While working in Sansho’s slave compound, Anju hears a new arrival singing Tamaki’s song.
by Lee Price
Sansho the Bailiff: Introduction to Part Six
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 sixth and final blog entry in a set of six essays, each including examinations of key ethical concepts emphasized in the film, visual analyses of representative scenes, and some personal reflections.
The Ethics of Sansho the Bailiff: Compassion
Sansho the Bailiff tells the story of the children Zushiô and Anju. Through the self-sacrifice of his sister Anju, Zushiô escapes the slave compound of Sansho the Bailiff and is reunited with his mother Tamaki. The movie opens with Zushiô and closes with him. Therefore the movie might be more reasonably, and informatively, called:
Zushiô and Anju or Anju and Zushiô or
Zushiô the Governor or Citizen Zushiô or even
Look Homeward, Zushiô.
Revisiting the book Figures Traced in Light by acclaimed film theorist David Bordwell, I was delighted to see that he addresses one of the most puzzling mysteries of Sansho the Bailiff, namely:
“Why is it (the movie) named after him (Sanshô)? I always ask my classes. Isn’t it a bit like changing the title of Othello to Iago? My own view is that for Mizoguchi the world we live in, unhappily for us, belongs to its bailiffs.”
This is my view, too. Sansho is mean, vicious, and sycophantic but is not a rare breed. His kind still walks and rules among us. I read a quote today from the poet Philip Larkin that reminded me of Sanshô:
“Most people, I’m convinced, don’t think about life at all. They grab what they think they want and the subsequent consequences keep them busy in an endless chain till they’re carried out feet first.”
Sansho is a first-rate grabber of things he wants. In his world, greed is the primary mover. When he presents a chest of valuables to a royal envoy, he assumes that wealth can buy happiness. The envoy responds just as expected—he wants wealth and power, too. This is the world according to Sansho. As Bordwell says, “the world we live in… belongs to its bailiffs.”
Sansho with a branding iron.
But remember that Sansho lives within the same prison walls that enclose his slaves. They’re all inside together. Freedom is on the other side. It’s not easy to cross over and is it even worth the risk? Life is harsh on the other side as well.
At the conclusion of Sansho the Bailiff, we are left with several worlds to contemplate. At the center, there’s the ego-driven world of Sansho. Contrasting with that, there’s the benevolent world of Zushiô’s father Masauji, who believes all people should be treated with mercy and compassion. Zushiô returns to his father’s path, embracing the ideals that his father and sister lived and died for. Neither ends well: Masauji is sent into exile and the movie closes with Zushiô in poverty. This is the opposite of American prosperity theology where goodness is rewarded by material wealth. As the end title appears on the screen, this is what we’re left to grapple with—a choice to cast our lot with either Sansho’s materialist world or the impractical ethical idealism of Zushiô’s father. We’ve seen that both roads can lead to unhappiness and exile.
Most of us are rarely presented with even that clear a choice. There’s a third way, perhaps the easiest way, where one navigates through life disengaged from the work of either ambition or mercy. The final crane shot carries the viewer away from Zushiô and Tamaki, leaving us instead with the image of a seaweed gatherer, calmly doing his job, oblivious of the profound scene taking place nearby. It’s a haunting closing image that reminds me of the concluding stanza of W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”:
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
The seaweed gatherer is like the ploughman. His life goes on—he has work of his own to do—even as something amazing occurs mere yards away.
Above: “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus,” usually attributed to Pieter Bruegel but may be a copy from a lost original Bruegel work, circa 1560, oil on canvas, from the collection of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. Below: The seaweed gatherer toiling on the shore.
Compassion Expressed in Images
“Is the sea safe?”
Tamaki’s question is really beside the point. The sea is unavoidable, inescapable.
In Sansho the Bailiff, seas and lakes are emphatically not safe—they are strongly associated with separation and death. Yet the movie also presents these bodies of water as settings for healing and mourning. They appear primal, suggesting a world outside of time. In the essay “The Ghost Princess and the Seaweed Gatherer,” film critic Robin Wood points out the difficulty of assigning easy symbolic meanings to the imagery in Sansho the Bailiff:
“Mizoguchi never imposes symbolism on the action. Accordingly, the significance of the recurrent imagery is to be interpreted flexibly, in relation to the events with which it is linked; as the film progresses, it accumulates complex emotional overtones from the shifting juxtapositions, until by the end the visual presence of the sea makes emotionally present for us all the past events with which fire and water have been associated, becoming one of the means by which Mizoguchi deepens and intensifies our response to the last scene as the point to which every impulse in the film has moved.”
