One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie.
Red Beard (Akira Kurosawa, 1965).
Ever since she was scouted in a Tokyo Shimbun contest in 1949 at seventeen, Kyōko Kagawa has played many kinds of Japanese women. She has acted for the finest directors of Japan’s golden age of cinema: as an enslaved woman who commits suicide to seal her brother’s escape in Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff (1954), an unmarried schoolteacher caring for her elderly parents in Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953), and a wife who struggles to leave her abusive husband in Mikio Naruse’s Anzukko (1958), among other roles of womanhood ranging from the overly traditional to the outright subversive.
But it’s in Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard (1965) where Kagawa truly shines, even if it’s only for a few minutes. She plays a purported madwoman nicknamed Mantis, institutionalized in a destitute Koishikawa clinic run by Dr. Kyojō Niide (Toshiro Mifune) after murdering several men. In her only scene, alone in a room with the newly recruited doctor Noboru Yasumoto (Yūzō Kayama), the virtuosic Kagawa steals the show: In one moment, she is quivering on her knees, scared and traumatized as she recalls facing violence from men as a child, and in another, she is timidly proclaiming righteousness for the vengeance she subsequently took upon them, lifting her chin ever so slightly as she states that “there was a reason for it.” Before we know it, she has seduced Yasumoto, crying and clutching him tightly, with a hairpin secretly grasped in one hand, before pushing him down and attempting to stab him, all with a newly awakened fire burning through her entire being.
In mere seconds, Kagawa maneuvers with finesse between docile and emboldened, whether by her facial expressions or the balletic manner by which her body molds itself to each one: the murderous stare in harmony with the hand holding the murderous hairpin. Such deft dynamism shown here—sometimes meek, other times imposing—is Kagawa’s power as one of Japan’s most versatile actresses, imbuing her with an undeniable presence acutely felt in roles both leading and supporting: In Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), she stands tall, as a voice of humanity, before her cold, conniving husband (also Mifune), and in Mizoguchi’s The Crucified Lovers (1954), she bears a shockingly satisfied demeanor despite being restrained atop a horse alongside her eloper (Kazuo Hasegawa) and headed for crucifixion.
With a career spanning more than a hundred films over seven decades, Kagawa has represented a vast range of Japanese women onscreen, many of whom, like Mantis, are wonderfully hard to define. Long after Japan’s golden age, she acted in films by emerging directors like Hirokazu Kore-eda (in his sophomore After Life [1998]) and Chihiro Ikeda (in her debut Tokyo Rendezvous [2008]), and many others, bringing her diverse portrayals of womanhood—namely its desires, transgressions, and complexities—to newer generations of cinema in Japan. Through these vibrant performances that move fluidly in and out of gendered expectations, we see a woman who has spent her longstanding career unwilling to be flattened and pigeonholed.
The retrospective series Kyōko Kagawa Rarities will be screening in New York at the Asia Society and Anthology Film Archive from August 13 to 16.