Kazuo Miyagawa

Kazuo Miyagawa was, quite simply, Japan’s preeminent cinematographer. Commencing in the 1930s, he worked with some of his country’s foremost directors, including Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, Kon Ichikawa, Daisuke Ito, Hiroshi Inagaki, and Masahiro Shinoda, and his credits include some of the all time greatest Japanese films, including Rashomon , Ugetsu , Sansho the Bailiff , Street of Shame , Yojimbo , Floating Weeds , Odd Obsession , and Kagemusha .

Beginning his study of cinematography in 1926, after several years as an art student, Miyagawa was particularly impressed by the high-contrast lighting used in the German expressionist films of the era. Starting as a focus puller and assistant cameraman at the Nikkatsu Kyoto Studio laboratory, Miyagawa utilized his knowledge of film chemistry to experiment with the composition of film stock and the degree of exposure before shooting. Thus, he was able to determine the optimum exposure despite the varied physical conditions of location shooting; in fact, he did not even work with a light meter until Rashomon , in 1950.

Between 1935 and 1943, Miyagawa was in charge of second-unit photography and special effects at the Nikkatsu Studio. His first great success as chief cinematographer came in 1943, with his work on Hiroshi Inagaki’s The Rickshaw Man , in which his ambitious camerawork captures the vivid images of the life of a rough but straightforward rickshaw man in a small city, using montage to recreate the flow of time. While he has attributed his success to the traditionally high standards of the studio’s cinematographers and camera mechanics—"Working in the film lab taught me the basics, the fundamental part of making pictures," he once explained—he also noted, “It was my training in [Japanese] ink painting that really taught me how to see.”

Indeed, it was Miyagawa’s early study of this art form that gave him the understanding of subtle shadings which was evident in his black-and-white films. His fluid camera movements, particularly the long takes in Mizoguchi’s films, demonstrate his knowledge of the Japanese traditional emakinomo scroll painting style. In order to satisfy Mizoguchi’s demand to draw out the tense moments of highly dramatic performances, Miyagawa conceived the technique of suspenseful long takes, which capture highly dramatic performances without interruptions. He used many crane shots to create the mysterious atmosphere of Ugetsu and the romantic escape scenes of A Story from Chikamatsu . Long and complicated pannings such as those of the garden scene and the last scene of Ugetsu and the ending of Sansho the Bailiff are breathtakingly inventive. Further, in the latter film, he experimented with shooting the entire film in counter-light, to create the cold image suggested by the subject of slavery.

Miyagawa also contributed his dynamic camera style to Kurosawa’s work. Utilizing the light reflecting directly on a mirror, he captured in bright summer daylight the surging emotions of the characters of Rashomon . The image of sunlight flickering behind the trees became legendary. In Yojimbo Miyagawa used telephoto lenses to successfully convey the powerful images of swordplay in the swirling dust. He also used telephoto lenses effectively in Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad to capture the poetic moments of physical movement, often in combination with slow motion. Miyagawa’s bold use of the CinemaScope screen is evident in other successful films of Ichikawa. Particularly important was Miyagawa’s technique of inventing the “silver tone” in the chemical process to create a greenish-gray tone, appropriate for the turn-of-the-century atmosphere of Her Brother .

Miyagawa’s sensitive and ingenious approach to the specific tones of each of his color films is evident in his work for Ozu, Ito, Shinoda, Kouzaburo Yoshimura, Masuzo Yasumura, and others. He studied each type of film stock for specific color effects according to the subject. For Floating Weeds , the only Ozu film on which Miyagawa worked, he used a light color scheme to recreate the atmosphere of a town in southern Japan. The tension of the scene of a hard rainstorm under which a couple quarrels from opposite sides of a street was accentuated by Miyagawa’s usage of a large light source with the dripping water captured in counter-light. The combination of bold colors and lyrical night scenes of Kyoto in Yoshimura’s Night River , the recreation of the world of Kabuki and the bright-colored woodprints in Ito’s Benten Boy and Masumura’s Tattoo , the magnificent landscape colors in Shinoda’s Silence and Banished Orin , and the dazzling color spectacle of Kurosawa’s Kagemusha are other highly acclaimed examples of Miyagawa’s skill.

The cinematographer was employed by the same studio between 1926 and 1971, working elsewhere only twice: on Yojimbo , shot at the Toho Studio; and Tokyo Olympiad , produced independently. Before his death, his more notable credits were Kagemusha , and Shinoda’s Gonza the Spearman and MacArthur’s Children . He remained professionally active into his eighties. “A director and cameraman are like husband and wife,” Miyagawa once declared. “Even though they may fight, all their films are their offspring.” He added, proudly, “I am a cinematographer. I’ve never had any ambition to become a director. A film is not one individual’s method of personal expression but a matter of teamwork, a cooperative venture.” —Kyoko Hirano, updated by Rob Edelman