relation to such a text is one of strong reading ("rewriting" in Roland Barthes' vocabulary), the absolute contrary of the slavish passivity of identification.

Among film scholars Noël Burch has long been in the vanguard of the deconstructionist project. Not only has he tried to expose the mechanisms of illusion and representation, he has actively proposed alternative models of filmic signification: specifically the silent era before 1920, the current avant-garde, and, most important for us, the prewar cinema of Japan. Mizoguchi is a key figure in Burch's view of Japanese cinema. Before the war he, along with Ozu, developed and sustained a totally non-Hollywood narrative film tradition. After the war he can be cited as among those Japanese directors who not only succumbed to western modes of representation, but who pandered to western tastes, groveling for the lucrative export market.

Burch's rhetorical project leads him to bisect the world of texts into those complicit with a dominant (Hollywood) version of reality, featuring illusion and identification, and those other texts that ascetically abjure the temptations of this method and its obvious rewards. Its moralism aside, Burch's view of Japanese cinema and of Mizoguchi in particular remains crudely on the surface. Mizoguchi's postwar films may indeed have reached an export market and may indeed employ the lure of identification, not to mention a compellingly delicious pictorialism, but these devices don't exhaust the project of his films. That project might best be termed a "cinema of responsiveness." A machine of recording, the camera can also become an instrument of response to what is recorded. This mélange of objectivity and affect situates Mizoguchi's aesthetic within the problematic of reading and interpretation. Specifically, Mizoguchi treats his subjects as texts whose illusions promote in him the need to respond in such and such a way. Identification with the illusion, then, is only the first part of an arc that ends in productive interpretation. Hence his films, especially the late ones, never pretend to touch ground and always point to themselves as textual experiences. While this should attract Burch and the deconstructionists, Mizoguchi's responses, his readings, have nothing of the anarchic about them. His films are disciplines in reading, the results of which, as every viewer of Ugetsu will attest, are as compelling and inevitable as the most tightly plotted Hollywood film.

While we do not go through Mizoguchi to something seemingly solid beyond, he gives us the solidity of his response to a text that hovers as an illusion before him. In Mizoguchi (and, Barthes has argued, in Japan generally) there is never a question of pure reality to transmit nor of some independent Nature which the heroic artist may journey to and bring back to share with his spectators; instead there can only be the purity of the reading of a text about reality, that is, the productive reaction to an illusion. Every reading produces a reaction which in turn can be read as a text. Thus eddies out the infinite text of culture. The curiously mixed feelings of Mizoguchi's films are a measure of this intermediate stance between illusion and interpretation, the product of the "full emptiness" we are made present to, especially in Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff, The Life of Oharu, and Miss Oyu.

The concluding camera "fixation" in each of these films transcends the drama that leads up to it. This is not the authorial transcendence of the tidy rhetorical flourish, nor an ironic comment on the action, but the completion of another action which has been operative throughout the film, that of the filmmaker's sympathetic reading of the destiny of his characters. Identification, in the generic sense of the term, acts as a relay between separate levels of the text, essentially between separate texts. At the first level the character is created via actor identification with the role or circumstance of the script. To assure this, Mizoguchi's actresses were forced, for months before their role, to wear the costume of the period, to frequent museums, and to listen to the music of the time.

His well-known refusal to cut within an action can in part be attributed to the respect he accorded the player's identification with her role. One might be tempted to suppose that the camera struggles to follow and amplify the actress's reading of the role if it were not for the fact that Mizoguchi's most elaborate movements are those that, though beginning with an actor's movement, continue until they reach a new, distinct, and settled composition all their own. And so although characters control the framing of shots, always finish the actions they begin, and usually initiate whatever movements the camera does make, the audience soon identifies with the camera via its quasi-independence. This independence is also attributable to the aestheticized compositions of many scenes and to the noticeable ellipses between actions. To put this all together, the viewer must read the camera's response to an actress's response to her situation. Nor does it stop here, for the presumably originary situation she identifies with is often itself a textual response (in the form of legend, story, poem) to a hypothetical reality so far back it is literally out of the picture.

The Life of Oharu suitably exemplifies these strata and the movement of identification that interrelates them. The camera watches Kinuyo Tanaka come to terms with the role of Oharu, derived from one of Japan's greatest literary classics, Saikako's Life of an Amorous Woman. This seventeenth-century tale, essentially satiric and picaresque, chronicles the foibles of an easy woman who stumbles morally over and over to the delight of the reader. Tanaka, reading this tale from the perspective of postwar Japan, projects a tragic pathos in the grace of her falls, a grace so transcendent that she is permitted to escape society altogether in a final fall to the role of an indifferent mendicant nun.

