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Archive for the 'Directors: Ozu Yasujiro' Category
Watch again! Look well! Look! (For Ozu)
Okada Mariko and Tsukasa Yoko with Ozu, on the set of Late Autumn (1960).
DB here:
Ozu was born on 12 December (in 1903) and died on 12 December (in 1963). He has been gone fifty years, yet his films are as fresh, inviting, funny, and moving as ever. As chance would have it, my book Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema was published twenty-five years ago. Two events of the past few months have brought me back to him.
First, my biannual summer course in Antwerp, held under the auspices of the Flemish Film Foundation, was focused on him. As I've explained in earlier years (2011, 2009, 2007), at this Summer Movie Camp, across a week we immerse ourselves in films and wrap lectures around them. It was a joy to see a dozen of his films, mostly in good 35mm prints. Our sessions provided an occasion for me to rethink some things I said in the book, as well as to notice more about how these dazzling, apparently simple films work and work upon us. I learned as well from the comments and questions of many of the participants. The whole experience didn't shift my opinion, stated on an earlier Ozu anniversary, that "no director has come closer to perfection."
The second occasion: Two enterprising Ozuphiles have just published a collection of essays, Ozu à présent (Paris: G3j publishers). Diane Arnaud and Mathias Lavin have worked very hard for several years gathering pieces from filmmakers (Erice, Kurosawa Kyoshi) and critics like Hasumi, Frodon, Rosenbaum, and Jun Furita Hirose. Many other contributors have previously written on the director: Basile Doganis (Le Silence dans le cinéma d'Ozu), Benjamin Thomas (essays for Positif), and Clélia Zernik (Perception-cinéma). As for the editors, Diane has books on Sokurov and Kurosawa Kyoshi, while Mathias has written on Oliveira and art history generally. The entire collection is stimulating and beautifully produced.
As the title indicates, it's centrally about Ozu's continuing influence on modern cinema. I was asked to contribute a preface, which Diane and Mathias have kindly allowed me to reproduce below in revised form. I'm now chiefly aware of what I neglected (no mention of Wenders' Tokyo-Ga) and didn't know about (for instance, Claire Denis' admiration for Ozu). These and many other matters are taken up by the book's contributors. But I think my piece may be of interest as a small update of my Ozu book.
In 1988, most of Ozu's surviving films weren't easy to access. Things have changed. And since I wrote the essay, virtually all the extant work has appeared on DVD, on cable television, and in the Criterion collection on Hulu Plus. As his films become more and more familiar, we can expect ever-greater acknowledgment of his centrality. Already, the 2012 Sight and Sound poll of critics put Tokyo Story just below Vertigo and Citizen Kane; the directors' poll put it at the very top.
Why not watch an Ozu film today? Go beyond Tokyo Story, fine as it is, to Early Summer, Passing Fancy, Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family, An Autumn Afternoon, The Only Son, The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, Ohayo, Diary of a Tenement Gentleman, What Did the Lady Forget?, Dragnet Girl, Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth?, I Was Born, But… and on and on.
Catching up with Ozu
Ozu is a major presence in today's international film culture. When I began seeing his work in the early 1970s, about half a dozen Ozu movies were in circulation, and of those only Tokyo Story was known to nonspecialist cinephiles. As late as the 1980s, I had to travel to archives in Europe and the US to see his rarer films. Now even the most obscure early 1930s titles are issued on DVD, and the films have been widely distributed in touring packages. They are screened all over the world, a process lovingly recorded on Twitter. Ozu is better known to a broad public than Mizoguchi Kenji is—an ironic turn of affairs, given that in many countries Mizoguchi gained fame during the 1950s and 1960s, when Ozu was unknown.
Even more famous throughout the west was, of course, Kurosawa Akira. His influence on mainstream cinema has been robust and pervasive. If slow-motion violence has become a convention in American films since Bonnie and Clyde, that is directly traceable to the director of Seven Samurai. The use of very long lenses to cover a scene, common in American cinema of the 1960s and thereafter, owes a great deal to Kurosawa's strategies in films like I Live in Fear and Red Beard. Editing on the camera axis for visceral impact, a Kurosawa signature technique, has bumped up the visual excitement in many American action pictures.
Ozu has not had such a direct influence. He is much less easy to assimilate. With few exceptions, his signature style has been far less imitated, and it has even been misunderstood. His effect on modern cinema, it seems to me, has been far more oblique, with directors paying him tribute in discreet, sometimes unexpected ways.
Brand Ozu
Ozu wing, Kamakura Cinema World, 1996.
Ozu was careful to mark his uniqueness. He designed his films to be sharply different from those of his contemporaries. His home base, the Shochiku studio, encouraged directors to develop personal styles, and he was allowed to make artistic choices that could only be considered eccentric. At first glance, Ozu's films may seem to melt into a broader idea of "Japanese artistic culture," but the more films we see by his colleagues, the more idiosyncratic his works look.
Having allowed Ozu to make such singular films, Shochiku has exacted a reciprocal obligation: his legacy now serves as a trademark for a film studio. For the world at large, Japanese cinema consists of Kurosawa and Toho studios' Godzilla, Nikkatsu action, and anime. Shochiku had its tradition of modest, humane dramas of working-class and middle-class people, treated with that mixture of humor and tears known as the "Kamata flavor" (after the Tokyo suburb where the studio was located). That tradition was sustained by Ozu and his colleagues through the 1950s as a brand identity. The forty-eight Tora-san films (Otoko wa tsurai yo, "It's Tough to Be a Man") became what we'd call a frachise for Shochiku from 1969 through 1996.
But as media became globalized, and as merchandising became central to sustaining filmmaking, Shochiku's product came to seem narrowly local. Accordingly, the firm turned its attention to its most famous employee. Shochiku's familiar postwar logo, a view of Mount Fuji, had become for westerners part of Ozu's iconography.
Now Shochiku tried to reclaim its trademark by reminding viewers that he belonged to a bigger family.
For the local market, Shochiku tried a bit of merchandising, such as phone cards with scenes from Ozu movies. More ambitiously, there was Shochiku Kamakura Cinema World, a theme park established in 1995 at a cost of $125 million. It held many attractions devoted to American cinema, and it even allowed customers to visit a movie in the making, but one wing was devoted to Shochiku's legacy properties, including a replica of a street from the Tora-san series. There were as well Ozu memorabilia, including a three-dimensional tableau of an effigy Ozu directing a scene in Tokyo Story. The adjacent vitrine housed a reconstruction of his work area at home, complete with whisky bottle and bright red rice kettle.
Cinema World closed in 1998, a financial failure. But Shochiku persisted and declared in 2003 that it would host a worldwide celebration of Ozu's hundredth anniversary. That celebration consisted of a new touring program of 35mm prints of his films, with ancillary ceremonies and festival activities, and several new DVD releases. Shochiku went further and commissioned Hou Hsiao-hsien's Café Lumière, a film in homage to the great director. For festivals and arthouse cinemas, Hou's tribute was aimed to recall Ozu's greatness and, by association, Shochiku's place in film history.
As directors have sought to retain the Kamata flavor in later decades, we find hints and traces of Ozu as well. A film like 119: Quiet Days of the Firemen (1994), in which middle-aged men in a small village fantasize about romance with a young researcher, might bring to mind the overactive imaginations of the grown-up schoolboys of Late Autumn (1960). Kore-eda Hirokazu's Still Walking (Aruitemo aruitemo, 2008) is a family drama made in full awareness of the Ozu tradition. Not surprisingly, Yamada Yoji, impresario of Tora-san, has invoked the Shochiku tradition in several productions (notably Kabei: Our Mother, 2008, and Ototo, 2010). At the start of 2013 Yamada, at 81 years of age, released an updated remake of Tokyo Story.
Ozu comes to America
Days of Youth (1929).
