Sansho the Bailiff

Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi

Film Forum’s current retrospective-salute to Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi reaches its peak with Sansho the Bailiff on September 15-16. This couldn’t happen at a better time. The rarely screened film initiates the new movie season with a reminder of why the art form matters.

Made in 1954, Sansho the Bailiff is one of those period films set in Japan’s dark ages that seems timeless to Westerners. Mizoguchi’s prologue announces that the folktale comes from a period before man discovered his humanity—an introduction that makes the story seem timely, even today. The past is not used for escapism; there’s a fundamental moral example conveyed through watching a land-owning family as it is torn apart and scattered into the cruelty of peonage and slavery. With rhythmic, lyrical camera movements and astonishing, sensual cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa, Mizoguchi gives this story the richness of fable. 

Watching Sansho combines awe and lucidity, benefits of the myth-reading process. Contemporary culture has forgotten that this is what makes moviegoing special: wonderment. Through Mizoguchi’s style, simple gestures and details provide visual pleasure (the young siblings Zushio and Anju fleeing with their mother Tanaka, building an impromptu shelter in the woods symbolizes their innocence and empathy during crisis). Character and circumstance are defined with such clarity that the story’s forward movement is dreamlike and captivating. As Zushio and Anju age, their response to the hostile world—a class system ruled by Sansho, the tyrant of a small village—becomes a personal trial as well as a meditation on fate. (The essential slave-liberation story is felt in films from 1900 and Days of Heaven to The Color Purple.)

It is Mizoguchi’s unique concept of fate that makes Sansho the Bailiff exemplify that uncommon movie quality: greatness. Zushio and Anju discover the way of the world, keeping in mind their father’s lesson: “A man is not a human being without mercy.” This theme overrides critics’ usual emphasis on Mizoguchi’s “feminism.” What is any “ism” without humanity? The mother’s simple question, “Do you remember your father’s face as well as his lesson?” unsettles the idyllic imagery. And at Anju’s crisis point—an acknowledged legendary moment in cinema history—Mizoguchi exquisitely articulates mankind’s despair, linking it to hope and longing. Few movies have more unforgettable moments than Sansho the Bailiff.  No wonder it has won testimony from Bertolucci, Spielberg and Malick. Join them.