This notion of role operates beyond the obvious technical requirements of the cinema, for the character, Oharu herself, conceives of her life as a series of roles in which she has participated. The flashback structure of the film guarantees this attitude of "reinhabiting" situations, allowing feelings to well up out of memory. In the opening segment she enters a temple to stare at a constellation of statues of famous Bodhisattvas. Focussing on one of these, she sees in its stony face the visage of Toshiro Mifune, her former lover executed for love of her. A glance-object structure (including the film's single closeup shots) underlines the primacy of this moment as trigger for the film to follow. She identifies, if not with Mifune, then with the past in which he played the decisive role. More important, her hallucination not only produces the image that permits the film of her life to unroll, it produces as well a reaction from her. In one of cinema's most gracefully telling gestures, her head cocks sadly and she slowly pulls the scarf from her hair. The liquid slipping of this silk down the side of the screen is her response to the reading of the image before her. It is the prototype for numerous falls she will have throughout the film and for the equally numerous camera descents by which Mizoguchi will sympathize with her plight (after the family's exile at the bridge, after the beheading of Mifune, after the suicidal run of Oharu). We can go so far as to say that just as Oharu's reactions to her situation are more important than the events that produced them, so Mizoguchi's reaction to Oharu transcends her tale. That tale begins with the distant camera set before a carefully raked palace garden while Oharu and her small entourage pass before us in extreme long shot. It ends with Oharu continuing to pass screen left out of frame, this time alone, as the camera remains still on the elegiac temple in the distance. She has entered and passed completely through Mizoguchi's view, our view. We have used her as the pretext for our own movement, just as Tanaka, as actress, used Saikaku's novel as pretext for her performance. Thus goes the dialectic of identification and interpretation.

Oharu may be Mizoguchi's most rigorous and complex film, but in terms of the question of identification it is far simpler than some of the later masterworks. It clearly exhibits the paradox of distance and involvement which defines the experience of his films. The distance comes not merely from camera placement but from Mizoguchi's determination to let every action run its course and to separate each action with tangible intervals. The involvement derives from Mizoguchi's peculiar timing which insists on a certain view of an action and waits for it to erupt, as though the camera itself were a bellows stirring the embers of the dramatic interplay to ignite in sudden flame. Each scene has its own dramatic structure and runs to its own fiery conclusion. The camera flourish which concludes so many of these scenes is an expression of the involvement that demands and results from this kind of obsessive uninterrupted look.

Sansho Dayu forthrightly takes up the questions of identification and sympathy in relation to the status of texts. Instead of a single character with whom we and the camera must come into relation, Sansho presents us with a family who exchange sympathy via identification through texts. In the first sequence mother and son exchange a memory about the father's trauma of exile. The mother recalls their last moments together when the son received an heirloom from his father along with the sacred text, "Be merciful to all men." A dissolve returns us not to the mother but to the son wearing the heirloom and speaking of his father. His spirit and love is thus shared. In the film's closing scene this same mother and son will again merge in repeating the father's text. The route which the film follows to permit this conclusion involves a set of exchanges too intricate to detail here. What is crucial to note, however, is that these exchanges occur as the passing on of texts. The mother's plaintive song from the island of Sado is brought to the daughter via a slave girl. The memory of the mother's cry "Anju, Zushio" wells up when the siblings repeat the cutting of the branch. Mizoguchi's camera here insists on the textualizing of this scene, making it not an action but the record of a meaning. This scene becomes a theatrical scene, read by its actors who change their lives in relation to the meaning it holds.

Sansho Dayu is a film about the emergence of morality out of a state of natural brutality. It is also about the centrality of texts and textuality in an illiterate and, consequently, unreadable world. When Zushio recognizes meaning in the text of a song, a dramatic reenactment, or the saying of his father, he frees himself from the meaningless activity of the slave camp, activity which by its very nature is unmemorable. Because they intone a text (the father's dictum), this forlorn couple, huddling alone on the beach out of sight even of the oblivious seaweed gatherer, rekindles the lost flame of culture and an idea of humanity.