Since at least the early 1920s, the Japanese cinema has responding to the American cinema. During the classic period, American films did not dominate the Japanese market, as they did in many other countries, but filmmakers were nevertheless acutely conscious of Hollywood. In particular, the founding of Shochiku in 1920, with a self-consciously modernizing orientation under Kido Shiro, created a ferment that changed Japanese cinema forever.
Like other Kamata/ Ofuna directors, Ozu relied crucially on American cinema. There are visual citations (the Seventh Heaven poster in Days of Youth), lines of dialogue about Gary Cooper and Katharine Hepburn, borrowed gags (from A Sailor-Made Man in Days of Youth), and even an extract from If I Had a Million in Woman of Tokyo. More deeply, his early films absorbed the analytical editing of 1920s Hollywood. He broke every scene into a stream of precise, slightly varied bits of information in the manner of Ernst Lubitsch and Harold Lloyd.
Ozu paid American cinema a deeper tribute. Having grasped that system of axis-of-action continuity that Hollywood had forged from the late 1910s, he created his own system as an alternative. Instead of a 180-degree organization of space, he proposed a 360-degree one. This allowed him to absorb the Americans' innovations and yet give them a new force. Cuts would use eyelines, shoulders, and character orientation, but would often show characters looking in the same direction, their figures and faces matched pictorially from shot to shot.
A cut on movement could be made by crossing what American directors called "the line."
Further, Ozu realized that the establishing shot, that depiction of the overall space of the action, could be prolonged and split into several shots. The result was a suite of changing spaces that could be unified by shape, texture, light, or even analogy (one window/ another window). These transitional sequences substitute for fades and dissolves, turning ordinary locales into something at once evocative and rigorous.
All of these transformations of Hollywood's stylistic schemata are rendered more palpable by a single, simple choice that is more single-minded than anything to be found in Hollywood: The camera is typically placed lower than its subject. This constant framing choice acts as a sort of basso continuo for the melodic variations Ozu will work on two-dimensional composition and three-dimensional staging.
This entire stylistic machine might seem to be aimed wholly at working out its own intricate patterns, and indeed to some extent that is what happens. The aficionado can appreciate the refinements, the theme-and-variants structuring, created by Ozu's cinematic narration. There's playfulness as well; how funny, he seems to say, that editing and composition can play hide-go-seek with quilts and ketchup bottles. Just as important, all these techniques nudge us to arouse our attention—to the possibilities of cinema, but also to the shapes and surfaces of the world as they change. Alongside the characters' drama is a realm at once stable and ceaselessly shifting; the characters and their drama are subject to the same forces of mutability. Ozu's modest pyrotechnics activate the world his characters inhabit, subject them and their actions to the same suite of transformations, and have the larger purpose of reawakening us to our world.
Made in USA
As Ozu's films became known in the west, citation-happy directors of the 1980s took notice. An example is the moment in Stranger Than Paradise (1984, above), when Eddie reads off the list of horses running in the second race: "Indian Giver, Face the Music, Inside Dope, Off the Wall, Cat Fight, Late Spring, Passing Fancy, and Tokyo Story." After a pause, Eddie says to bet on Tokyo Story. We know from Jarmusch's account of visiting Ozu's grave that he was a passionate admirer, but his films seem to me to show his debts chiefly in their "minimalist" approach to their action.
More elaborately, Wayne Wang offers a self-conscious homage in Dim Sum (1985). This story of a widow, her brother-in-law, and her daughter transfers an Ozu situation to San Francisco and a Chinese-American community. Should the daughter marry and leave her mother alone? The uncle, who runs a declining bar, urges the girl to do so. The situation, he says, reminds him of "an old Japanese movie" in which a parent urges the child to start a family. As in Ozu, the generations are sometimes captured in "similar-position" (sojekei) compositions.
To the generational split of the Ozu prototype, Wang adds the cultural division between modern America, the daughter's home, and Hong Kong, home not only to the mother but all the friends in her age group. The generational contrasts would be elaborated upon in Wang's later Joy Luck Club (1993), which counterpoints the experience of four mothers and four daughters.
Well aware of the Ozu parallels in the plot, Wang elaborates them through some stylistic choices. The film starts with a static thirty-second shot of curtains blowing alongside a sewing machine. The mother comes into the frame, pours tea, takes pills, and starts the machine. The next sequence consists of isolated details—a birdcage, a table.
Only then do we get a placing shot of the street, but it serves here as a transition taking us out of the home (Ozu would probably have included part of the window frame), then to San Francisco Bay and then to a young woman seen from the rear sitting on shore.
No drama is forthcoming–no conversation, not even a voice-over suggesting the young woman's thoughts. The lyrical capstone of the sequence comes with a nearly abstract shot of the water, perhaps the woman's point of view, but unaccompanied by language or music.
Wang has given us an imagistic preview of details to be seen later. Not only will we come to recognize the young woman as the daughter Laureen, but we'll see the household furnishings, street locations, and bridge views at various points in the film.
The rest of the film is not as disjunctive as this opening, and Wang soon settles into the sort of loose, leisurely plotting that characterized independent film of the period. But the objects and cityscapes we see don't become dramatically significant; they are part of the ambience of the characters, somewhat in the Ozu manner. But neither do they take on the elaborate variations and minute adjustments we find in Ozu's "hypersituated" objects and recurring locations. Still, of all American directors Wang has most willingly adapted Ozu's aesthetic to his own personal concerns, while paying homage to a director who was just starting to be appreciated as both storyteller and stylist.
Otherwise, the balance-sheet seems to me virtually empty. Every young American filmmaker seems to have studied Kurosawa, but which of them knows Ozu—or, like Eddie, have bet only on Tokyo Story? Filmmakers elsewhere have been more generous and discerning.
Citation, pastiche, and parody
Hou Hsiao-hsien, no cinephile in his youth, came to admire Ozu later in life, and he used citation in a more thoroughgoing way than Jarmusch had in Stranger than Paradise. Liang Ching, the modern-day protagonist of Good Men, Good Women (1995), leads a sort of parallel life with a Taiwanese woman she's playing in a film: Chiang Bi-yu, along with her husband, who joined the anti-Japanese resistance on the mainland in 1940. But the parallel is a contrast as well, since Liang is unhappy in her love relationships and seems to lack any sense of social commitment. Her drifting, rather lost style of living is counterpointed not only to the courageous and energetic Chiang but also, via a televised movie, to Ozu's postwar world.
Early in the film, Liang is awakened by the beeping of her fax machine. As she droops at her kitchen table, her television monitor runs the bicycling sequence from Late Spring (1948).
These cheerful shots of Noriko and Hattori on an outing provide yet another contrast to Liang's brooding torpor about the death of her lover Ah-wei. They also suggest another way to be a heroine, quietly strong and capable of both love and defiance. And the chaste outing we see in Late Spring contrasts sharply with the intense eroticism of the flashback that follows this morning scene, showing Liang and her lover caressing each other before a mirror. Unlike Ozu's couple, they need a narcissistic magnification of their passion. If Good Men, Good Women's overall plot condemns the Japanese for their army's invasion of China, Hou from the start reminds the audience of another Japan, one that after the war became, at least in Ozu's hands, a place of humane feeling. This is no one-off joke as in Jarmusch's citations; the Late Spring extract deepens the thematic reverberations of Hou's film as whole.
Likewise, instead of the sporadic invocations of Ozu's style provided by Wayne Wang, the early films of Suo Masayuki show more engagement with the Ozu manner—particularly because they are turned to comic ends. Suo's first feature, My Brother's Wife: The Crazy Family (Hentai kazoku: Aniki no yomeson, 1984) was a curiosity: a softcore pornographic film shot in a distinctly Ozuian style. Only in Japan can an erotic film spare the energy to borrow so explicitly from a master of the cinema. While the newly married couple has thumping intercourse upstairs, the husband's father, sister, and brother sit calmly downstairs, sighing or frowning slightly in response to the gymnastics overhead. One evening the father comes home from a drinking bout and the son, like the son in An Autumn Afternoon, warns him to cut back.
