David Bordwell

The Western avant-garde has long used the Oriental sign as a wedge to
be driven between ourselves and Occidental representation. After Debussy
saw Annanite opera at the 1889 World Exposition, he praised its percussive
directness and by contrast belittled Wagnerian music-drama. In 1928, kabuki
performances in Moscow introduced Eisenstein to a spectacle very different
from that of Western naturalism. Three years later, Artaud saw in Balinese
dance 'a new physical language, based upon signs and no longer upon words'. ¹
For Brecht, the Chinese actor Mei Lan-fang demonstrated how an Oriental
tradition could offer an alternative to the identification procedures character-
istic of Western theater. More recently, Roland Barthes and the Tel quel
group have found in the East an alternative economy of the sign. What is at
issue here is how an analysis of non-Western representation can take on a
critical edge. It is not a matter of asserting that the Oriental sign is simply, and
irrevocably, other, but rather of analyzing that otherness and using the
analysis to illuminate our habitual thinking.

The nineteen thirties work of Kenji Mizoguchi is very useful for this
critical purpose because his work enables us to rethink how we construct the
history of film style. If my title makes reference to André Bazin's celebrated
essay, 'The Evolution of the Language of Cinema', ² it is because Bazin's work
has exercised a great power over our conception of film history. ³ A thorough
investigation of Bazin's position would have to examine films produced
within those two national cinemas that his essay pointedly excludes: the
Soviet Union after 1928 and Japan. ⁴ In the space of this essay, I can only
indicate how Mizoguchi's surviving films from the nineteen thirties can
usefully challenge the assumptions of Bazin's account of deep focus.

-107-