Cherry blossoms are honored as symbols of impermanence in Japan as they bloom briefly in spring. “Blossoming Cherry Trees by a Stream” by Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese, Tokyo (Edo) 1760-1849). Woodblock print (surimono); ink and color on paper. H.O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H.O. Havemeyer, 1929. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
by Lee Price
A profound meditation on a world evenly divided between cruelty and mercy, Sansho the Bailiff (1954) builds its power through its narrative’s ethical wisdom and visual expression’s beauty and power. This is the second blog entry in a set of six essays, each including examinations of key ethical concepts emphasized in the film, visual analyses of targeted scenes, and some reflections concerning my history with Sansho the Bailiff.
The Ethics of Sansho the Bailiff: Impermanence
Sansho the Bailiff depicts a stoic acceptance of change as a proper attitude to bring to life. Buddhists talk of impermanence as the way of the world. Everything will change. Therefore, it’s not surprising to see Governors and wealthy bailiffs sent into exile, high-born sons turn their back on luxury and accept a life of monastic poverty, and refined ladies descend into prostitution.
But while everything changes, in another sense, nothing changes. That’s the paradox at the core of the last scene. For the family to remain true to itself, the surviving members must accept the sacrifices and the degradation brought upon them. As the mother says to her son, “I know that you have followed your father’s teachings, and that is why we have been able to meet again.” Although utterly devastated, the family is intact and justified.
The year after he made Sansho the Bailiff, Kenji Mizoguchi directed his version of the classic 13th-century story The Tale of the Heike, under the title Taira Clan Saga (Shin heike monogatari). The opening lines of this ancient epic poem were translated by Helen C. McCullough in 1988. They have resonance for Sansho the Bailiff:
“The sound of the Gion shōja bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sōla flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline. The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring night; the mighty fall at last, they are as dust before the wind.” – The Tale of the Heike, translated by Helen C. McCullough
In Sansho the Bailiff, impermanence is the natural order of the world. No one grieves about change, even when it is painful. It is accepted. Zushiô stands by the lake where his sister drowned and kneels by the grave where his father is buried. And then he resumes his course, endeavoring to live the life they have pointed him toward.
Zushio paying respect at his father’s grave and at the lake.
The concept of wabi, a cultivated appreciation of all aspects of existence, enables meaning to be found even amid the chaos of change. Dichotomies of good and evil, divisions between the ugly and the beautiful, lose their meaning in this philosophy.
“Wabi means that no thought of hardship arises even in straitened circumstances. Even amid insufficiency, one is moved by no feeling of want. Even when faced with failure, one does not brood over injustice.” – Wind in the Pines: Classic Writings on the Way of Tea as a Buddhist Path, edited by Dennis Hirota
These concepts are so ingrained in Sansho the Bailiff that the wrenching final scene on the beach retains a deep sense of dignity. The hardship is counterbalanced by the beauty of the completed circle of reunion. Maybe it’s wabi. Transcendence is touched even in the trappings of outward misery.
Impermanence Expressed in Images
Taro on the road that leads from Sansho’s slave compound to the Imperial temple.
“You have a difficult road ahead of you,” Sanshô’s son Taro cautions Zushiô while protecting him in the Imperial Temple. No one chooses lightly to go on the road in Sansho the Bailiff. Eventually, all the major characters set out upon these winding paths (and that even includes Sanshô, who spends most of the movie haughtily confident of his situation). The very first shot of the movie introduces the family as travelers on a forest path. These roads head into uncertainty, and the characters must stoically accept the impermanence of their situations.
In Sansho the Bailiff, the far shots of people following paths are beautifully composed. They usually serve as a memorable last image to close a scene and signal key transitional moments in the lives of the characters depicted.
The young man Taro is nothing like his father, the villainous bailiff Sanshô. Taro is drawn to the enslaved children, Zushiô and Anju, and he embraces the ethical teachings that Zushiô recites to him. Disgusted with the greed and cruelty he sees around him, Taro resolves to make a clean break from the brutal world of his father. As he prepares to leave the slave compound forever, Taro stops by the hut where the children are sleeping. In an act of compassion to begin his new life, he tenderly covers the children with a blanket of straw, the equivalent of a parent pulling up the covers. It is a beautiful grace note.
Then Taro leaves the compound. The final image is a magnificent far shot of Taro disappearing into the distance on the mountain path. He accepts the necessity of transition—the impermanence of his position in life—without looking back. It is the last shot of the movie’s first half, followed by an intertitle that announces the passage of ten years.
Taro covers the children, then goes to the guarded gate of the compound. From the other side of the fence, the camera tracks with Taro as he approaches the gate and walks out into freedom, released from the barred prison of his father’s world.
The far shot of Taro’s departure is later echoed by a similar shot when Zushiô flees the compound. As with Taro, Zushiô performs an act of compassion as he leaves, carrying the ailing slave Namiji with him to freedom. At this point, Zushiô’s life is in transition once again.
