After women were banned from the Kabuki stage in the seventeenth century, all women's roles were played by men. Daniel Schmid says, "The man playing the woman's role, the onnagata, does not imitate the woman, as in the West, but tries to capture her significance. He need not stick close to his model, but draws far more from his own identity: a shift of value takes place, which is nonetheless not a step beyond." The Written Face is a collaborative portrait of the great onnagata Tamasaburo Bando, famous for the delicacy and beauty of his performances. With Tamasaburo V, as he is known, and two other legendary figures-the actress Haruko Sugimura, who worked with Ozu and Naruse during the flowering of Japanese cinema, and the geisha dancer Han Takehara-Schmid creates a work of "fictitious documentation" that, as he says, offers "a variation on the ideal of female beauty hinted at by man, a confrontation with the cracks and fractures in the masks."