The Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
gent planning that would offset overpopulation and pollution, and just be happy to keep armed conflicts localized; and Gunther Bornkamm's article on Jesus Christ which begins: "The history of...
...What both saves it from doing so and creates such a vision of it in the first place is Ozu's style...
...How Japanese and traditional this view of life is can be seen, I suspect, from the position assumed by Ozu's camera...
...Any director might use this sort of shot once, the first time the audience sees the setting to which the hallway leads...
...But Hutchins and Adler will not rest well if their new EB is merely read, admired and bought...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Another student told me he had spent two weeks listening to a professor outline the history of a European country, then, during review, had found the same material in Colliers" Encyclopedia...
...He answered that his own Middle Ages course could have been called "The Middle Ages Day-by-Day," but that the EB articles corresponded with what he had learned...
...There was a ballerina with a wand Like ice, with feet like wind...
...But Ozu repeated these establishing shots every time he had us return there...
...Ozu's Commonweal: 83 chosen genre was the shomin geki, the drama of middleclass workers...
...The shot is always of something that has no meaning, no importance, in and of itself--something that is just part of the trivial, enduring routine of life...
...The scene mentioned before, in which some men get drunk and behave badly, occurs almost identically in all three of the Ozu films that have been released here...
...These are typical even in content of the way Ozu used such punctuation...
...No doubt Ozu was, too, in the way he practiced his craft, a very traditional artist...
...Even the players are pretty much the same in all three films...
...It's as if he wished us to walk down that hall every time we visited that room just as one would have to do to revisit a room in real life...
...Nor is this the only scene or character that Tokyo Story (1953), Early Spring and An Autumn A[ternoon share...
...We thrive on anything we have never seen before, on originality and innovation...
...It forces us to experience the characters' lives as mere process...
...They are, above all, educators...
...The plots of all three films deal with the most common dramas of middle-class life...
...In some ways such an angle may seem to us, like much else in Ozu's films, very awkward...
...But this position, which is roughly that of a man seated cross-legged on the floor, is the one from which Nob theater is watched and from which the haiku master contemplates life...
...In Early Spring a young man has an affair with a woman from his office, but goes back to his wife when friends intercede...
...In both Tokyo Story and Early Spring, for instance, there are repeated shots of a rail line with a train going by...
...Sadness is here stripped of that momentousness we usually associate with it...
...and, although the hackneyed illustrations of Central Park, Park Avenue and Lincoln Center belie the tension of his treatment, the city that emerges from his 15-page portrait is the authentic one--the magnificent swarming conglomeration of violent ghettos and charming neighborhoods, as awesome as its skyline and as intimate as its quietest cafe, the "dying" metropolis that is "far more alive on its deathbed" than the dreary suburbs to which so many of its more timid citizens have fled...
...In Tokyo Story an elderly couple go on a trip to visit their children, who are clearly not pleased to see them, and on the way home the woman falls ill and dies...
...The train goes by...
...and in Manhattan just off Forty-Second Street, where all the mass-audience action films play, there used to be a theater that showed Japanese Samurai films exclusively...
...It is a moment of unspeakable sadness...
...At least Ozu's don't have obscure medieval settings...
...the hack lecturer, the instructor who really doesn't want to be there but is impelled to drone "basic" biology, geography, or history into the unwilling heads of passive listeners who thirst only for the end of the final exam...
...FROST Is there a ballerina in the house...
...The effect is to deny that abbreviation of the action we are used to in a drama...
...They are about modern Japan where people wear business suits and work in offices...
...A neighbor sticks her head in to wish the old couple a happy journey to Tokyo...
...He has the grit of his beloved city under his fingernails...
...Unlike Kurosawa, who has tried his hand at every genre with very un-Japanese eclecticism, Ozu concentrated diligently on one genre and one alone...
...It would seem that this student and others like him would be better off spending less time in class, reading the EB guided by the Propaedin, and taking an exam...
...Compare his work to that of Akira Kurosawa, who was the first to receive such recognition...
...Back in the fifties Kurosawa, the classic maker of Samurai sword-fight films, readily found an international audience for his work...
...In all the repeated shots which establish this view, the camera is mounted low to the ground--uncomfortably low, for our Western senses...
...And into this mere process Ozu's films fit their most singular and decisive moments...
...This single-minded adherence to a convention is one of the things that makes Ozu's work seem so foreign to us, or at least so uncommercial...
...And at the film's end, as the old man sits utterly alone, his wife now dead and his uncaring children departed, that same everyday round of events is repeated: the train goes by, the daughter goes to her job, the neighbor sticks her head in...