Later, Mizoguchi employs a different visual strategy to capture another key transition point in Zushiô’s life. When he resigns his governorship, the camera follows Zushiô as he walks behind a translucent screen, the shot lingering upon his indistinct image as he leaves this part of his life forever. When we catch up with him seconds later, Zushiô will be dressed as a peasant. The images smoothly carry us from royalty to poverty using only a screen and a dissolve to elide a precipitous transition.
Zushio behind the screen in the background in a subtle visual transition from governor to peasant.
Mizoguchi and the Impermanence of Critical Acclaim
When I visited my grandparents’ house in the 1960s, I’d linger at a certain bookcase in their house where they proudly displayed their World’s Greatest Literature collection, a multi-volume set of classic books as selected by the Spencer Press publishers in 1936. In my ten-year-old mind, I assumed that these were the essential books that an educated person must read—books like Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography, The Last Days of Pompeii by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley. But now, 50+ years later, I thumb through my copy of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006 edition) and there’s no mention of these books to be found.
A selection from the ‘World’s Greatest Literature’ set, published by Spence Press.
Acclaim is fleeting. Critical tastes are fickle. The public moves on. Poor Edward Bulwer-Lytton is now best known for penning the opening line, “It was a dark and stormy night…,” the inspiration for the very popular annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest that challenges contestants to compose the most “atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written.”
In 2022, Sansho the Bailiff placed at #18 in a Wonders in the Dark poll of the Greatest Films of All Time. I imagine this should be sufficient to earn it a place of honor in a blu-ray set of the World’s Greatest Movies, proudly displayed to attract the attention of future inquisitive grandchildren. But #18 sounds borderline. Will it survive the next poll?
Sansho the Bailiff was designed for prestige. Emerging from the chaos of Japan’s post-WWII corporate reorganizations, the Daiei Film company hit the global jackpot in 1950 with the unexpected—in fact, unprecedented—international success of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. It made a tidy profit in Japan in its first year of release, but was then turbo-charged a year later when it won the Golden Lion prize for Best Picture at the Venice International Film Festival. Still struggling to find respect in a new world, Japan scored with an art film.
Daiei invested in talent and encouraged quality. Kurosawa received the most attention, but the studio execs looked to strong directors like Teinosuke Kinugasha and Kenji Mizoguchi to deliver another Rashomon, too. Daiei hungered for more Venice accolades.
To some extent, this strategy worked. Films by Kurosawa, Kinugasha, and Mizoguchi were welcomed, applauded, and honored at Cannes and Venice. The directors were hailed as great film artists who brought uniquely Japanese artistic visions to the world. But their films didn’t repeat the Rashomon model, where an international seal of approval guaranteed international financial success.
Sansho the Bailiff performed modestly well at the Japanese box office upon its release in March 1954. Then at the 1954 Venice International Film Festival, Sansho garnered a Silver Lion prize for Best Directing Achievement in a Feature Film, sharing this honor with three other directors—Elia Kazan for On the Waterfront, Kurosawa for Seven Samurai, and Federico Fellini for La Strada. This was Mizoguchi’s second film to win him Silver Lion recognition, having received a Silver Lion award for Ugetsu the previous year.
Despite these awards, Mizoguchi fever failed to catch on in the Western world. Film bookings were rare. The top film critics were aware of his name from the festivals, but few received opportunities to view more than a handful of the 100+ films he had directed. Mizoguchi died in 1956, just a couple of years after his Venice triumphs. There would be no new Mizoguchi movies to build on the firm foundation of two consecutive Silver Lions.
The French New Wave rescued Mizoguchi from encroaching obscurity. Writing in the extremely influential Cahiers du Cinéma in 1958, critic and aspiring filmmaker Jacques Rivette used his article “Fragments of Mizoguchi View from Here” to trash the popular Akira Kurosawa by exalting the relatively obscure Mizoguchi. Rivette’s Cahiers compatriots joined his rallying cry. In their 1960 annual critics’ poll, the Cahiers du Cinéma critics selected Sansho the Bailiff as the best film released in France in 1960 (note that this 1954 Silver Lion winner received its official premiere in France six years after its release).
For a wild ride through the vicissitudes of critical affection, the decennial “Greatest Films of All Time” polls of the British film journal Sight and Sound perhaps best capture the roller coaster nature of critical fame. For 60 years, Mizoguchi has been a contender. Unfortunately, a precise pattern of his poll success is impossible to chart as Sight and Sound constantly changes whether it elects to post a Top Ten, a Top 33, a Top 102, or a Top 250. Also, it is to be expected that competition will naturally become more intense over time, simply because more movies join the mix. But these polls are fun, providing solid evidence of the fickle nature of critical acclaim.