Mizoguchi's position in this film is more direct and explicit than it was in Oharu. He actively joins scenes and memories. He himself memorializes and textualizes the activity of the family. Consciously the film participates in the proliferation of the father's text. The credits are themselves supered over two ancient sacred markers, present-day traces of the birth of meaning. When the slave girl from Sado sings the mother's song, she spins wool from wheel to wheel. Likewise the film unwinds in creating the fabric of the same plaintive hymn, passed on not directly but through the countless retellings the tale of Sansho has undergone, culminating in Mori Ogai's sensationally popular novel, the credited source of the movie.

If Mizoguchi's film seems disturbingly empty in the end, it is because he has audaciously placed his legend within the indifference of undramatic time. The seaweed gatherer exists in the state of nature, while the legend, dramatic and consequential, institutes cultural time, progress, and hope in the future. In identifying with Mizoguchi's weaving cinema we identify not with the success of culture and legend, but with the effort of textuality in an otherwise unreadable world. This is not a question of comedy versus tragedy since both of these are cultural constructions. In Sansho we participate in the eloquence of a meaningful gesture thrown up in the face of the indifference to which it arises in response. Once again identification is the key to the film and to our experience, but it is a knowing identification which places a burden of sympathy on the subject, refusing the consolation of fullness or presence. We are asked to identify with the difference of a text in the indifferent emptiness of the cosmos.

Can we continue to call this operation, by which an artist creates an image of a prior text, "identification," especially when the distance between the image and its subject is sadly insisted upon as it is at the end of all the films we have discussed so far? This kind of sympathetic participation by an observer in a primary scene is part of Japanese aesthetics generally and, therefore, lifts it out of the category of illusionism and passive identification.

Recall the horizontal panel paintings of the feudal era. Seldom is a scene of natural beauty rendered without the presence of an observer visibly meditating on or reacting to the view before him. The summer mountain scene may suggest or express "majesty" or "tranquility" or any of the highly coded moods permitted in Japanese art, but it will do so through an observer moved by this experience. Nature itself either cannot be trusted to deliver feeling or, more probably, is thought to express feeling only in the presence of a spectator.

Haiku poetry concentrates this same convention through the sequence of its rigid lines. A scene or action is presented in the first two lines, whereas the third line suddenly introduces a particular perspective, a human view or feeling. Listen to Basho:

The sound of a water jar
Cracking on this icy night
As I lie awake.

Coming closer to Mizoguchi's own interests and to the cinema, one would do well to start with the various aesthetics embodied in the no, kabuki, bunraku, and shinpa theater. Many instances of each of these dramatic forms crop up in his films and we know that he was an addicted spectator all his life. A catalogue would contain many straightforward adaptations and even more instances of the partial inclusion of a theater performance in his films.

More important than direct reference to these forms of theater, however, is the model they provide for a kind of mediated artistic experience. Mizoguchi was to shape this model into his own complex narrative stance. At the very least he took from traditional theater the absolute separation of action and telling. Here most importantly, narration is sung from the side of the stage, accompanied by instrumental music which provides the scene with added aural mimesis (the sound of rain or of a battle), but which can also respond to the action or_reflect upon it. In bunraku, of course, the visible presence of the puppeteers further mediates the performance and the tale it represents. In addition to these aspects of narration, the stories, sets, and acting in kabuki theater readily serve to accentuate heightened moments through a kind of concentration and counterpoint which Eisenstein was the first to recognize as a potential the cinema might adopt but which few filmmakers have dared to emulate. In his own way Mizoguchi did dare, so much so that one might speak of his work as performances in film, including the performance of his actors which he was loath to interrupt through cutting, the performance of his camera which, in quasi-independent fashion, responds to the actors, and the performance of the music which both participates in the drama and reacts pathetically to its consequences.

The route of this aesthetic leads directly to Japan's unique contribution to early cinema practice, the benshi. Audiences came to watch not just a film, but a professional response to that film. The benshi's commentary related the tale, to be sure, but from a distinct style and personal repertoire. This Japanese penchant for separate but simultaneously presented texts, linked by mood and thought, finds its champion in Mizoguchi. He treated each of his collaborators as the maker of a finished text which it was up to him, Mizoguchi, to play out in his own medium and in his own way. This accounts for the stony silence that notoriously signaled his dissatisfaction with a writer's draft, a decorator's sketch, or an actress's run-through of a scene. Refusing to impose his will in an area that didn't belong to him, he nevertheless forced all to repeat and rework their particular "texts" until they had surpassed themselves and given him something at the peak of intensity and expressiveness, something with which he could identify and begin to interpret. Hence the paradox: Mizoguchi, at once the most feared and exacting of directors, was also the one who gave to his co-workers the fullest responsibility for creating an acceptable artifact in their own fields of expertise.

