I admit that my use of the term "fascist propaganda" is a bit generous and problematic. However I most certainly don't want to paint the whole Japanese film output of 1937-45 as fascist because these films vaguely supported the system at the very least just by providing entertainment. This lazy kind of critizism is in fact very much what I'm opposed to and I absolutely agree with you.Gregory wrote: To begin with the original claim of whether this is a "fascist propaganda film," I am far from convinced that even reading the story as lubitsch sums it up, a woman's noble sacrifice for a man's career, is a distinctly fascist narrative. It’s conservative and even reactionary but there is nothing whatsoever about it that's peculiar to fascism, and it can be found just as readily in countless later films remote from any context of fascism. It’s about a broader patriarchal culture, which is not to try to plead guilty to a lesser crime or anything, it’s just a different kind of charge which better explains why such stories involving traditional gender roles extend far beyond a fascist context.
As for whether it’s propaganda, I think some distinctions and questions of degree and intent need to be made. Painting with the same brush every Japanese film made during the war that outwardly espouses conservative values as “fascist propaganda” obscures far more than it reveals. Likewise if both Triumph of the Will and Schlußakkord were both deemed nothing but “Nazi propaganda” and thus repugnant in equal measure, then that obscures not only the major differences between the two (textually and in terms of historical context, intention, and so on) but also the potentially interesting things in Schlußakkord that are not propagandistic, which is crucial to valuing a problematic film if we’re not ready to just dismiss it as corrupted trash. Is Schlußakkord tainted by its origins (UFA during the Third Reich), even if it was merely an escapist melodrama in that setting? Of course it is, but I'd argue that there's much more to consider in it, and it should not be treated as if it's akin to one of Riefenstahl's propaganda films.
However Chrysanthemum strikes me as more problematic than Schlußakkord. It is not an all out propaganda film, but also not completely escapism. What bothers me is the ideology of suffering, sacrifice and subjugation ending in the apotheosis of a man finding a vocation which consumes him. During the Third Reich the most successful kind of propaganda film in 1940-42 was the biopic which praised the superhuman hero on his historic mission to do something great in his field, a genre obviously fishing for parallels with Hitler. There were also melodramas where women try to detract men from their vocation and have to be taught otherwise.
Both genres are represented well in Chrysanthemum. We have a hero who has greatness in him and he finally goes on his mission by sacrificing his personal happiness. And we have a woman who indirectly stands in his way and is written out of the history by killing her off.
So generally I'd say this film is supportive of the mood of the times and of the demands the Japanese military might have. It preaches the subjugation and the sacrifice of the individual towards a greater good.
First I don't think that Mizoguchi was indifferent to Otoku. However he didn't care as much for her as for the ladies in his 36 films. Otoku is much more of an abstraction than a living character. She is a sacrificial lamb, always supportive, lacking any character traits of her own.Gregory wrote:But I think a real misunderstanding is that Mizoguchi was indifferent to a character such as Otoku just because of the distance in his technique.For one thing, close-ups were not used in 1930s Japanese cinema in the way they were in Hollywood, and they didn’t need to be used that way to convey emotional concern for a character. And to investigate these assumptions about “distance,” the point of comparison that comes readily to mind is Sirk, whose technique often established distances (and his films were more "distant" than most other melodramas and "message" dramas) but that in no way meant that audiences should or would feel disconnected from the characters and their problems.lubitsch wrote:But for me the effect is clearly one of validating the sacrifice of the young woman for her beloved one which is reactionary and in tune with the rollback against women's liberation perpetrated in Japanese cinema. I think Mizoguchi's aesthetic style makes things even worse because his detached long takes actually minimize suffering and create instead a kind of visual tapestry which makes human experience remote and distant while emphasizing order and society rules.
My stylistic critique may reflect my scepticism towards the long take, long distance aesthetic which Mizoguchi uses. I don't think it's a helpful aesthetic approach to suffering to film it aesthetically from a distance, it tends to soften the blow. People become a design element (ironically not too dissimilar to Riefenstahl).
This may be open to debate however I'm not so sure about Japanese 30s cinema being that different from hollywood. Bordwell critizised this in his Figures traced in Light if I remember correctly. Hollywood standards were Japanese standards by then and Mizoguchi's special style was seen as highbrow and an attempt to create a certain Japaneseness. Unfortunately I haven't seen enough films from the era - especially the more normal ones - to make any qualified statement about this, but watching the classics Ozu and Mizoguchi might be very misleading about the Japanese standard film aesthetics of the era.
