A Film Canon

The Life Of Oharu represents Mizoguchi's most systematic, merciless vision of female disempowerment, tracing the eponymous heroine's (Kinuyo Tanaka) gradual descent through the social strata of the Tokugawa Shogunate, each of which exhibits its own particular mode of subjugation. Although this process is initially catalysed by Oharu's romance with page Katsunosuke (Toshiro Mifune), and her hope for "the day...when all may be free to love, regardless of status", its panoramic quality ultimately offsets the difference between social classes by bringing their shared sexism into relief - a common denominator that imbues Oharu with a curious stasis, or lack of net movement, and explains Mizoguchi's combination of an almost mathematically linear narrative with a circular framing device. This finds its stylistic corollary in his iconic medium tracking-shot, here poised between the largely urban register of his earlier films, in which it serves to abstract interior space, and detach the audience from its operations, frequently by pulling back to a mobile distance at which the architecture of the town and home blocks the action; and a new, natural register, in which it moves with a slightly more frantic pace, and seems keener to embody, rather than abstract, the action of its subjects, as if to evoke the entire abject, skulking, potentially supernatural world that will come to characterise his late historical works. It also renders Tanaka's performance of Oharu's lifespan from a teenager to old woman more plausible, as well as ensuring that the face - and its cipher, the close- up - take on the full trauma of her desubjectivisation, from a pilgrim's brutal uncovering of her features as a lesson against sin, to her desperate, artfully tracked attempt to glimpse her son's indifferent visage, and, finally, the wry Buddha that encircles the framing device.