Suo gives us the father sitting alone in an Ozuesque shot, and as his head slumps, Suo cuts to the wife upstairs, rolling her head forward in a similar gesture.
True to the exhaustive geometry of pornography, the brother graduates to sadomasochism, the adolescent son becomes fixated on his sister-in-law, and the young daughter takes up work in a "soapland" parlor. Thus is the Ozu family drama turned upside down, with the father observing everything with a bemused, helpless smile. Suo, who had studied film under Hasumi Shiguéhiko, turned in a well-crafted film that was a virtual parody of the late Ozu style. Of course, by the time he started, Suo was able to study video releases and mimic the Ozu look shot by shot.
In Suo's next films, parody turned into pastiche. Fancy Dance (Fanshi dansu, 1989) and Sumo Do, Sumo Don't (Shiko funjatta, 1992) display a fanatically precise understanding of Ozu's unique use of space. Suo adheres to the low camera height, builds scenes out of slightly overlapping zones, and avoids camera movement. He indulges in the master's penchant for head-on shots that can be matched graphically across a cut, leaving us to notice the variations of color and texture within remarkably similar compositions.
Suo will even follow Ozu's penchant for graphically matched movement across cuts. His sumo opponents spread their arms in a continuous movement as smooth as that displayed by Ozu's drinking buddies.
Westerners often ignore Ozu's penchant for social comedy in the Lubitsch vein, but Suo's films happily explore this dimension. American and European filmmakers seem aware only of Ozu's postwar films, but Suo the cinephile grasped that the 1930s college comedies offered fertile resources. Suo's youth pictures show young people giving up modern popular culture in favor of Japanese traditions that are so old that they become fashionably retro. In Sumo Do..., a ragged college sumo team discovers that the sport turns them from slackers into adepts. In Fancy Dance, a talentless rocker, forced to live in the Buddhist monastery he has inherited, eventually learns that Zen can be cool.
Shall We Dance? (1996) modifies the Ozu look into something more generically Kamata-toned, but Suo still shows traces of the master's rigor. For example, the first time that the camera moves is when the bored executive takes his first tentative lesson in ballroom dance. The film's social critique is not as harsh as that in Ozu's 1930s work, but it does dramatize the stifling limits put on both the salaryman and his family.
Just-noticeable differences
Five Dedicated to Ozu.
The two most famous Ozu homages, both from his anniversary year of 2003, are more puzzling. For neither Hou's Café Lumière nor Abbas Kiarostami's Five Dedicated to Ozu can be easily categorized as citation, assimilation, or pastiche. How have these two masters paid tribute to him?
Café Lumiere could easily be simply a Hou production that happened to be in Japan. It's imbued with his characteristic narrative maneuvers, themes, and style. Even the cutaway long shots of trains, recalling some of Ozu's urban iconography, would be perfectly at home in Hou's work, which has made memorable use of trains (Summer at Grandfather's, 1984; Dust in the Wind, 1987).
Likewise, Kiarostami's Five Dedicated to Ozu might seem to take Ozu as a pretext for a foray into "pure cinema" in the manner of Shirin (2008) or the video installations Sleepers (2001) and Ten Minutes Older (2001). Unlike Hou, though, Kiarostami didn't conceive his film as a tribute; only after having premiered it at Cannes was he invited to attach it to the fall 2003 Ozu centenary. As a result, he changed the title from the original one, Five. In explanation, Kiarostami claims that the protracted long shots in the first four episodes are akin to Ozu's style:
His long shots are everlasting and respectful. The interactions between people happen in the long shots and this is the respect that I believe Ozu felt for his audience . . . In his mise-en-scène he respected the rights of the audience as an intelligent audience. His films were not usually very technical, which would make them appear nervous and melodramatic in the manner of today's montage facilities.
Although Kiarostami's statement isn't perfectly clear in translation, he seems to suggest that Ozu favored lengthy and distant shots and avoided editing—a common misconception about the director. There is, in short, something of a mismatch between each of these directors' "Ozu films" and the oeuvre of Ozu.
Café Lumière has recourse to one of Hou's favorite maneuvers, casting rising pop-music stars in his films. Yo Hitoto, who had her first hit "Morai-Naki" in 2002, became his lead performer. This was a shrewd marketing move, as she is of both Japanese and Taiwanese ancestry and personifies the "fusion" aspect of Hou's Shochiku project. Likewise, the male star Tadanobu Asano, an idol of Japanese cinema, has appeared in Thai, Russian, and even American films (e.g., Thor, 2011). Tadanobu is also a pop musician and model. These strategic choices would, I think, have been appreciated by Ozu, who designed his scripts around Shochiku's biggest stars and was not above "product placement" of favorite alcohol brands in his bar settings. Just as important, as with his Taiwanese films, Hou puts his young stars into a rigorously paced, controlled mise-en-scène—one owing little to Ozu technically, but a great deal to his model of incessant attention.
At one level Café Lumière is a family drama, a little reminiscent of Ozu's Tokyo Twilight (1958). While visiting her parents, Yoko tells her mother she is pregnant and has no intention of marrying the child's Taiwanese father. Her family must come to terms with this, and the situation is handled with even more subdued reactions than we would find in Ozu. At another level, the film is about a search for sound. Yoko meets the book dealer Hajime while she is researching a Tawainese-Japanese composer from the 1930s. For his part, Hajime has the hobby of recording the sound of Tokyo subways, trains, and trams. Ozu leaves it to the viewer to notice the subtle attenuation of his music and noise effects, while Hou announces and thematizes these components as part of his cross-cultural drama.
Hou, like Ozu, is a director of "just-noticeable differences," the details that change slightly across a shot or scene. The first encounter that we see between Yoko and Hajime is a lengthy long-lens two-shot. Yoko pays for books that Hajime has kept for her, and as the couple move slightly, we can glimpse Hajime's dog in the background, a bit of characterization for him. She moves aside to let us see it, then shifts back to allow us to concentrate on their dialogue.
This dynamic blocking and revealing of elements, characteristic of Hou's staging, shapes the space as an unfolding spectacle, with new facets for us to discover. On the file cabinet on the right, splashes of light from the street outside come to fill the spot Yoko had occupied.
As the couple talk and listen to extracts of the composer's piano music, illumination ripples over the shop interior, a reminder of the city turmoil that lies outside this cramped sanctuary, and Yoko leans back into the light.
The rest of the film will vary the locations to which we return—a coffee bar, Yoko's apartment—with slight differences measuring the time that has passed. Likewise, the minimal, barely-started romance, crystallized in meetings over coffee, is nuanced by ever-changing patterns of light. We must watch the people, their gestures and slight displacements, as well as the space that they inhabit and the changing levels of illumination. We must attend to both the drama and its aura, both the café and the lumière.
Kiarostami calls Five Dedicated to Ozu "a real experimental film," and he's right: It could as easily have been called Five Dedicated to Warhol. Like American Structural Film, Five… asks us to sink into a fixed frame showing landscape views, and to concentrate on minutiae. A piece of wood, caught on the waves lapping to shore, breaks in two. One piece stays on the sand, while the other is carried out to sea. People stride or stroll along the sea front. Unidentifiable objects at the water's edge shift uneasily and gradually become recognizable as dogs; but soon they dissolve into spindly black skeletons as the image brightens into dazzling abstraction. Ducks stroll through the shot, each one making a padding sound. Finally, the moon is reflected in a pond at night; the reflections quiver, broken by thunderclaps. For long periods the image is black and we must listen to birds, frogs, and some mysterious creatures.
"I think," Kiarostami explains, "we should extract the values that are hidden in objects and expose them." That sensitivity to just-noticeable differences that Hou achieves through the long take and intricate staging, Kiarostami achieves with the cooperation of nature. He is willing to trust to chance, a force that will collaborate with him and invent something he couldn't conceive. Both filmmakers ask for a patience that most contemporary cinema cannot tolerate. In a general sense, Ozu becomes a model of a possible cinema—not through specific technical choices, as with Wang and Suo, but through an overall effect: a cinema delighting in the textures and weight of our world.
