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First, a few comments about Chikamatsu: Chikamatsu Monzaemon, circa-1700, is writing what today we would call �bourgeois� dramas. Plays like The Love Suicides at Sonezaki feature Osaka merchants as their protagonists�not gods, kings, aristocrats, or the gentry, but merchants, sometimes poor merchants at that. His British contemporaries, of whom he knew nothing and who knew nothing of him, were writing plays about the gentry and would continue to do so for some time. (Note that I am speaking here of plays in the �realistic� vein, however we want to describe that). Europe would not see the arrival of bourgeois drama�or at least, of bourgeois drama that anyone would remember a hundred years later�until well into the 1800�s, with the arrival of Ibsen on the scene, and that�s over one hundred fifty years after The Love Suicides at Sonezaki. What seemed revolutionary and provocative in Europe�this �realistic� theater about bourgeois people, penned by Ibsen and those who came after him, all the way up to Chekhov and the theoretician Stanislavsky. with his �realistic� acting methodology�had already been carried off with aplomb by a Japanese playwright of the Edo period. And remember, this was a man who wrote some of his greatest works for puppets. I am reminded of Ezra Pound�s editorial decision to include his translation of the Anglo-Saxon �The Seafarer� in Cathay (1915) amongst the translations of Tang poetry that make up the rest of the collection; he sought to draw attention to the contrast between the comparative primitiveness of �The Seafarer� and the culture that spawned it, with the contemporaneous poetry of Tang dynasty China, which reached unprecedented heights of aesthetic refinement and came from a culture of corresponding brilliance. His point was not particularly subtle; essentially: �look at how primitive the English were in 700, when the Chinese were doing this.� The English would arguably not reach a comparable Golden Age of poetry until some eight hundred years later, in the Elizabethan era. Similarly, what Chikamatsu was doing in 1700�and in a culture pretty well isolated from the rest of the world�the Europeans would not be able to do until well into the 1800�s; for the sake of convenience, let�s say 1877, the year Ibsen debuted The Pillars of the Community.
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Having brought the conversation around to the Tang dynasty, I would now like to say a few words about Kenji Mizoguchi�s Princess Yang Kwei-fei (1955), which depicts the events surrounding what is perhaps thekey event of the Tang era, the An Lushan Rebellion. Mixing Mizoguchi�s version with what I remember of the event from other sources, here is the story of
The An Lushan Rebellion
The Tang emperor Xuanzong was a very lonely emperor. Having ruled for decades (his reign spanned from 712 to 756 of the current era), by 742 the emperor�s beloved consort (his wife, in Mizoguchi�s film) died and he fell into a deep depression. He lost interest in affairs of state, and preferred to spend his time composing music, which he would then play on his lute. It was thought by high-ranking courtiers that the emperor could be roused from his lethargy if they could find him a woman to replace his wife. Oh, but the emperor was so hard to please. Dozens of beautiful women were presented to him, but he dismissed them all; the most beautiful were left to languish in his harem.
One of the emperor�s military governors was a Turkic general (I remember him being Turkic; in the movie, he�s half Turkic) named An Lushan. The ambitious An was not content with his position; he would much rather have been the emperor�s chancellor (sort of like a prime minister, as I understand it) or perhaps�although he didn�t dare to speak it aloud�emperor himself. An Lushan discovered a woman of surpassing beauty, Yang Kwei-fei, laboring away in the kitchen of her cousin�s restaurant. Cinderella-style, the restaurant owner had three female cousins�Yang Kwei-fei�s half-sisters�whom he had presented to the emperor, but all three of them were rejected and sent back to the restaurant. It had never occurred to the restauranter, Yang Guozhong, to present Yang Kwei-fei at court, but An Lushan immediately perceived her beauty and plucked her from her obscure position. When she was presented to the emperor, he soon became deeply enamored of her, discovering for the first time a woman who could equal his deceased wife. She became his chief consort and her bitchy half-sisters all became high-ranking court ladies and her cousin Yang Guozhong was made chancellor.
Emperor Xuanzong and Princess Yang Kwei-fei were deeply in love with each other and gave themselves up to a life of luxury and pleasure; far from reengaging the emperor with matters of government, he neglected them now more than ever. This negligence allowed the bitchy Yang sisters and Yang Guozhong to set about enriching themselves, draining the state�s coffers and imposing a crippling tax burden upon the peasantry. The Yangs soon came to be hated by the citizenry.
Meanwhile, An Lushan was not reaping the benefits that he thought would accrue to him for discovering Yang Kwei-fei. He was made military governor of three provinces, but it was not enough to satisfy his ambition. Feeling himself wronged by the emperor, and seeing in the popular discontent and resentment against the Yangs a sparkling opportunity, in 755 An Lushan launched the rebellion which bears his name. It was to be one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history, killing, by some accounts, as many as thirty-six million people.
