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Still centre The movies explore the trials and tribulations of marginalised women

The two are kidnapped and fall into the hands of a cruel slave owner, Sansho and they suffer the oppression of Sansho and his minions for 10 years. When a newly-arrived slave sings a song about two missing children, Zushio and Anju, the siblings are able to find out that their mother was sold off to prostitution, when they were kidnapped.

Zushio escapes to the capital city of Osaka and meets the prime minister where he is told his father is dead and he is made governor in recognition for his father’s good work. Zushio is governor of the province where Sansho reigns. Zushio returns to the place of his oppression only to learn that Anju drowned herself so that she will not give her brother away when she is tortured.

He frees the slaves, resigns his commission and goes in search of his mother. He finds her blind and crippled singing by the sea waiting for her lost children. The two-hour long film tells a family’s story spread over roughly twenty years. The film is full of events, plots, sub-plots and characters and yet like the best of Kenji Mizoguchi (1898 – 1956), there is nothing frenetic about it.

The pace, very contrarily, is unhurried, dream-like and exquisitely poetic. For all the busy happenings, the movie is a meditation on silence. All the movies screened at the retrospective of the Japanese master luxuriate in this mystic magic stillness.

From the Shakespearean “Ugetsu” (1953) to the heart-breaking “Woman of Rumour” (1954), “The Osaka Elegy” (1936) and “Story of Late Chrysanthemums” (1939), stillness is used as a powerful symbol of radical change.

If the form is devastatingly lyrical, the content focuses on the lives of the marginalised. Mizoguchi suffered intense personal hardships when his dreamer father squandered away all the family wealth with quixotic plans that came to nothing. Mizoguchi’s 14-year-old sister was put up for adoption and later sold to a geisha house, while he was taken out of school and sent for apprenticeship.

This sensitivity for the oppressed woman is a common thread running through Mizoguchi’s movies. Be it the ageing geisha yearning for love in “Woman of Rumour”, Ayako, who becomes her lecherous boss’s mistress for her family in “The Osaka Elegy”, the star-crossed lovers in “Chrysanthemum” or the wives of the brothers in the eerie supernatural fable, “Ugetsu”.

While the movies speak of an era when time moves and still stands forever still (to paraphrase T. S. Eliot), there is an undeniable contemporariness to them. A case in point in Mizoguchi’s “47 Ronin” (not shown at the festival), which was the springboard for the superb action thriller “Ronin”.

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