...She pirouetted All night upon the petrifying pond...
...It is only as this pattern of inconsequential activity that life itself survives--it is only by being this pattern that it does so...
...Kurosawa's monumental epic, The Seven Samurai, was remade here as one of the most successful Westerns of all time, The Magnificent Seven...
...And yet, despite this concern with the Westernization of Japan, I'm sure that at home Ozu is considered the most Japanese and insular of all the postwar directors...
...and this new project should be seen as another attempt to influence the curriculum of American secondary and higher education...
...The one daughter still living at home goes to her teaching job...
...If these films are at times hard to sit through, however, it is not because of any tedium...
...This forces us to experience the moment of expectation and waiting which is so large a part of life and so often omitted from art...
...I particularly enjoyed New York Times' reporter Murray Schumach's story on New York...
...On the breeze Some hint of her persists--who would not team with The lithe Nijinsky of the arteries...
...I tested the EB on a bright student asking him to compare the articles on psychology, anthropology and the Middle Ages with the courses he had had last year...
...TWICE-TOLD TALES 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN 1 suppose it's easy to see why, among all the great Japanese directors of the post-war era, Yasujiro Ozu has been the last to receive recognition outside Japan...
...In An Autumn Afternoon a widower goes through the dilemma of finding a suitable husband for a daughter with whom he doesn't get along...
...25 October 1974:84...
...The sense of expectation we had walking down all those halls has at last led us into a room in which this quotidian reality is the only truth...
...All Japanese art seems to spawn genres in extraordinary quantity, and even so recent an art as filmmaking permits of subtle distinctions like that between the hahn mono, or "mother" picture, and the tsuma mono, or "wife" picture...
...inflexible sequences of courses and requirements...
...In one way it might seem that Ozu's postwar films--he had already been directing for fifteen years before the war--should be even easier to take in than Kurosawa's...
...All human experience must finally conform to this regulation...
...But if we find his work difficult to watch, it isn't because of this or because he demands too great a patience of us...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 JOHN NIXON, JR...
...Tokyo Story begins with the usual business of the day...
...But meanwhile, in a period of general educational caution and retrenchment, when so many of the educational experimentations of the 1960s (when one man's innovation was always in danger of becoming another man's strait jacket) appear to have flopped, when the job market glut has cowed both timid faculty and students into benign passivity, the newborn EB is in danger of just sitting there in its cradle---certainly not stillborn, but perhaps just once-born...
...Far from making ordinary life appear tedious or insignificant, they make the ordinary seem almost too significant...
...the time-block system that imagines that knowledge is best imparted in a classroom in three 50minute periods a week...
...Used creatively, it could be subversive in that it would subvert some of the university's more inhibiting structures: the mandatory introductory course which often repeats high school material...
...But his films are as unremittingly alike as their Englishlanguage titles suggest: Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951), Early Spring (1956), Late Autumn (1960), Early Autumn (1961) or An Autumn Alternoon (1962...
...I would imagine one reason his films haven't reached us earlier is that in Japan itself he was always thought too Japanese to be exportable...
...and Gunther Bornkamm's article on Jesus Christ which begins: "The history of the life, work, and death of Jesus of Nazareth reveals nothing of the worldwide movement to which he gave rise...
...And Hutchins and Adler, great teachers that they are, will go on feeling what all teachers necessarily feel--incompleteness, the gnawing of so much work still undone...
...But she was not for morning...
...Ozu's films, on the other hand, have only begun to appear in this country in the last couple of years, even though he died over a decade ago...
...Occasionally they even go out to bars, drink too much Scotch, and make asses of themselves...
...It becomes the most commonplace, inescapable emotion, and as such, threatens to make life unbearable...
...That was before pornography and Kung Fu took over...
...Inquires the pulse, that celebrated dancer, Leaping to winter music by J. Strauss...
...Perhaps the most characteristic such shots in Ozu's films are those of hallways outside offices or apartments...
...It's because we are used only to having our emotions coarsened by our movies, and we can't stand the reproach of a man who is capable of doing the opposite...
...This reallocation of time might put the academic hack out of business and free the great lecturers (of which each university has about three), the good researchers, and discussion-seminar leaders, and the more motivated students to deal with the results of their own research, to discuss original texts or more recent or controversial books, and ask questions about the value of what they have learned...
...To Americans who had had the Western as a staple of their movie diet, Samurai films seemed entirely familiar...
...The very style of these films is a ritual, a ceremony of repetitions in which there are not only recurrent characters and situations from film to film, but recurring images and shots within each film...
Vol. 101 • October 1974 • No. 4
