The Daily Rushes: The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums

     "The Daily Rushes" are a day late, bordering on two, and the producers are tearing their toupees out.  Hey, don't blame us, we don't make the weather--but we need to feed them a little to keep our project from starving, so here's a little about a peerless moviemaker who deserves a lot more analysis.

     I'll resist the temptation to paste a link to my friend and ex-roomie Bruce Bennett's NY Sun appreciation of Kenji Mizoguchi and leave it at that.  He certainly knows a lot more about the subject than I do; to-nite's viewing was only the third Mizoguchi I've witnessed, the others being "Ugetsu" and "Sansho the Bailiff".  I'l be content with borrowing his phrase, "gentle, unwavering camera".

     Like Mizoguchi's work itself, the lilt of said phrase is loverly, quotidian and universal, yet very specific in time and place.  A gentle, unwavering camera is what any basic shutterbug needs.  Life will often provide an amateur with accidentally brilliant framing and tantalizing whispers of what may be going on beyond the borders of the frame.  A Polaroid salvaged from a dumpster can be as beautiful and telling as a Robert Frank.  I gawked at old photos online to-day and marveled once again at the fitful genius of chance.  Some were great photos taken by profesionals or semipros; others were shot by Jane P. Friend or John Q. Acquaintance.  Experience and aesthetic purpose-mongering barely mattered, as long as the artists' hands were gentle and unwavering when they touched and clicked.  Time is a supremely indulgent art that regales us with fascinating stories in the recordkeeping of instants we see in photographs.      

     Kenji Mizoguchi was the most exacting of possible control freaks in the fine art of cinema.  Accounts of his precision and preparation make Stanley Kubrick seem like a crayon-wielding toddler scribbling wildly on a placemat.  Yet, the personalized, emotional reaction we have in watching and listening to his naturalistic work is nearly troubling.  We must eavesdrop in his world without losing ourselves in the comforts of cinematic voyeurism.  As technically meticulous as Mizoguchi's mise-en-scene is, it feels like hastily snapped photographs and recordings of strangers at their most emotionally vulnerable.  Even in the devastating "Ikiru" and "Rashomon", arthouse icon Akira Kurosawa let us finish the popcorn and soda we purchased to soothe any growls of nausea stemming from our commiseration (exacerbating the diabetic rush of the pop with a nauseating sickly sweet ending to the latter flick).  Interrupting a Mizoguchi scene with a chomping session or a bathroom break feels as inconsiderate as doing so in the middle of an intimate's teary-eyed confession.  We kneel before his imagery and perk ears for his fragile soundtracks of existence as if we're the repositories of his faith and vision.  Melancholy contemplation sates our appetites.

     J-Ro (Jonathan Rosenbaum--thanx again for the idea, B-Ben) described "Chrysanthemums" as "a movie about people trapped in boxes" during his lecture.  Mizoguchi liberates them and us with an incredibly lush exogenous world created to actualize both promise and threat.  As in "Sansho" and "Ugetsu", the most immediate threats tend to be just out of camera range, often literally around the stark, boxy right angles of a corner.  However, so is liberation of a more permanent nature, deliverance that lasts beyond social pressures or the ill passions of the moment and is often expressed thru serenely nurturing sounds.  Like no other director whose work I've encountered, Mizoguchi owns not only the space he so meticulously arranges in lines and waves onscreen but the space of our own being in time before the screen's beckoning call. 

     "The Daily Spot" will be a day late as well, and a money shot or more short.  We'll catch up with production after a quick haiku and get this baby back on sked by Friday.