Still, something has been lost. To make us wait and watch today, the director must "gear us down" through long takes and stasis, through deferring, stretching, or purging narrative. Ozu, miraculously, solicits this heightened perception in less strenuous ways, through a cascade of cuts, rapid dialogue, and an engrossing story. The contemplative aspect of his cinema was simply another dimension of a work that incorporated dynamic storytelling. When cinema was newer, it seems, much was possible. Hou and Kiarostami, like Béla Tarr and a few others, have found in a slow pace and minimal drama today's best analogues to the sharp-edged awareness of the world that came so spontaneously to Ozu in a more industrial mode of production. In a larger sense, though, Ozu and Hou would agree with what Kiarostami claims could be alternate titles for his film: Watch Again! Look Well! or simply Look!
Peter Bosma's report on last summer's Film College can be read here. Thanks as well to Peter for a rare Ozu-related document. I'm grateful as well to Nicola Mazzanti, Gabrielle Claes, Stef Franck, and Bart Versteirt for making my stay in Antwerp so enjoyable, especially including the beer, moules, and frites. Earlier reports on the annual Summer Movie Camp can be read here and here and here.
Once more, thanks to Diane Arnaud and Mathias Lavin for having solicited the essay.
My quotations from Kiarostami come from the interview included in the Kimstim DVD of Five Dedicated to Ozu. On Hou's staging principles, see Chapter 5 of my Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging. I've discussed Hou's staging on this site as well, here and here (with Ozu in the mix). Other entries on Ozu on the site can be found listed on the right. My book Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema is available as a free pdf file, with color illustrations, from the University of Michigan. As ever, thanks to Markus Nornes for making the book available in this format.
Finally, some years ago Lorenzo J. Torres Hortelano, author of a book-length study of Late Spring, wrote to tell me that the Noh play performed in Late Spring is Kakitsubata, not the one I had claimed. I found that he was correct, but had no way to change the book's mention of it. Seeing Late Spring again last summer, I was reminded of Prof. Torres Hortelano's message and now want to call readers' attention to my error in the book. Prof. Torres Hortelano is also the author of The Directory of World Cinema: Spain and World Cinema Locations: Madrid. I thank him for the correction.
A modest extravagance: Four looks at Ozu
DB here:
Ozu Yasujiro was born on 12 December 1903. He died on 12 December 1963.
For Donald Richie
The film comes to us calmly, not trying to overpower us or sneak into our good graces: just a simple story that seems to tell itself. First there is the daily routine. People arise, go to work or school, greet their acquaintances, labor at their desks, meet friends at a bar or teahouse or coffeehouse. Gradually, as one character mentions or meets another, the film carries us to that one. Then we discover another network of people, also linked through everyday action and little courtesies. This movie, it seems, could sidestep from group to group forever, eventually introducing us to the population of Japan.
A plot coalesces. Someone has fallen in love; someone is unhappy; someone must pass an exam; someone must get married to oblige a parent. Now everything that we have seen starts to crystallize into a drama. But the narrative flow is so unpredictable, even diffuse, that we can scarcely imagine what the climax could be. Sometimes the action is just put on hold, and an idyll shows a character recalling days of prior happiness, or imagining recalling today as a moment of consummate peace.
Suddenly a crisis descends. Someone we have come to care about falls ill, or decides not to marry, or decides to marry someone else, or betrays a friend. And soon we are truly overpowered, with a climax that seems completely contingent. Why this? Why now? The characters may ask along with us, but they resign themselves to things. The epilogue is like a farewell. These people who have come to matter to us drift away to an uncertain future that has a touch of stoic serenity.
All very straightforward, even artless. But that's at first glance. Take a second look, and you see a subtle architecture. The distantly connected characters actually form a table of contrasts. For every wilful father, a tolerant one; for every cheerful daughter, a morose one; for each flirtatious boss a kindly widower. Long ago Donald Richie pointed out the importance of parallelism in Ozu: every person or circumstance is echoed or inverted elsewhere. Into these parallels Ozu inserts prefigurations of future action, motifs which connect characters (gestures, lines of dialogue, props like watches or cups), and daring ellipses which skip over important events. (Once he has us hooked, he can tease us by withholding what we want to see.) The ending and epilogue have the inevitability of the final lines of a grand poem. Look closely, and each Ozu film has a magnificently filigreed structure, and everything that will happen seems quietly destined from the start.
Third look: The simplicity of style. What could be easier than to shoot each scene with a master shot, followed by medium-shots? Each character, no matter how minor, gets his or her "single," and a cut very seldom interrupts a line of dialogue. Every person gets a chance to speak, and people listen to each other. Nobody interrupts. A few establishing shots will link one scene with another. The camera is set low in nearly every shot, as if to eliminate any decision about where else it might be put, and it almost never moves. This, surely, is Moviemaking 101.
Look again, and it all becomes staggeringly complicated. Each shot is composed meticulously, down to the arrangement of food on the table. The compositions mirror each other uncannily: every medium-shot single puts the person's face in the same part of the frame, so that the eyes of one character weirdly coincide with those of another. Indeed, Ozu's bold play with graphic qualities—lines, masses, and color—from shot to shot is without peer in mainstream filmmaking. Contrary to what critics still say, the camera position doesn't mimic a seated person's view. It's obstinately low even in train corridors and on sidewalks. What it does is subject the entire visible world to a precise patterning.
Thanks to this maniacally repeated framing, layers of space bristle with tantalizing possibilities. A humdrum space becomes charged with muted dynamism. Mundane bits of setting, like a red teakettle or a hanging sock-tree, come alive. And the intermediate spaces which link scenes often don't establish the new scene's locale very clearly. Instead, they hook one area to another by visual or auditory rhymes. The transitions also play games with our expectations. We may think we are going one place, but something, perhaps only the shadow of rippling water cast on a screen, swerves us to somewhere else. Just as Shakespeare's dialogue can be read as pure poetry, the surface texture of these films would entrance us even if there were no story to follow.
Thanks to his apparently simple stories and easily grasped technique, Ozu has captivated and moved audiences for eighty years. But this humble artisan who compared himself to a tofu seller created a cinema of which no other director dreamed. Modest in effect yet extravagantly precise in execution, Ozu's films are at once amusing, rapturous, and experimental. He tests his characters, his medium, his audience, and himself. His films show us how profound a genre- and star-driven studio picture can be. At the same time they open up a vast realm of purely cinematic possibilities. No filmmaker has come closer to perfection.
This essay originally appeared in slightly different form in Ozu Yasujiro: 100th Anniversary (Hong Kong International Film Festival, 2003). It is reprinted here by permission. Illustrations are from 35mm prints of Equinox Flower, Dragnet Girl, The Lady and the Beard, and Early Summer. DVD copies of Ozu films are available from the Criterion Collection in the US, the British Film Institute in the UK, and other sources elsewhere. A site showcasing all things Ozu is Ozu-san.com. My book, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, is out of print in hard copy, but a free pdf file is available for download here.
Good and good for you
Late Autumn (Ozu Yasujiro, 1960).
DB here:
Manohla Dargis of the New York Times has just written a piece that refers to some ideas that have appeared on this site. If you see the article online, you'll find the links to appropriate entries, but if you've come here after reading the paper edition of the Times, you can find the Tim Smith essay she cites here. It is a remarkable piece of work, and it's gratifying that Dargis has called attention to it. (Tim's video experiments have received many hundreds of thousands of downloads already.) My table-setting entry, on task-driven looking, is here.
The backstory is simple. On this site in 2008, I took a slow, unemphatic scene from There Will Be Blood as an example of how a director can subtly guide our attention without cutting, camera movement, or auditory underlining. My analysis was guided by recognition of my own responses and some knowledge of traditions of cinematic staging. Tim, in his turn, used the tools of modern perceptual research to show that we can gain firmer knowledge of directorial craft. By tracking viewers' eye-scanning, Tim demonstrates vividly that filmmakers can shape our experience of the action on a second-by-second basis. This not only helps us understand how we grasp images. It shows that humanistic inquiry and psychological research can collaborate.
