Take Kenji Mizoguchi. A lovely lady, part of a great lord's entourage in 16th-century Japan, falls in love with a passionate inferior. Her suitor is summarily executed, while Oharu inexorably declines from concubine to high-class prostitute to streetwalker and finally to homeless old age. The manner in which he visualizes Oharu and her world transforms the film's banal matter into exhilarating purity. Early in the film, strolling the immaculate grounds that surround her lord's perfect manor-house, Oharu is little more than an attractive element in a composition characterized by stasis and artifice.
Safety means staying in one's place.
Self-definition doesn't enter in, nor is any spiritual stretch possible in this immobilizing design. She retreats, but he presses his suit, opening delicate screen after screen, robbing Oharu of her controlling frames of reference, forcing her into dangerous, open ground. In the comparatively natural environs of a sad little garden carpeted with fallen leaves, Oharu is thrown on her own devices. When she chooses passion, the lowering camera marks her literal and figurative fall. And as the lovers exit the frame, Mizoguchi's gaze rests on two stone markers.