This view of the artist as disciplined craftsman infuses Mizoguchi's most personal and sustained meditation on the vocation of the artist, his portrait of Utamaro, the greatest of the ukiyo-e printmakers of the eighteenth century. Mizoguchi clearly admires the way the mass-produced aspects of the ukiyo-e do not in the least detract from its instrumentality as a means of refined expression. Utamaro is at once a popular hero and an artist whose genius is capable of challenging the greatest practitioners of graphics living in Japan. He works in a frenzy for art equalled only by the passion for life which his subjects, beautiful courtesans, play out to the fullest. He exists within the heat of history and event, only he does so with a calculated distance. His works immortalize the history they seek to express, the passions that are so strong and sublime that it is at once inevitable and inconceivable that they should pass away. The final credits roll over a torrent of prints that rain down from above, each landing on and replacing the one beneath, each memorializing a passionate scene from the lives of the women who lived not with but around him. What obsesses Utamaro and, through him, Mizoguchi, is not the fleeting lives of the women, nor even the prints he makes of them, prints that are disposable and mass-produced; rather it is the activity of expression which through repetition and discipline is the way to vision and serenity.

The primacy of discipline and activity, that is, of artwork over artifact, lends prestige to popular arts and crafts, to pottery, printmaking, and the cinema. Mizoguchi surrendered himself to this ethic and this aesthetic, and sought to bring out in his films the fleeting vestige of such discipline. The Japanese critic Tadao Sato has demonstrated how intimately related to traditional Japanese arts is this Zen attitude of Mizoguchi, an attitude that crystallizes in the peculiarly Japanese effect of "impermanent posturing." Unlike the classics of western cinema, Mizoguchi's films deliver neither clear statement, nor well-constructed drama, nor stable outline. Instead, he presents us with the process of coming to a peak of meaning, only to slip off in search of something further. This eloquently describes the feelings conveyed by his famous crane shots which, at the appropriate moment in the drama, glide into a perfectly expressive composition and then fall away after holding this posture for as long as is seemly.

The Zen philosophy that this camera strategy is said to express and the peculiar texture of his films that it helps describe are of less interest to us than its function as an important and challenging sort of identification. For this gesture of his camera carves out an intangible space which has no meaning of its own but rather is linked to a pretext that develops and itself disappears. This act of response, this co-expression, completes itself in the spectator from whom is demanded neither understanding nor judgment, but the permanent readiness of a distinct yet parallel response. Mizoguchi's films are not objects to be observed but textual acts putting in motion correlative acts of response.

In what way is this style and aesthetic complicit with western representational models? What we have described as "impermanent posturings" and "fixations" of response, Burch accuses of mere pictorialism, catering to the West's facile understanding of Japan as a land of mystery and vague beauty where philosophers and artists wistfully ponder the evanescence of life. Certainly the overwhelming popularity in Europe and America of films such as Kinugasa's Gate of Hell with its pastel view of a traditional past gives substance to Burch's charge that Japan in the 1950s cashed in on an international hunger for delicious illusions. Over against the more dialectical, analytical films of the thirties whose subject matter was often socially relevant, these export "festival" films seem escapist and precious, exciting western audiences for that very reason.

But in his blanket condemnation of the rejuvenated Japanese industry, Burch blinds himself to the peculiar use Mizoguchi makes of the pictorialism his films undeniably include and the seductive illusions they just as undeniably tempt the viewer to succumb to. What Burch finds to be "academically decorative" and "opportunistic" is in fact a working past "decoration" in search of its authority and its value. What he claims is only a "contrived laying of certain traits of [Mizoguchi's] earlier system over the framework of Hollywood codes" might better be thought of as a meditation via those traits on the kind of suffering he explored in his social films of the thirties.

To see this at work one should begin with the first of these late films, Miss Oyu. Burch can hardly complain about Mizoguchi cashing in on a readymade audience, for this film, a critical and box-office flop, sought to revive quite an unpopular genre, the Meiji period film. The project of this revival led him to give Mizutani's set design a most prominent function in the overall effect of nostalgia indicated by the story. More important still, Miss Oyu marks the first collaboration between Mizoguchi and Kazuo Miyagawa and initiates the studied use of the elegiac camera movements that enthralled the West in The Life of Oharu and that might be said to characterize the late films in general. Miss Oyu is the first in a line of films to take aestheticism to the limit in order to peer beyond it.

