Verse
Nixon, John Jr.
chosen genre was the shomin geki, the drama of middleclass workers. Unlike Kurosawa, who has tried his hand at every genre with very un-Japanese eclecticism, Ozu concentrated diligently on one...
...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...
...Sadness is here stripped of that momentousness we usually associate with it...
...On the breeze Some hint of her persists--who would not team with The lithe Nijinsky of the arteries...
...Tokyo Story begins with the usual business of the day...
...It is only as this pattern of inconsequential activity that life itself survives--it is only by being this pattern that it does so...
...The effect is to deny that abbreviation of the action we are used to in a drama...
...How Japanese and traditional this view of life is can be seen, I suspect, from the position assumed by Ozu's camera...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...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...
...But Ozu repeated these establishing shots every time he had us return there...
...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...
...There was a ballerina with a wand Like ice, with feet like wind...
...Even the players are pretty much the same in all three films...
...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...
...FROST Is there a ballerina in the house...
...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...
...We thrive on anything we have never seen before, on originality and innovation...
...It is a moment of unspeakable sadness...
...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...
...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...
...25 October 1974:84...
...She pirouetted All night upon the petrifying pond...
...In both Tokyo Story and Early Spring, for instance, there are repeated shots of a rail line with a train going by...
...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...
...It becomes the most commonplace, inescapable emotion, and as such, threatens to make life unbearable...
...Unlike Kurosawa, who has tried his hand at every genre with very un-Japanese eclecticism, Ozu concentrated diligently on one genre and one alone...
...In Early Spring a young man has an affair with a woman from his office, but goes back to his wife when friends intercede...
...But she was not for morning...
...What both saves it from doing so and creates such a vision of it in the first place is Ozu's style...
...The plots of all three films deal with the most common dramas of middle-class life...
...And into this mere process Ozu's films fit their most singular and decisive moments...
...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...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 JOHN NIXON, JR...
...Nor is this the only scene or character that Tokyo Story (1953), Early Spring and An Autumn A[ternoon share...
...If these films are at times hard to sit through, however, it is not because of any tedium...
...A neighbor sticks her head in to wish the old couple a happy journey to Tokyo...
...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...
...In all the repeated shots which establish this view, the camera is mounted low to the ground--uncomfortably low, for our Western senses...
...Far from making ordinary life appear tedious or insignificant, they make the ordinary seem almost too significant...
...In some ways such an angle may seem to us, like much else in Ozu's films, very awkward...
...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...
...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...
...It forces us to experience the characters' lives as mere process...
...The one daughter still living at home goes to her teaching job...
...Any director might use this sort of shot once, the first time the audience sees the setting to which the hallway leads...
...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...
...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...
...These are typical even in content of the way Ozu used such punctuation...
...All human experience must finally conform to this regulation...
...The train goes by...
...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...
Vol. 101 • October 1974 • No. 4
