Cinema
Across the Lake
ISABEL QUIGLY II y
THE Top Ten, to film enthu- siasts in this country over the last few weeks, has meant one thing: it has meant Citizen o Kane, L'Avventura, La Regle du Jett, Ugetsu Monogatori, Greed, Battleship Potemkin, Bicycle Thieves, Ivan the Terrible, La Terra Trema, L'Atalante; that is, the ten films that turned up most often in the lists of seventy film critics, each choosing his own Top Ten at the request of Sight and Sound. No one pretends, of course, least of all the list-makers, that this means more than a rough guide to current taste, but it is interesting to see where such taste takes us, how opinions have altered in the last ten years (Bicycle Thieves was top and La Regle du Jcu last in the 1952 ten), what the surprises are and what the gaps, the most surprising gap being, to my mind, Bergman.
One of the surprises is the film that comes fourth on the list, tying with von Stroheitn's Greed: Kenji. Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogatori, which even most readers of Sight and Sound won't have seen, as it hasn't yet been shown here commercially. But if they can now get along to the Academy's late night shows (and few films would be as suitable as this for seeing at un- earthly hours), there it is. It is not my own num- ber four film out of all the world, but it is a film with some of the most extraordinary moments, surely, ever seen in the cinema, and that strange and wholly cinematic way of giving you visual prods, as it were, without your quite knowing what it is that prods you, as in a dream, or as with half-lost memories, making things seem familiar or significant without your being able, even afterwards, to work out why. Ugetsu Monogatori is full of these prods; to a Western audience there must be such gulfs of incompre- hension and misunderstanding that it's a wonder we catch on to even the tail-end of any of them.
The unfamiliarity of things in Japanese films is both a help and a hindrance, of course. Every- thing we see is exotic: even the human face and certainly a good deal of human feeling. How are we to interpret, say, the supernatural when we cannot really judge degrees of realism, since everything, as I said, looks `unreal'? In this film realism and fantasy are combined in a manner that seems strange to us because we are not used to meeting fairy-tales (ghosts, anyway) in realistic settings. (But, then, what, in this con- text, is realism?) If a potter goes to sell his pots in the market and is carried off home by a beautiful princess, you don't expect to find that actually she has been dead quite a while. Nearer to our habit of looking at it is the friendly ghost of a wife who has died, but is there to greet her husband home from his ad- ventures, so that he won't be disappointed.
The story is set in what Japanese films have accustomed us to think of as the endless Japanese middle ages, in which everyone seems curiously at home. A man of peace, a potter, and a man who longs for glory, a farmer, set off from the village to make their fortunes during the civil wars. Both make and lose them in a circular way that brings them back where they started. On the way to their adventures they cross a lake on a misty night: and out of just that, the boat looming up and being lost to sight again, Mizoguchi has made one of the most unforgettable few minutes in the cinema.
Previous page