Holy shit, that�s a lot of people. Where does this number come from? If you look at the Chinese census from 754, Tang China had a population of some 53 million people. The first census to be taken after the war, in 764, found a population of only 17 million people. Now, that�s a discrepancy of 36 million people, but it hardly means that all 36 million of them died; several factors need to be taken into consideration: first, as the country had just been ravaged by warfare and millions of people were displaced, the census-taking system itself was likely in disarray. Furthermore, by the end of the war, the Tang dynasty had lost several northern provinces, which likely took millions of people with them. Finally, the new census didn�t count certain classes of people who didn�t pay taxes, such as monks and foreigners (an interesting notion, there, that a person who doesn�t pay taxes isn�t a person). Now, even with all of these qualifications, they don�t account for the full 36 million missing people. Surely, millions must have died, and from the writings of the period�s poets�most notably Du Fu and Wang Wei�we can conclude that the experience of the war, whatever the death toll, was perceived as a catastrophe of the highest magnitude, even to an almost apocalyptic extent, by many Chinese of the time.
(Only two poems that I can remember have ever brought tears to my eyes. I distinctly remember �tearing up� when reading Tu Fu�s account of one of his children starving to death as his family joined millions of other refugees in fleeing the advancing rebel army. I later found out that Du Fu was given to�how to put this politely?��exaggerations� in his poetry, and that his family was never as poor and never as hungry as he intimated, and that he probably didn�t even lose a child during the conflict. This is what we would call �poetic license.� And I guess that�s fine by me. Du Fu created a persona called �Du Fu,� and the account of the death of this Du Fu�s son affected me deeply. For those who were wondering, the other poem that made me tear up�I didn�t cry, mind you; I make a distinction between a moistening of the eyes and full-on weeping�was Pablo Neruda�s �Spain in our Hearts.�)
So, now that we�ve discussed the An Lushan Rebellion�s death toll, how did it actually unfold? An Lushan and his soldiers enjoyed numerous early victories, and Emperor Xuanzong�s court was forced to abandon the capital of Chang�an to the rebels. It was during their southward flight that the troops loyal to the emperor �caught the bug,� as it were, and became mutinous in their own right. They attributed the rebellion and its catastrophic success, not to the emperor�or at least they wouldn�t say it�but rather to corrupt elements within his court, and specifically to Princess Yang Kwei-fei and her relatives (the tactic of revolting against a leader because you want to �save him� from his courtiers or administrators is time-honored, and seems to occur with especial frequency in Chinese and Japanese history). The soldiers rise up and they kill the emperor�s chancellor, Yang Kwei-fei�s cousin Yang Guozhong, and they also kill the princess�s hateful step-sisters (not much of a loss, probably, but still). And then the soldiers present the emperor with an ultimatum. They demand that he hand over Princess Yang Kwei-fei for execution; otherwise, they refuse to further combat the forces of An Lushan. In the film, Yang Kwei-fei has the self-sacrificing instinct in her, and she willingly hands herself over to the mutineers and is hung�or rather, allows herself to be hung�from a tree. The emperor doesn�t try to stop her. My impression is that, in the real-life rebellion, the emperor took a more active role in handing over the princess, although he was still devastated by it.
Well, after killing the Yangs, the �loyalist� forces quickly retake the country, the rebellion is crushed, and An Lushan killed. Emperor Xuanzong was dethroned by his son, who confined him, Lear-like, to one of his lesser palaces. The Tang dynasty forces were victorious, but the Tang�s golden era was over, and the state would decline until it was supplanted by the Song Dynasty.
Well, there�s your general history. Now a few comments on Mizoguchi�s film. It was one of only two movies he made in color (the other being an adaptation of The Tales of the Heike). It is also somewhat disconcerting�but only somewhat, don�t worry�to watch a Chinese costume drama performed in Japanese. I remember reading on the Criterion Collections website Johnnie To�s list of his top ten Criterion films, one of which was Bernardo Bertolucci�s The Last Emperor (1987), in which To comments that �It�s almost surreal to see Chinese costume drama performed with English dialogue!� I should imagine he would have a similar reaction to the Japanese dialogue of Mizoguchi�s film. (As an aside, I�d really like to see a Chinese director do something comparable; for instance, I�d like to see Zhang Yimou make a film about the American Civil War in which Lincoln and Grant and everyone else speak entirely in Mandarin; the Gettysburg address given in Mandarin; all of the pathos of Lincoln�s death, in Mandarin; just an idea).
Now, I don�t know if Mizoguchi�s film was made in Technicolor or with some similar process, but it has that vague air of unreality (or perhaps surreality?) that seems to pervade even the most �realistic� of Technicolor films. These just aren�t tones that are found in nature, which is fine. It doesn�t have to be realistic. Hell, I live in reality, so I�m certainly happy to take a break from it.
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| Aren't the colors lovely? |
I spoke about Pasolini in my last post, and Pasolini was known to say that his two greatest filmmakers were Charlie Chaplin and Kenji Mizoguchi. Those two wouldn�t be my personal choices (I don�t know what my personal choices would be, actually; I prefer the freedom of a top ten list or, even better, a top twenty five), but after watching Princess Yang Kwei-fei, I certainly understand where Pasolini was coming from.
