«Визуальная сложность» в японском и европейском кино 1950–1960-х годов: стилистические и смысловые сходства и различия

Abstract

In this article, I study the stylistic features of Japanese cinematography of the middle of the twentieth century, which was introduced to European critics and the general public in the 1950s. The cinematic style of the analyzed Japanese films is associated with the concept of visual complexity, borrowed from Le Fanu’s book Mizoguchi and Japan (Le Fanu, 2018). One of the manifestations of visual complexity in the films of Kenji Mizoguchi, YasujiroOzu, early Akira Kurosawa and other Japanese film directors of the ’50s, is that the viewer, experiencing anxiety and disharmony, is forced to build up in his mind an image, that is difficult to identify in the first moments of its screen existence, to regognizable objectivity. Another interesting aspect of visual complexity is the motionless long shots taken by a camera distanced from the object of observation—seemingly impassive, but at the same time bringing the viewer to a high degree of tension. These manifestations of visual complexity in Japanese cinema are compared to the outwardly similar forms created in the same period or somewhat later by such European film modernists and representatives of the American New Hollywood as Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick and, mainly, Robert Bresson. However, analyzing primarily Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari (“Tales of Moonlight and Rain”) and relying on the article A Lesson in Japanese Film Style by André Bazin and works by Jean-Luc Godard, Mark Le Fanu and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, I show that, in Bazin’s words, Japanese films do not so much give a sense of the style of the work that characterizes their authors as they express the anonymous “artistic spirit of a distinct civilization” (as cited in Le Fanu, 2018, p. 179). This means that Japanese cinema of the period under study contains artistic traditions that were formed and developed long before the birth of cinema to a much more pronounced degree than European and American auteur cinema. In particular, Japanese cinematography is obviously influenced by theatrical traditions, primarily Noh, the ancient traditions of making folding screens, tapestries, and erotic miniatures. All this, in turn, is a part of Japanese mentality rather than of Japanese intellectual culture. And this largely distinguishes Japanese cinema from formally similar European and American film modernism, predetermined not so much by mental factors and old cultural traditions as by contemporary intellectual discourses, primarily existentialist and Christian-personalist philosophy.