The source of the film goes a long way in distinguishing Mizoguchi's project from the norm, for Miss Oyu derives from one of Junichiro Tanizaki's most famous stories of his "art for art's sake period," Ashikari. Tanizaki in the 1930s represented precisely the sort of Japanese artist scorned by Burch. Westerners have always felt at home in his delicious sensual refinement, and in his evocative nature descriptions which invariably are seasoned with the metaphysical. His is a literature of small but stunningly subtle effects.

Ashikari is a perfect example of Tanizaki's philosophy of art for it begins and ends in search of nearly indescribable effects. The story of Miss Oyu, which is the narrative heart of this novella, actually comprises but one-half its pages. The remaining half is an elaborate introduction in which a tourist encounters a traveler on the evening of the traditional moon-viewing ceremony by the River Yoda. Tanizaki has carefully given over his narrative voice to an aimless pleasure-seeker, out to relish the landscape and enjoy the country cooking. The story of Oyu has no direct connection to him (or to us) except as a prop to heighten the sensual and psychological effects which he has sought that evening.

Indeed, the introduction is even further contrived by the fact that the interior narrator who tells our tourist the story is himself also an observer at a distance. Although we surmise (and are eventually told) that he is the issue of the romantic tragedy he recounts, his knowledge of that tragedy comes not from direct experience but from his father who told him of Mis s Oyu years ago when father and son made their annual pilgrimage to gaze not just at the moon but at a noble lady playing the koto on the porch of her lakeside estate.

And so we approach the tableau of the revered figure, Miss Oyu, through Tanizaki, through the tourist, through the traveler he meets, and that traveler's memory of his father's tale. Oyu is indeed a hazy moon of a lady casting her glow coolly and from afar.

The tale surrounding Oyu only heightens her inaccessibility. A woman of rare independence, she has smitten the heart of Shinosuke, but being a recently widowed mother she is in fact unavailable. Through a uniquely Japanese web of allegiances, duties, and self-sacrificings, Shinosuke marries Oyu's young sister Oshizu and the three establish an unconventional menage. This arrangement outlasts the scandal it causes, but when Oyu learns that because of her, the married couple are living like brother and sister, she is filled with remorse and marries lovelessly. The couple disappears into a Tokyo slum where Oshizu dies in childbirth; Oyu retreats to the lovely villa by Lake Ogura passing her days in an atmosphere of melancholy elegance. Everyone is drawn into this atmosphere: Shinosuke, his son, and now even the tourist whose general sense of sadness is defined and deepened by the story he has heard. To this Tanizaki adds a characteristically haunting coda. Our tourist looks from the moonlit landscape back to his interlocutor. "But where he had been sitting, there was nothing to be seen save the tall grasses swaying and rustling in the wind. The reeds which grew down to the water's edge were fading from sight, and the man had vanished like a wraith in the light of the moon."

The novella stops here, for our guide has succeeded in his search; he has been surprised by the moonscape he went out to see, a moonscape whose "haunting" beauty doubtless contains within it myriad ghostly tales. By this blurring of narrative and spectacle the "framed" tale of Oyu is not the novella's ultimate treasure, for it, too, has been used as a frame, a narrative frame within which the landscape can evoke its peculiar effects.

Tanizaki's effects are precious because they are invariably directed to the single observer. The tourist's highly tuned sensibility is meant to lead our own into an atmosphere that floods us with that eerie feeling of ghostly loss. It is precisely this concentration, cultlike, on private sensation and mystification, which contributes to the suspicions of critics like Noël Burch who indict this aesthetic for its frivolity and uselessness. Neither art nor society is improved, disrupted, or even affected by such stories which nevertheless masquerade as serious.

In adapting Ashikari and particularly in enhancing the misty pictorialism of its already evocative imagery, Mizoguchi seems liable to Burch's charges. Yet his is by no means an "art for art's sake" aesthetic; rather it is art for the sake of peering past art's limit to that which precisely but namelessly bounds it. First of all, if Tanizaki aimed to manipulate private sensations, we must say that Mizoguchi's goal is to convey the impersonal character of emotion. To begin, he approaches the tale directly, eliminating all three interior narrators and (uncharacteristically) maintaining complete chronological sequence from the moment Shinosuke lays eyes on Oyu to his disappearance into the reeds beyond her lakeside manor.