Why so unserious?
Late Spring (Ozu Yasujiro, 1949).
Those who navigate Internet eddies and flows know that dozens of responses have swirled around Dan Kois' "Eating Your Cultural Vegetables." Kois wants to like long, slow movies, but after trying for years, he has found that he just can't enjoy many of them. He can mimic, even anticipate, the judgments of those who do, but in his heart he finds most of the celebrated films boring. He's now decided to give in to his impulse and declare that he needn't pretend to enjoy Tarkovsky or Hou Hsiao-hsien:
As I get older, I find I'm suffering from a kind of culture fatigue and have less interest in eating my cultural vegetables, no matter how good they may be for me.
As one man's confession of guilt and fatigue, this is doubtless sincere, although its sideswiping putdowns of viewers who praise such movies suggest more calculation than humility. Still, this cry from the heart has broader implications, as many Net writers have discussed. Kois' complaint elicited not one but two responses from the New York Times film critics A. O. Scott and Manohla Dargis. For one thing, Kois' essay seems to offer aid and comfort to people who are afraid to try something different. Indeed, it lets them feel superior to the phonies who claim to like such films. Moreover, Kois justifies the most superficial response a moviegoer can make. Simply shrugging off a film by saying, "It's boring!" is about as uninformative a response as saying, "It's interesting!" And one should always be suspicious of somebody, in the name of debunkery, telling us that we shouldn't bother to know something.
Kois' piece exploits the special status that film enjoys in today's culture. High and low mingle. Because movies are so accessible, and Hollywood movies are so eager to give us what somebody has decided that we want, coterie tastes are dismissed as snobbism. Things seem different in other arts. Would the Times publish a piece in which someone confessed to finding Tarkovsky's contemporary, the Soviet composer Sofia Gubaidulina, boring? No, because to talk about her is already to enter a restricted and high-level conversation. It goes without saying that a great many listeners would be bored by her music, but who cares what non-experts think about a modern composer? Film, however, is a free-fire zone; anybody's opinion is worth a public hearing.
I've kept out of the fracas because I thought Kois' piece was silly-season fluff. Of course I wrote my own replies in my head, such as We used to have a name for this: Philistinism. I also thought that the essay operated in bad faith. Kois wasn't as apologetic as he tried to seem. He claims humility (he "yearns…to experience culture at a more elevated level") when really disdaining this area of cinema and considering the people who claim to enjoy it mere poseurs. The exaggerations show, I think, that this is not a serious piece:
Surely there are die-hard Hou Hsiao-hsien fans out there who grit their teeth every time a new Pixar movie comes out.
Surely not.
Still, Kois' complaint touches on something important about film history. We have a polarized film culture: fast, aggressive cinema for the mass market and slow, more austere cinema for festivals and arthouses. That's not to say that every foreign film is the seven-and-a-half hour Sátántangó, only that demanding works like Tarr's find their homes in museums, cinematheques, and other specialized venues. Interestingly for Kois' case, many of the most valuable movies in this vein don't get any commercial distribution. The major works of Hou, Tarr, and others didn't play the US theatre market. Sátántangó is just coming out on DVD here, nearly twenty years after its original appearance. Most of us can't get access to the most vitamin-rich cultural vegetables, and they're in no danger of overrunning our diet.
The race is to the slowest
City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1989).
For the historian, the polarization between fast pop movies and slow festival films asks to be explained. My take goes roughly this way.
From the 1940s through the 1960s, certain directors developed a new approach to telling stories. Antonioni, Dreyer, Bergman, and a few others opted for a style that relied on slower pacing and even "dead moments" that seemed to halt the narrative altogether. "Dedramatization," it was sometimes called, and many rightly considered it a powerful innovation in the history of film as an art. But these films did get a purchase on the international movie market, often for other reasons (sex in Antonioni and Bergman, religiosity in Dreyer). They also came along at a time when there was a niche audience eager to have new cinematic experiences. (On this period see Tino Balio's Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens.)
But artists being artists, competition grew up. The long take, for instance, got longer and more virtuosic. Miklós Jancsó, shamefully ignored today, made a series of pageants of Hungarian history in superbly sustained, intricate camera movements; some of his films have only twelve shots. But his films are sumptuous compared to what we found elsewhere. From the late 1960s through the 1970s, it seems, a new generation of filmmakers competed to make ever more austere films. They often kept the camera fixed, framed the action at a distance, and sustained the shot for many minutes. The works of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet are the high-water marks of this trend, but there were also Chantal Akerman, Theo Angelopoulos, and even Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Katzelmacher) and Wim Wenders (Kings of the Road). Werner Herzog's successful career as a documentarist has perhaps let people forget that he once made very slow and demanding films like Fata Morgana; his Heart of Glass, screened in US arthouses in the 1970s, would surely not find a distributor today.
From a marketing standpoint, the avant-garde overplayed its hand. The new austerity came along just when Spielberg and Lucas were reinventing Hollywood. As movies got faster and louder, long-take minimalism looked perversely ascetic. Some of the directors, like Straub and Huillet, remained loyal to their project; others crossed over. It is quite a shift from Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), a 201-minute film mostly about housework, to the musical The Golden Eighties (1986) and A Couch in New York (1996). Likewise with Wenders' Summer in the City (1970) and Wings of Desire (1987). I happen to admire both strains in these directors' works, but there's no doubt which is the more audience-friendly.
Today, directors who persist in long-take, slowly-paced storytelling are aiming chiefly at the festival market, which means that most of their films will be shown theatrically only, to be blunt, in France. But some of the greatest directors of our time, notably Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Abbas Kiarostami, have done their best work in this mode. The US arthouse market has taken decades to discover them, through more accessible works like Flight of the Red Balloon, Yi Yi, and Certified Copy. Kois confesses to loving Yi Yi, so I'd urge him to look at Yang's Terrorizers and A Brighter Summer Day, more rigorous but no less gripping films, though they lack the traditional arthouse bait of a charming child. Hou's Red Balloon also has a cute kid and refers back to an arthouse classic, while Kiarostami, not normally given to couples and romances, offers us in Certified Copy a pleasantly teasing take on Antonioni and Resnais.
Minimalism of the 1970s variety got revived by 1980s American indies, notably Jim Jarmusch, but with more entertainment value. In later years he too crossed over stylistically; however unpredictable the plot maneuvers of Ghost Dog and Broken Flowers, they lack the long takes and open-ended unfolding of time we find in Stranger than Paradise. Even Kelly Reichardt, one of Kois' targets, doesn't give us anything like the severity of the 1970s generation. That makes the "purer" films from overseas that persist in this tradition even more off-putting. If Kois can't take Meek's Cutoff, as he claims, he'd find Hong Sangsoo (Oki's Movie) or Liu Jiayin (Oxhide and Oxhide II) cinematic chloroform.
So Kois may assume that "boring" films have persisted in today's film culture because of snobbism, but there are deeper reasons. The competition among filmmakers to push an aesthetic horizon further, the narrowing of audience tastes, the search for a budget-appropriate niche that could stand in opposition to the visual spectacle of the New Hollywood–these seem to me important factors in making slow movies a ghetto for cinephiles.
Why shouldn't people follow Kois in giving up their vegetables? No reason, except that they're missing some worthwhile cinematic experiences. Not all austere movies are good, but viewers who want to expand their cinematic horizons should consider the possibility of learning to look at certain movies differently. Kois can't see that; he thinks that people who like the movies that bore him are usually phonies. But I believe that some of those admirers have developed a repertory of viewing habits that adjust to different cinematic traditions. If you can like both Stravinsky and rock and roll, why can't you like Hou and Spielberg?
Look again, closer
Voyage to Cythera (Theo Angelopoulos, 1984).
This is the prospect opened up by Dargis' latest article. She suggests that Kois' response isn't wholly based on taste. It may stem from literally not knowing how to look at certain kinds of movies.
