Imagine it were really a case of patterns on a long ribbon. The ribbon moves past me and now I say "This is the pattern S," now "This is the pattern V." Sometimes for a period of time I do not know which it is; sometimes I say at the end "It was neither.". .. But why in the case of the patterns does one make this distinction that is so difficult to grasp? Because it is of importance in our life.-Ludwig Wittgenstein 1 Mizoguchi Kenji (1898-1956) is by general consensus one of the great directors of classical Japanese cinema (fig. 1). Yet he is less endearing than his friend Ozu Yasujirō, less exciting than his rival Kurosawa Akira; his films lack the novelistic depth of the former's Late Spring (1949) or the excitement of the latter's Yojimbo (1961). "I believe it is much more important," Mizoguchi once said, "to show the film's subject-the author's thought-than to tell a story." 2 This notion of "showing thought" implies a fairly broad definition of intellection. It recurs thereby to perennially unsettled issues of nondiscursive rationality, hence of the availability of movies to theoretical, and more specifically academic, discourse. Mizoguchi's films are melodramas, but they avoid the genre's usual techniques of focalization (flashback, point of view, This paper owes a great deal to Dan Morgan, Tom Gunning, Joel Snyder, and the students in a seminar in the department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago in the winter of 2017. Its debt to Arnold Davidson is everywhere apparent. Any errors are my own, and except where otherwise noted all translations are my own.
