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The ending of the film brings a sense of closure to the film. It also offers an answer for the question posed by the moralist Kurosawa. After the finale of traditional Japanese music, the woodcutter leaves the gate into the sunlight, with the infant in his arms. Then the camera swiftly moves to a long shot of the woodcutter from the opposite angle. As he walks toward the camera, he stops and bows to the priest, beaming with happiness. The film ends with a close-up of the signboard still intact amid the devastation.
The woodcutter's decision to adopt the abandoned baby is clearly altruistic, clearly a means to save a fallen society. Moreover, this redeeming instance of a compassionate individual obviously takes the place of institutional responses, as evidenced by the priest in this tale.
Ugetsu (1953)
After so many attempts, Mizoguchi broke out of his postwar doldrums with two of his finest films: The Life of Oharu, (Saikaku ichidai onna), 1952 and Ugetsu (1953). The first brought him into the international limelight when he shared the best director award (The Silver Lion) with John Ford for The Quiet Man at the 1952 Venice Festival. The latter, his seventy-eighth film, won the Silver Lion along with the Italian Critics Award at the same festival the following year. In fact, success of these films had a lot to do with Mizoguchi's hallmark-the long take which helped him create the same kind of rhythmic beauty seen in the medieval emakimono, or picture scrolls, as we shall see.
Ugetsu was inspired by two different literary sources: "The House Amid the Thickets" (Asaji ga Yado) and "The Lust of the White Serpent" (Jasei no in), two tales from Ueda Akinari's collection of supernatural stories, Tales of Moonlight and Rain (Ugetsu Monogatari, 1776) as well as the French 19th century author Guy de Maupassant's story "La Décoration." But these stories were superbly transformed by Mizoguchi's veteran scriptwriters, Yoda Yoshikata and Kawaguchi Matsutarō, to accommodate the director's life-long thematic constant: women's confrontation with a male-dominated, money-oriented society.
Ugetsu rises above many Mizoguchi films because it lifts personal issues to a more universal plane and does so brilliantly. In this film the question of social injustice is related to the suffering masses and to their struggle to survive the forces of oppression. Mizoguchi explained these convictions in a letter to his scriptwriter, Yoda:
Whether the war originates in the ruler's personal motives, or in some public concern, how violence, disguised as war, oppresses the torments the populace both physically and spiritually! . . . . I want to emphasize this as the main theme of the film.
The film's action concerns two ways of confronting the Japanese postwar situation was through the use of historical period of the sixteenth century. The first, represented by Genjūrō, Tobei, and to a certain extent, Ohama, Tobei's wife, is the way of opportunistic greed that involves geographic mobility. The second, represented by Miyagi, Genjūrō's wife, is the way of optimistic endurance that entails devotion to community and orientation towards the future.
The first part of the film focuses on the clash of these opposing values and the resultant dissolution of the family. The second concerns Genjūrō's obsession with illusion and the restoration of the family. Mizoguchi explores the clash of values in a rather fundamental manner: through the depiction of each character's attitudes towards money, when wartime provides are opportunities for riches.
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