Kois' article treats most defenses of slow films as a matter of hand-waving and you-see-it-or-you-don't attitudinizing. Again, he has a point: Those reactions are common, I think. The fact that cinephiles must face is that this sort of film is very difficult to talk about. We can point out the creative choices in Hollywood because narrative in some degree drives everything we see and hear. But when narrative relaxes, most viewers don't know what to look or listen for.
The problem has haunted me for decades, ever since the 1970s when I took an interest in Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, and Mizoguchi–all filmmakers felt, at the time, to be slow. I failed to come to grips with the problem in my 1981 book on Dreyer; I even anticipated Kois in calling Gertrud (another item that would never grace theatre screens today) boring–but I took that to be a good thing, as a challenge to conventional viewing habits.
What can I say? I was young. Since then, I think I've come up with better ways of talking about the other directors I mentioned, as well as some in their camp, such as Angelopoulos and Hou and Tarr. A lot of my answer comes down to the way, pace Dargis and Smith, they structure our attention.
My arguments are set out in the places I mention in the tailpiece of this entry. In brief, these filmmakers become engaging, even entertaining, when we realize that they are to some extent shifting our involvement from characters and situations to the manner of presentation. Not narrative but narration is what engages us. And we need, as Dargis points out, some schemas for grasping these alternative patterns. We have robust and refined schemas for following a story, but grasping the dynamics of narration, the how as well as the what, takes more practice, and perhaps some instruction from critics.
The process is like taking in an opera on two levels: following the stage action but also registering the patterns, the emotional highs and lows, of the music that accompanies–and sometimes overwhelms–it. Let Papagena and Papageno stammer each one's name again and again. The repetition isn't needed for the drama, but it's thrilling on sheerly musical grounds.
Now imagine that sort of development transposed to cinema, in which we can appreciate, at one and the same time, not only the story's unfolding but the patterns that present it. The supreme master of this possibility, I think, is Ozu, perhaps cinema's Mozart. But you can find the same qualities in more somber key elsewhere. For example, in watching Angelpoulos' Voyage to Cythera, I think that you have to be prepared to see the arrival of track workers in yellow slickers, visible through the speckled window pane in the shot above, as a kind of visual epiphany, the quiet equivalent of a stunt in a summer tentpole picture.
Given a narrative mandate, we're on the lookout for pictorial factors that affect the dramatic situation. But when narrative slows, other things, maybe not of narrative moment, pop out, like the yellow-garbed train workers on their handcar. At such moments, it's not that our eyes roam around aimlessly; it's that the director guides us in a different way, toward a visual search that isn't wholly driven by plot considerations. Here's a shot from Ozu's End of Summer (1961).
The principal action is a party of young people singing. But the faces are no more important than the gleaming drinks on the table, a little suite of colors and shapes that become fascinating in themselves. (For instance, several of the liquids and bottle labels sit along the same horizon line, regardless of how far the drinks are from us.) You don't discover this half-gag, half-still-life by groping: Ozu has lit it and composed it so that you're invited to discover it. He has found a way to activate what in most movies would be filler material. And if you think that noticing colors and shapes on the tabletop is just trivial, consider that we enjoy staring at the same sorts of patterns in an abstract Kandinsky. Or is he cultural roughage too?
In an Ozu film, even though he cuts rather fast, we're given time to see everything. But this isn't random rummaging. It's visual exploration guided by Ozu's decisions about composition, lighting, and color. Something similar, I think, is going on with Tarr, although there it's more a matter of texture and tactile qualities. His people shamble through mud, oily puddles, dusty corners, and tearing winds. In one shot of Damnation, a rain-soaked wall shrivels to match a wrinkled topcoat.
The story is still going forward, but by turning his protagonist from us and aligning him with the wall, Tarr has given his shot an extra layer of sensuous appeal. Try to remember the way any wall looked in Transformers 3, before it got blasted to rubble.
Slow movies let us look around, and good slow-movie makers give us something to see when we do. But what do we do when these accessory appeals don't just accompany the narrative but swamp it? What if we lose track of the characters? The film may steer us to pictorial or auditory qualities that take over our perception.
The authorities are looking for a man in the family in Hou's City of Sadness, but you have to rely almost solely on dialogue to identify what's going on and who's speaking.
The sheer pictorial beauty of the shot becomes a sort of anti-narrative pretext. But if you're alert, you won't take the plot off the table, because at one crucial moment a figure flashes through the far left background, more or less fully lit, who may be the suspect the cops are seeking.
Sometimes you have to destroy narrative in order to save it.
Hou asks that we engage with his distant, fixed images in a complex way, being patient but vigilant, enjoying abstract geometry while also sustaining old-fashioned suspense. It's this dynamic between story and style, fastening on plot elements but also discovering accessory pleasures and patterns, that I think constitutes one delight of the sort of films that Kois finds boring.
Add Bresson, Mizoguchi, Dreyer, Tarkovsky, and others to my list of directors whose very different styles invite us to explore what the rapid pace of most narrative cinema refuses to dwell upon. These filmmakers invite us to grasp the space and time of a scene in a fresh way. The details and dimensions of a world surge forward, not simply as a backdrop for characters hurtling toward a goal, but as something valuable in their own right. For some viewers, me included, they do more. They also ask you to transfer those viewing skills to life outside the theatre. They encourage you to find a new way to look at our world.
Not all slow, minimalist movies are good. That's why I think critics are obliged to rebut Kois with careful analysis, not the gaseous generalities about sublimity and eternal mystery to which we too often resort. Digging deeper, we can not only answer skeptics but expand our understanding of how cinema works. These films have opened windows for many of us. Why should we keep them to ourselves?
First, thanks to Manohla Dargis for enjoyable correspondence about these issues.
Tim Smith's blog, Continuity Boy, is a good way to keep up with his energetic and expanding research program.
Dargis mentions the invisible gorilla experiments of Chabris and Simons. I talk about their relevance to film here and here.
Kristin has written on comparable matters in Tati; she even wrote an essay on M. Hulot's Holiday called "Boredom on the Beach." (It and an essay on Play Time are in her book Breaking the Glass Armor.) Tati's films, in their spasmodic pauses and shamelessly repeated or sustained gags, could also count as part of the postwar dedramatization trend.
My initial arguments about different registers of viewer perception and cognition were made in Narration in the Fiction Film (1985). My case for Ozu is in Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, available online. More recently, I've become interested in cinematic staging and have concentrated on challenging directors like Mizoguchi, Angelopoulos, and Hou; see On the History of Film Style (1998) and Figures Traced in Light (2005). All of these "slow" filmmakers ask us to be sensitive to unusual sorts of narrative patterning, and some purely non-narrative patterning. More thoughts on these matters can be found in The Way Hollywood Tells It (20006) and Poetics of Cinema (20007).
On this site, you can find similar lines of argument, especially about Béla Tarr, Mizoguchi Kenji, and silent directors like Louis Feuillade, Victor Sjöström and some Danish creators. See director entries for Hong Sangsoo, Liu Jiayin, and others mentioned above. Later this month I hope to post a bit more about how directors guide our attention without recourse to fast-paced editing–before editing was really invented.
Sátántangó (Béla Tarr, 1994).
Graphic content ahead
Kristin here:
Recently I received the June issue of Empire magazine. After the shock of realizing that, Ack! It really is almost June, I turned to the letters to the editor. I received an even worse shock when I read this one:
I recently discussed 2001: A Space Odyssey with my Film Studies teacher (I'm an A-level student), and mentioned (what the back of the DVD case says): "One of the most mind-blowing jump cuts ever conceived." He told me the bone to satellite scene is actually a match cut. I then read issue 262 of Empire, and was very happy to see a Stanley Kubrick special. I noticed you also called it a "stunning jump cut". After being told what a jump cut and what a match cut is and seeing a few examples (the jump cut at the start of Don't Look Now, and then the match cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey), I am now confused as to why the DVD and Empire would call it a jump cut when it is a match cut.