The children Zushiô and Anju are separated from their mother Tamaki in a harrowing abduction scene in which Ubatake, the family servant, drowns. Later, Tamaki runs to the sea in a hopeless attempt to escape from her life on Sado Island, only to be left crippled and crying for her lost children on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Anju dies in a lake.
Above: A kidnapping at sea. Below: A lament by the sea
Zushiô returns to each family member in the movie’s second half as if in a series of pilgrimages. In each case, a body of water is positioned as an essential element within the frame. Zushiô visits his father’s grave, located at the top of a hill with the sea in the background. He visits the lake where his sister took her life. And he meets his mother in a cove by the sea.
In the final scene, the sun is nearing the horizon as Zushiô reaches the end of his quest. He enters a timeless landscape, passing giant trees and entering a picturesque cove, austere and sheltered from the world. Life and death go unnoticed in this place—a tsunami struck here two years previous, but no one seems to know the names or the number of the dead. For another movie equivalent of the trees, think of the Sequoias in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958)… and for the cove, both the stretch of beach where astronaut Taylor pounds the sand in Planet of the Apes (1968) and the beach where Anthony Quinn breaks down at the end of La Strada (1954). Quests often end at the shoreline.
Looking closely at that last scene in Sansho the Bailiff, the first shot—following Zushiô on his descent into the cove—is introductory. Then, the second shot serves as the real beginning of the final sequence. This shot will be reversed to close the movie, forming a sublime set of bookends enclosing one of the most moving scenes ever filmed. The opening bookend is a crane shot that ascends to a significant height, ultimately uniting Zushiô and Tamaki within the frame. Then, following eight medium shots and close-ups that take the viewer through the heart-rending details of their reunion, Mizoguchi retreats to a closing crane shot that leaves Zushiô and Tamaki, now clinging to each other with nothing left to say, and pans left to end on a final image of the steadily-working seaweed gatherer and the eternal sea.
Zushio and Tamaki hug in the film’s penultimate shot.
Postlude
What happened next?
The ending of Sansho the Bailiff is pitch perfect. Nothing more needs to be said. A sequel would be sacrilegious.
Nevertheless, I can imagine a believable plot trajectory from this point, albeit a narrative lacking in conflict. Box office potential would be limited.
Zushiô remains there on the beach, living with his mother, close to starvation and battered by the elements but appreciative of this time together. Tamaki dies with Zushiô by her side.
Zushiô sets out once again, just another beggar on the road. This time the path leads him back to the Imperial Temple where his friend Taro serves as a priest. Zushiô stays there, becoming a monk, dedicating his life to meditation and contemplation.
Zushio and Taro in the Imperial Temple
When Zushiô thinks of Anju, his mind instinctively turns to Sansho, and he knows that he is still full of rage. He remembers his mother and the torture she endured, and he sees that the world is full of Sanshos. He feels the hatred burn within him. Five years pass, and he awakens one morning to discover his love for Anju and Tamaki remains, even deeper than before, but his rage has passed. He has forgiven Sansho the bailiff.
Five more years pass, and Zushiô awakens one morning to discover that he has forgiven himself. He has found peace at last.
On his deathbed, Zushiô is asked for the secret of his wisdom. He shares his father’s words:
“Without mercy, man is like a beast. Even if you are hard on yourself, be merciful to others. Men are created equal. Everyone is entitled to their happiness.”
Life continues on at the temple. Memories of Zushiô fade. One by one, the monks who knew him best pass away. But some of the stories shared inside the temple slowly spread to the communities outside, concentric circles rippling out into the world. The story of Zushiô and Anju traveled through the countryside, told and retold with many variations, spreading throughout Japan, first through oral recitations and then eventually captured on paper. The story was told, sometimes embellished, always cherished.
A movie of their story would be filmed in 1954, introducing the story of Zushiô and Anju to new audiences throughout the world, yet one more ripple outward across time and space. One thousand years after Zushiô’s death, the movie that drew inspiration from his story would be acclaimed as a world cinema masterpiece.
REFERENCES
Personal Views: Explorations in Film by Robin Wood
Kenji Mizoguchi and the Art of Japanese Cinema by Tadao Sato
Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging by David Bordwell
“Sanshô dayû and the Overthrow of History” by Carole Cavanaugh, essay included with Criterion DVD
“Mizo Dayû” by Dudley Andrew, essay included with Criterion DVD
Criterion DVD commentary by Jeffrey Angles
Portions of this blog entry were previously published at the “21 Essays” blog in 2013.