“As long as life goes on, relationships between parents and children will bring boundless joy and endless grief.” So aptly and concisely describes the YouTube trailer of Ozu Yasujiro’s Tokyo Story.
Quiet family dramas; typify most of Ozu Yasujiro’s most stirring masterpieces. Seemingly, the plots are plain and simple. Yet there are many emotional underpinnings and hidden revelations that make it poignantly striking.
In Tokyo Story, there are many dialogues when taken plainly, may probably give trivial impressions but its poetics are seen in the context of how it is filmed and seen in entirety. Yasujiro is also remembered for the unlikely revelations that may well leave the viewer a little derailed, eventually paints a nuance that deepens the emotional impact of the material. So much so that even the process of truly understanding his masterpieces remain a delightful mystery.
The meaning of his films is like a mirage. The mirage seems so far away, and so you walk toward it. But just when you have reached it, the mirage moves farther away, all the while, luring you to pursue it farther. (Kiju, 2003)
Ozu Yasujiro’s love affair with the cinema began at an early age. He was initiated to the world of moving pictures particularly, via western films. Ironically, the films that eventually placed him on the international art map are bare no semblance neither influence of the western movie-making techniques. A style that many critics regard as the “most Japanese of all Japanese films.”
Irreverent and almost bare, compared to the western standards of filmmaking, Ozu Yasujiro intentionally disregarded classical cinema conventions such as the 180-degree rule (where the camera remains on one side of an imaginary axis drawn between two talking actors). In fact in his practice, he crosses this axis, replaced traditional reverse shot with a style finding the actors looking and talking straight to the camera when in dialogue with someone else.
Also in his later works, he got rid of too much camera movements like panning and dollying and opted for more still compositions. Even his editing was stripped bare of fading and dissolving effects and rendered with simple cuts. This radical methods worked in his favor for it was able to redirect focus to the characters and make their humanity flourish in the narrative. (Wrigley,2003)
A seemingly low camera angle is a very distinct Ozu trademark. Although many critics say that it most likely from the vantage point of the Japnaese kneeling on the tatami mat, the more technical rational is that what makes the camera low is not its angle but its height and is relative to the subject or object being filmed. In terms of creating the narrative, the Ozu is known to have rejected orthodox narrational options. In the majority of his films, narration moves freely from one character to another or one situation to the next. Narrative motifs though, are important to all his works, these can be in form of recurring images, sound, gestures and even lines or dialogue. (Bordwell,1988)
Significantly, to an ordinary viewer like me, the kind of “bareness” witnessed in Tokyo Story creates a stronger emotional connection. Throughout the film, the mood is set and somehow conditions the emotions of the quiet emotional tension that unfurls through each of the characters in the film. The truth about seeing how their humanity shines through the narrative is very much apparent. Like in the particular scene where the daughter-in-law while saying goodbye to the widowed father, admits of her flaw as a wife. How she was able to discredit herself, negating all the good that his in-laws have thought of her, by admitting she has been selfish not thinking of his husband, their son, all the time.
This was one of those moments that a viewer was in a brink of understanding and closure and then, another revelation happens and the picture becomes gray and a bit blurry all over again. Yet, despite it all, what is very, very clear is the emotional intent of the scene. It is in this moments, that the film tells us of the many the uncertainties in life which can be revealed in the most unexpected moments; that we, as key players of life’s drama, will always hurdle back and forth orderliness and chaos, clarity and confusion, happiness and grief.
In connection to uncertainties, one of the distinct techniques that Ozu Yasujiro plays with as a filmmaker is how to make the audience see the visible and the invisible. A particular instance in the Tokyo Story finds the old couple with the daughter in-law. They were talking about the photo of the dead son and the wife remarked how he has tilted his head again. In classical film language, a close up will be given at least to reveal what was being talked about. However, Yasujiro, opts not to show any detail of the photo and leave the viewer to his imagination. In this particular instance, varied pictures of that “invisible” subject come into the heads of the viewers.
Ozu-san planned to show the photo in a close-up, but while shooting he did not pursue it. He decided against this probably because he was afraid of the vast difference between words and an image….The images invoked by words could be more open than images invoked by photos or moving pictures that merely represent the actual world. (Yoshida, 2003)
It is of such plain-ness and profundity that Ozu-san has defines his kind of cinema. Presenting daily episodes of Japanese life and letting the world see how its images can lend to infinite meanings, how the quiet discord strikes us emotionally and leaves us affected. And although he has broken rules, stripped film of its tricks and techniques, he has defined a cinematic vocabulary that speaks to the humanity that resides in all of us.
References
Wrigley, Nick (2003) Senses of Cinema, an adaptation. Web.
Bordwell, David (1988) Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema.
Kiju, Yoshida, Ozu’s Anti-Cinema (Paperback – 2003) (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies) translated by Daisuke Miyao, and Kyoko Hirano.