Robby Burke, via email
It is a match cut. The offending writer has been put into a small room with only Eisenstein films for company. The moral of this story is always listen to your teachers, kids. And good luck to Owen Robinson on your Kubrick Film Studies unit. This is turning into hospital radio.
No wonder Mr. Burke is confused. His teacher and Empire both gave him answers that I would consider wrong, or at best imprecise to the point of vagueness. This rather surprised me. I enjoy reading Empire, which has somehow managed to keep itself fat and glossy when magazines like Entertainment Weekly have shrunk to the size of brochures. It even has occasional useful articles, like its retrospective section on Back to the Future in the April, 2010 issue. (As far as I can tell, this section has never made its way to the Empire website.)
The term "match cut" is, out of context, virtually meaningless. There are different kinds of match cuts, and not specifying which type one is referring to will leave Mr. Burke and the rest of us clueless as to what the teacher and the unnamed staff member for Empire mean.
Thinking I was missing something about the term "match cut," I looked it up on Wikipedia and discovered that the teacher and the Empire staff member might have gotten their misinformation from the entry on that phrase. Its definition of a "match cut" is:
A match cut, also called a graphic match, is a cut in film editing between either two different objects, two different spaces, or two different compositions in which an object in the two shots graphically match, often helping to establish a strong continuity of action and linking the two shots metaphorically.
While the Empire use of "match cut" was only vague, this definition is simply inaccurate. The author goes on to say:
Match cuts form the basis for continuity editing, such as the ubiquitous use of match on action. Continuity editing smoothes over the inherent discontinuity of shot changes to establish a logical coherence between shots. Even within continuity editing, though, the match cut is a contrast both with cross-cutting between actions in two different locations that are occurring simultaneously, and with parallel editing, which draws parallels or contrasts between two different time-space locations.
I'll agree that continuity editing is designed to smooth over the potentially disruptive quality of cuts. Matching anything within a scene is definitely different from cutting from an action in one place to a different action in a different place. But graphic matches are neither synonymous with "match cuts" nor the basis for continuity editing.
I also discovered that the "Further Reading" list at the bottom included two items, one of which was Film Art: An Introduction. One of those good news/bad news situations. The good news is, if you read the book, you will find out what graphic matches, and matches in general, really are. The bad news is, if you don't, you might blame us for the contents of the Wikipedia entry.
A little detour into history
Most people don't realize this, but David and I invented the term "graphic match." As we recall, this happened in 1975. David was teaching a course that involved screening Yasujiro Ozu's second color film, Ohayu (1959), a wonderful comedy about television, farting, and small talk. We had never seen the film before and were watching a 16mm print of it.
When the two shots below passed before our eyes, we both gasped and lunged for the projector. We ran the film back and watched the cut again. There was no doubt that Ozu had deliberately placed a bright red sweater in the upper left quadrant of the frame in one shot and a bright red lamp in the same basic position in the next shot. We didn't know what to call this technique, so we dubbed it a "graphic match." Two years later, when we started writing Film Art: An Introduction, we included the term as one technique of film editing and used Ozu's match on red as one example. By now "graphic match" has been picked up to the point where we occasionally see it used in print.
If people, however, are tossing that term and "match cut" around so inaccurately–and even equating the two–then some definitions and examples seem in order.
"Match" as applied to editing simply means that some element is carried over from one shot to the next. That doesn't necessarily mean that this element creates a sense of continuity.
In general, "continuity" means that a coherent space and time are continuing over the cut, so that the spectator's understanding of a story isn't disturbed by a sense that bits of time have been left out or that characters have changed positions at the cut. Most people watching a mainstream narrative film probably aren't even aware of the editing, especially in conventional conversation scenes.
More specifically, "continuity" means a set of guidelines or loose "rules" that American filmmakers devised, mostly during the 1910s, to allow them to help create that clarity of narrative action in time and space. Within a scene, the most basic of these is the 180-degree rule or "axis of action," the invisible line that runs through the scene perpendicular to the camera. If the camera stays on one side of that line, characters will stay in a consistent spatial relation to each other. Character A will be on the left in every shot, Character B on the right—unless one of them walks to a different part of the setting. In other words, the axis creates consistent screen direction.
The most basic kinds of matches are on appearance, position, action, and eyelines. Everyone knows that if a character is wearing a blue hat, showing her wearing a red one after the cut is a continuity error. Her appearance has not been matched. The same is true if she is resting her cheek on her hand in one shot, but has both hands flat on the table after the cut. If she is walking in one shot, she should not be running or standing still in the next. Even if the shots are made with a single camera and the actress repeats her actions, her position and movement should ideally be repeated so precisely that her action appears continuous. That's a match on action, one of the most common continuity devices.
Smooth matches on action are difficult, especially if, as often happened in classic studio filmmaking, the two shots are made hours or even days apart. Even a supreme technician like Hitchcock can err. Here is a flagrantly mismatched passage from Suspicion. In the long shot, Johnnie (Cary Grant) reaches for the teapot with his left hand and starts to pour.
But then Hitchcock cuts in axially, the teapot is back where it was, and Johnnie once more reaches for it. By the time he's pouring now, Lina has turned to watch him.
Editors traditionally like an overlap of 2-4 frames when they're matching action on cuts, but this is a much longer overlap, something on the order of four seconds. Why we don't usually notice such things is a source of considerable discussion in film circles.
The eyeline match is also very common. If a character looks at something offscreen, a cut shows us something in a different space, and we tend to assume that the character is looking at what we now see. Screen direction is important here, since if the character looks off right, when the next shot appears, we assume he is now offscreen left.
Not all continuity devices involve matches of these kinds. Crosscutting and flashbacks may move the action away from the space and even the time of a scene, but there are other cues that help us keep track of the ways in which these new spaces relate to the storyline.
None of this requires what we would consider a graphic match. Of course, if we see the same characters in the same setting from shot to shot, there will be an overall graphic consistency. They're wearing the same costumes, and the background colors probably won't shift greatly. But precisely because of that general consistency, we probably won't notice the graphic qualities of the scene as being that important as elements of the editing. We're busy following the story.
Graphic matches precise enough to be noticed as such tend to jolt us a little out of our smooth concentration on the story action. They are not the basic of continuity, as the Wikipedia definition claims. On the contrary, they often appear in films outside the continuity tradition. Abstract films often play on the graphic similarities (matches) or contrasts (mismatches) among shapes from shot to shot. Such abstract play is, in effect, their subject, and we pay attention to the pictorial flow as we would pay attention to story in a conventional narrative film.
When close graphic matches or jolting graphic contrasts appear in narrative films, they may or may not play a narrative role. The famous bone/spaceship cut in 2001 is a graphic match. It's not a match on action, since two different objects in completely different times and places are shown. It's not a jump cut for the same reasons.
Here the graphic match is not really very close. The sky is bright and blue behind the bone, while it is dark behind the spaceship. Similarly, the bone is light in color, while the spaceship is initially dark, though it does brighten slightly as it moves. The only graphic element matched is the general shape and motion of the two objects.
The function, I assume, is to jolt the audience with the dramatic transition across millions of years and from earth into space. Thus here the graphic match has a narrative function, though it does not create the smooth movement from one scene to another that classical films tend to have. It's more like what is sometimes called a "shock cut," one which startles the viewer. The cut to the screeching cockatoo in Citizen Kane is one of the most famous examples, though it primarily involves sound and a strong graphic contrast.
A transition somewhat similar to the one in 2001 occurs early in Aliens, an example which we use in recent editions of Film Art. A dissolve moves from a close-up of Ripley's sleeping face to a view of part of the earth seen from space. Again there is a passage through time and space, though the interval is presumably only a few months. Here the graphic match is much closer than in the 2001 transition, with the colors as well as the shapes being kept fairly consistent. This graphic similarity and the dissolve that emphasizes it ease us from one scene to another rather than jolting and surprising us.