The first Sight and Sound poll of “The Greatest Films of All Time” was compiled in 1952, two years before Sansho the Bailiff was released. Sixty-three critics contributed to its top 20. By the second Sight and Sound poll in 1962, enthusiasm for Mizoguchi’s work had exploded among the select group of 70 prestige film critics polled, resulting in Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953) tying with Erich Von Stroheim’s Greed (1925) as the fourth greatest film of all time. Over the next six decades, Mizoguchi’s status on the Sight and Sound polls has constantly fluctuated.
Here are some notes on the fortunes of the Sight and Sound Top 33 Greatest Films of All Time as voted by film critics in 1962:
The Winners, 1962 – 2022: As all cinephiles probably know, the dependable high placements are: Citizen Kane (#1 in five out of eight polls, dropping as low as a respectable #3 in 2022), The Rules of the Game (in the top three for six out of eight polls and placing at a respectable #4 in 2022), and Tokyo Story (first appearing tied for 26th place in 1962 and subsequently rising to top five placements from 1992 through 2022). The latecomer Vertigo first crashed the poll in 1972 with a 12th place finish and has been a constant in the top 10 for every subsequent poll.
The Losers, 1962 – 2022: Nine of the 1962 Top 33 have altogether vanished from the Top 250 of 2022. They are: Night and Fog (1956), Limelight (1952), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), The Gold Rush (1925), Nazarin (1959), The Childhood of Maxim Gorky (1938), Zero for Conduct (1933), La Terra Trema (1948), and Ivan the Terrible, Part One (1945). The biggest drops were suffered by Ivan the Terrible, which tied for 6th place in 1962, and The Gold Rush, which dropped from tied for second in 1952 to tied for 14th in 1962 and then to oblivion in 2022. But before you conclude that Charlie Chaplin’s reputation took a nosedive off a Yukon peak, note that there are two Chaplin films (Modern Times and City Lights) still solidly ensconced in the Top 100.
The Director Sweepstakes, 1962 – 2022: To measure which directors have best weathered the test of time, I’ve identified the 23 directors included in the 1962 Top 33 and added up the number of their movies in the Top 100 of 2022. The following directors appear to have somehow sustained critical approval over a 60-year stretch of time, each contributing at least one film in 1962 and still maintaining a strong (minimum of two films) placement in 2022’s Top 100: Buster Keaton, Robert Bresson, Charles Chaplin, Carl Dreyer, Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and Kenji Mizoguchi.
Mizoguchi Status, Sight and Sound edition: He’s doing okay! Yes, 1962 was a fluke, with Ugetsu tied for fourth with Von Stroheim’s Greed. This remains the only Sight and Sound poll where a Mizoguchi film cracked the top 5. In 1972, Ugetsu slipped to #10. And then Mizoguchi disappeared from the rankings for three straight decades (the 1982 poll through the 2002), but keep in mind that the Sight and Sound lists for these decades were unusually small, ranking only 15 films in 1982 and then ten apiece in 1992 and 2002. There’s no telling if Mizoguchi films were simmering right below the surface. Happily, Sight and Sound’s 2012 poll ranked 102 films with Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu tied for 50th place and his Sansho the Bailiff appearing for the first time, tied for #59. Then in the 250-film poll of 2022, Mizoguchi fared well again, with Sansho the Bailiff tied for 75th greatest film of all time and Ugetsu tied for 90th place. And for the first time, Sansho has pulled ahead of Ugetsu in the horse race.
Of course, none of this obsessive poll-scrutinizing means anything. There is no such thing as a 75th greatest film of all time. Or an 18th greatest film of all time, if you go by the Wonders in the Dark poll. Ultimately, art can’t be measured numerically.
Tears expended may be a better measure. This is an area where Sansho the Bailiff has truly excelled. Years after his first Sansho experience noted film scholar David Bordwell recalled his first viewing at the Bleecker Street Cinema (New York) in 1969: “I came out of Sansho with tears streaming down my cheeks.”
And there’s film critic Anthony Lane, writing for The New Yorker in 2006: “I have seen Sansho only once, a decade ago, emerging from the cinema a broken man but calm in my conviction that I had never seen anything better; I have not dared watch it again, reluctant to ruin the spell, but also because the human heart was not designed to weather such an ordeal.”
And then there’s Sam Juliano of Wonders in the Dark: “I confess that I wept uncontrollably at the film’s ending and that I had somehow achieved cinematic nirvana by experiencing this shattering film, a picture whose blending of craftsmanship and humanism has produced what is surely the most profoundly emotional film of all time.”
Time moves on. Everything changes; nothing changes. Polling positions are built on the foundations of sand. In a world of impermanence, all we can do is hold tight to each other and know that our honest emotional responses to the images on the screen are the only worthwhile gauge of their value. By that measure, I find it easy to call Sansho the Bailiff a masterpiece as I wipe a tear from my eye.
Zushio visits the site where his father was buried.