Furthermore, he distributes viewer identification among the three main characters by offering support through camera movement and point of view to Shinosuke, Oyu, and Oshizu in succession. This keeps us at bay, juggling our sense of the complex feelings involved and reserving our fullest identification for the camera view which outlasts its convergence with the views of any one character.

After the unraveling of the menage toward the end of the film, when Oyu retires to her manor and the couple moves to their Tokyo slum, the camera view asserts its full independence, almost lifting itself beyond the pathetic drama to a general view of human passion and suffering. The style associated with this project borders on the ritualistic. The sequence showing the couple's decline in Tokyo, for instance, opens and closes with symmetrical descriptive shots of the slum, where in the distance a steaming locomotive passes first left (nudging the camera to move aside) and then screen right. Within these temporal and spatial brackets Oshizu dies in child-birth wrapped in Oyu's ceremonial kimono. This instance of dramatic economy is more than a case of understatement to quiet the audience before an explosive finale. It establishes the cool and measured tone with which Mizoguchi brings this potentially torrid melodrama to its end, generalizing rather than cashing in on its sentimental effects.

The final sequence opens with an elaborate tracking shot approaching a picturesque lakeside villa. Circling up to a moon-viewing party, we gradually distinguish Oyu and her retinue of maidservants and artists as they perform sad music, consonant with the night [12]. A baby's cry sends her servants out into the garden where they find Oshizu's infant and a letter from Shinosuke. While Oyu reads this letter commending the baby to her for life, the camera tracks from her face and down across the full length of the koto lying next to her. Never has a film insisted so literally on its own lyrical project. Although nestled in nature, Oyu's villa is utterly artificial, as the delicate shape of the koto, cut off from all background, testifies. Oyu responds to this moment, the culmination of her life's sole passion, in the only way she knows how, by asking her music teacher to play a composition to welcome the new child brought to her by the moon.

In a most daring coda, Mizoguchi frames a fully traditional moonscape, his own "composition" responding to the drama: on the misty moonlit lake, a boatman in the distance rhythmically rows to deposit on the shore a silhouetted passenger. A final tableau, the most painterly of Mizoguchi's entire career, places the hazy moon above a marsh full of rushes. Shinosuke (for it is he) moves no-like into the reeds singing the traditional air he had shared in happier times with Oyu:

Without you here
Every time I think on it
All seems melancholy
Osaka and my life

All the more unbearable.
  Don't think badly of me
Our love was wrong.

Shinosuke recedes completely into the reeds leaving us in a landscape which signifies bleakly the passing of man and of love, and yet which signifies this so pathetically that it simultaneously insists on the presence of human feeling in the earth itself [13-16].

Nature has become a sign that Mizoguchi both employs and reads, a crucial paradox that takes us back to a remark Oyu made in an early moment of triumph. After her exquisite koto recital during which she had gone to great lengths to create the proper atmosphere (with candles and incense), she confesses that she barely enjoys her instrument. Instead it is the pomp of the performance that she adores, particularly the ornate Heien era kimono which she wears at once pretentiously and seriously.

Mizoguchi likewise overdoes the atmosphere, cloaking this tale in an ancient, formal pictorial style and nudging its dramatic progression along in a hieratic rhythm. Mu sic, light, composition, and such traditional topoi as a boat, the hazy moon, and the rushes of a marsh, concentrate the pathos of the tale in the coda. But just as Oyu felt an authentic rapport with an environment of her own construction, so Mizoguchi can seriously respond to the desolate scene not just of spent human passions but of their dissolution into a pictorial drama of nature: moon-light on a somber marsh.

Here we can measure Mizoguchi's distance from Tanizaki, for the filmmaker has obviously sought to reproduce the elements of the novel's final sentence "The reeds which grew down to the water's edge were fading from sight, and the man had vanished like a wraith in the light of the moon." The sudden break which this passage signals in the novel between a tale and the status of the teller (is he a ghost?) strikes us with an icy eeriness. This is that singular effect which Tanizaki, following Poe, sought to produce in his narrator and in his reader. But Mizoguchi's presentation of the same tableau in no way seeks such a narrative twist. Instead this is the fullest and baldest exposition of the aesthetic strategy that has controlled the entire film, a strategy based once again on identification at a distance. The emotions that these final compositions indisputably arouse are so transpersonal in character (opposed to the sensualism of Tanizaki) that we must question the power and use of identification.

