Gion Festival Music

Last night we watched Gion Festival Music in class.

Completely unavailable on DVD here in America (though Masters of Cinema put out a nice edition, packaged with Sansho the Baliff in the UK), I have to say that the movie was startling as I rewatched it.

Mizoguchi films split quite easily into his period dramas and his films with a contemporaneous setting. Especially after Kurosawa's success internationally with Rashomon, Mizoguchi started also to submit to international festivals. For the most part it was his period films that were noted in the West, his contemporary films seemed to play more to a Japanese audience. Such is the case here.

The Gion festival occurs every June in Kyoto and has since 896. A friend pointed out that making a movie called Gion festival Music and then not showing the festival would be akin to me making a film called "4th of July Fireworks" and not showing that either.  The only invocation we get is a brief shot the traditional lanterns used, toward the end of the film.

One of the fascinating things about the film is that if it is indeed aimed at a japanese audience, it does much to confound the expectations and wants of that audience.  Stylistically this is much more westernized than what we traditionally think of when we think of Mizoguchi and his "one take/one scene" style (which, granted, is already a pretty reductive way to think about it).  

Instead this film is filled with close-ups and if his other films force and audience to consider a situation, here the emphasis is much more on empathizing with one.  If anything there is a transference between the audiences empathy and the feelings that the older geisha has toward the younger at the end of the film, it is as if the empathy we are extending is taken up.