The traditional garb of the moonscape, just like the Heien kimono, bears a definite feeling that we can neither resist nor call our own. Oshizu is happy to end her life enfolded in Oyu's gown, just as Oyu could feel most authentically herself in that gown's ancient aura, an aura, by the way, that Shinosuke and his sister claim belonged to their mother as well. In the same way, Mizoguchi is not being facile, as Burch no doubt would have it, when he calls up these ancient images out of his story; nor is he inventing a personal expression or one suitable to his characters.

Instead, he is invoking an ancient ghost of nature, artificially bringing it up via the magnificent labor of actors, designers, and cameraman. Thus nature is a traditional and an exquisite mask through which paradoxically another nature appears, the bleak nothingness that outlasts the drama that produced it as an image. Transpersonal, even apersonal, emotion in Mizoguchi's aesthetics is a fact of nature, not of individuals, and his film produces out of the artifice of passion (a love story) a truly passionate artifice, this picture.

Mizoguchi's impersonal and indifferent mode of identification must make us question the concept itself. If we insist on defining identification as an illusion, we must do so now in relation to the "real illusion" of the cosmos as Mizoguchi saw it. If we only know reality through texts and only act in relation to our reading of them, then we must become adequate to the texts that precede us. Textuality is not arbitrary. The illusions of life have specific and developing contours and Mizoguchi succeeded in identifying some of those contours through the passion/action of his films.

Surely the proof of Mizoguchi's success in this method is the conclusion of Ugetsu. There his camera explicitly participates in the duping of the hero Genjuro who hallucinates the appearance of his dead wife upon his return to his empty home. But Genjuro retires to bed and the camera remains with the vision it has conjured up, with Miyagi who kneels before the fire and sadly does her mending. For several minutes we watch and sympathize with the ghost of Miyagi, waiting for the dawn sadly to sublime her into its white haze. What is remarkable here is not merely the paradox of presence and absence which the film has created, but Mizoguchi's willingness to learn from that paradox, his ability to adjust his sensibility to the sensibility of a phantom of his own creation.

Is this identification? An d do the phantoms of his films likewise demand from us an identification that makes us adjust our sensibilities to them? I think they do, yet this is a very particular kind of identification indeed. Richard Wollheim, in his essay on identification in Freud, distinguishes between the empathie and the sympathetic imagination, noting that we may suffer the same things as the subject of imagination or we may suffer in response to what we imagine the character to feel. Wollheim's explicit incorporation of the term "internal audience" within his notion of the imagination has even broader implications for film theory. Identification in his scheme can only be the name of a certain form of psychic potency, one in which our internal audience coincides with the subject of me imagination, as when I imagine my father and respond as I feel certain he would respond. Mizoguchi's method is quite other than this, coming much closer to sympathetic imagination wherein the internal audience is free to respond in its own way to a subject it nevertheless imagines in the strongest possible manner.

I have argued that this mode of identification is represented by the activity of reading, wherein two consciousnesses come together without coincidence across the body of a text. The results of this encounter are not pathological, locking us into the view of another; they are potentially therapeutic, expanding our range, shifting perspectives, allowing what Ricoeur aptly calls a complete redescription of reality from the parallactic vision that our cross-over has made possible.

But while avoiding the trap of pathological identification, Mizoguchi, we have seen, does not enter the camp and campaign ruled over by Barthes, Burch, and all the apostles of modernism who preach an ultimately solipsistic (de)constructivism. Mizoguchi provides a third way of dealing with a character, a text, and by extension with life itself. Through a studied discipline that permits the crossing over to another (a text, a person, a point of view) and a return to oneself, he imagines sympathetically in order to respond personally to the encounter. The object of imagination provides the rule for the response in much the way that, in Ricoeur's view, the semantic and syntactic aspects of a metaphorical combination provide a rule for interpretation. This doesn't mean that they point to a final or correct meaning; instead they invite us to roam in a new field of meaning but one that has been purchased for us by a pre-text.

In this way Mizoguchi's cinema performs the function that I consider most crucial for art in our epoch. Through the physicality and otherness of a set of signifiers, we are urged to entertain a new range of thoughts that promise to affect us. Captive neither of the artwork (traditional illusionism) nor of our own constructions (modernism), we adjust our sensibilities and potentially our lives to the lightness of something standing before us and inviting our imagination, inviting our sympathy, in short, inviting the gesture of our reading.