In the hands of an experimental filmmaker or of an unconventional director like Ozu, who avoids obeying Hollywood's continuity guidelines, graphic matches don't necessarily play a narrative role. They are included as an extra layer of engagement for the viewer. We don't, or at least shouldn't, expect to be able to interpret them. I would contend that the link between the red sweater and the red lampshade is there for pure pleasure. You can come up with an interpretation of the graphic match if you try hard enough—but if you do, please don't tell me about it. I suspect it would interfere with my enjoyment of that scene when I next watch Ohayu.
I don't think the cut serves even so modest a function as establishing space at the beginning of a scene. Here's the shot that actually begins the scene and leads to the sweater and lampshade shots:
And here's the one that follows the lampshade shot:
The woman is a minor character. She and her husband live in the suburban housing complex where the much of the action is set. They are more modern in their habits than their neighbors, wearing western clothes rather than kimonos and owning the only TV in the complex. They function primarily to introduce the two young boys in the central family of the story to TV, since they hospitably let the local kids visit them to watch it. The scene following the graphic match shows the wife packing to move. Their absence will precipitate a crisis when the boys demand that their parents buy them a television. The strife among the family members forms the basis for much of the rest of the action.
So the packing scene is important. Yet Ozu uses two shots that he wouldn't need, thus delaying the scene's beginning. The extreme long shot of the housing complex doesn't tell us which house will form the setting for the upcoming scene. The red sweater is in the distance, but barely visible. We certainly wouldn't notice it or get any clues about the narrative from it. Yet Ozu cuts to a closer view of the sweater and a towel. The houses in the background are all identical, and we don't know which one belongs to which characters or which we will enter in the next shot.
The first interior view would be a logical establishing shot for the scene. The modern furnishings and especially the television box let us know where we are, and the boxes might hint that the inhabitants are packing to leave. So we are not surprised when we see the modern wife in the subsequent shot. But Ozu puts in the other two as part of his typical series of transitional shots that show the spaces between locales where action occurs.
The graphic match, I would suggest, is simply part of Ozu's distinctive style. It's playful and fits in with the general graphic beauty of his films, which includes bright splashes of color, careful compositions using the lines of the sets, and precise placements of props.
Returning to the Wikipedia entry for "match cut," there is a section that mentions several examples, including the one that inspired Mr. Burke's letter:
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey contains a famous example of a match cut. After an ape discovers the use of bones as a tool and a weapon, there is a match cut to a spacecraft or satellite in orbit. The match cut helps draw a connection between the two objects as exemplars of primitive and advanced tools respectively.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale contains the influence for the 2001: A Space Odyssey match cut in which a fourteenth century falcon cuts to a World War II aeroplane. The sense of time passing but nothing changing is emphasised by having the same actor, in different costumes, looking at both the falcon and the aeroplane.
An early example comes from Orson Welles's Citizen Kane which opens with a series of match dissolves that keeps the lit window of C.F. Kane's in the same part of the frame while the cuts take us around his dilapidated Xanadu estate, before a final match dissolve takes us from the outside to the inside where Kane is about to die.
Another match cut comes from Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) where an edit cuts together Lawrence blowing out a lit match with the desert sun rising from the horizon. Director David Lean credits inspiration for the edit to the experimental French New Wave. The edit was later praised by Steven Spielberg as inspiration for his own work.
How the author knows that A Canterbury Tale (see below) influenced 2001 is not clear. The site footnoted (here) simply says that the cut (below) "anticipated" Kubrick's scene in 2001. The film was released in the U.S. in early 1949, so possibly Kubrick saw it and remembered the scene nearly twenty years later. By the way, Powell and Pressburger create a double graphic echo, roughly matching the two similar dark objects against a light sky and making the two shots of the men looking upward strongly resemble each other as well.
The Citizen Kane opening, with its precise placements of the one lit window from shot to shot, is a good example of graphic matches. I am not going to touch the question of what a "match dissolve" is.
The cut from the match to the Jordanian desert horizon in Lawrence of Arabia is a trickier case. The match is placed in the left half of the anamorphic widescreen frame, while the sun rises in the right half. Moreover, the match shot is very bright, while the desert scene is fairly dark, with the sun only beginning to glow above the horizon a short way into the shot. Graphically there is not much to link them, though I think the spectator does get a strong sense of a connection between the match and sun. I'd say it's a conceptual link, not a graphic one. It's a link that we make on the basis of two bright objects that are not compositionally or spatially matched but simply juxtaposed.
Mr. Burke, your inquiry was perfectly reasonable, and I hope I have helped clear up your confusion.
We supply two flagrant examples of mismatched action, figure placement, and setting in Bringing Up Baby in this blog entry. Interestingly, probably no one but a professional notices them, because the relative positions of the major figures are consistent, as are the overall compositions of the shots. But then, as Dan Levin points out, we are not that sensitive to continuity disruptions in the real world either!
A Canterbury Tale.


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- kim kyeongmin
- Suwon City
- South Korea
Student ,
This conversation is closed.
Do games make human smarter?
in what way, or why?
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Tanka PoudelJul 24 2012: IN MY VIEW:
Involvement in any activity will enhance over all understand of that thing. Repetition will enhance reflex action. creativity and much more but even after all these I can't be much sure about being smart. If he/she is smart gaming may not be their right choice of fun time activity.
Jul 24 2012: Are you saying that smart children / people should not play games in their leisure time, because the repetitive actions in games do not foster creativity and intelligence? I somewhat disagree with you here.
As for PC, console, and online games -- the good ones are not only about repeating things and instant gratification after correctly applying the learned reflexes. Games are also about solving riddles, finding suitable strategies... and you can inlcude a lot of history or social problems in games and let players experience real-life issues in the context of virtual worlds!
As for board and card games, the players are equally required to find the best strategies to win and to outsmart their opponents. A poker face can likewise be a useful tool in real-world situations, where you would not want your emotions to surface -- but that is just an example.
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PISCATAWAY, NJ – The Rutgers men's soccer team (1-0) is ranked 11th in the latest National Soccer Coaches Association of America (NSCAA) poll released on Monday.
The ranking is the first for Rutgers this season. It comes on the heels of a season-opening 3-2 overtime victory at No. 25 William & Mary on Saturday.
Rutgers is one of five BIG EAST schools to be recognized in this week's rankings. Joining Rutgers is Notre Dame (9), Seton Hall (T19), St. John's (T19) and Connecticut (24).
The NSCAA ranking is the first for Rutgers since the week of Oct. 7-13, of the 2002 season when the Scarlet Knights were ranked 14th.
Rutgers will face Providence on Saturday, Sept. 6, at 7 p.m. in the season's home-opener at Yurcak Field.


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'Got this for my 3 month old boy. He loves the music and the wings that make fun sounds are easy to grip...'
momma bear - Newcastle
Ebony - Fareham
'Got these in the sale absolute bargain! My LG loves them. And my LB is fond of the brother twin too!'
Foxc14 - Durham


text: Explore Sydney and around Circular Quay The Rocks The Domain Darling Harbour and around The inner east The inner west The Harbour Ocean beaches Botany Bay Around Sydney Share West of the centre, immediately beyond Darling Harbour, the inner-city areas of Glebe and Newtown surround Sydney University, their vibrant artistic communities and cultural mix enlivened by large student populations. On a peninsula north of Glebe and west of The Rocks, Balmain is a gentrified former working-class dock area popular for its village atmosphere, while west of Glebe, Leichhardt is a focus for Sydney's Italian community. Glebe Read More


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May 21, 2013
Detroit Tigers starting pitcher Max Scherzer pitches in the first inning of a baseball game against the Cleveland Indians, Tuesday, May 21, 2013, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)
Stories this photo appears in:
Tigers topple Indians 5-1
Tuesday, May 21st, 2013 11:33 p.m.
Scherzer retired 22 straight after giving up two hits and a run in the first and Miguel Cabrera hit a two-run homer, leading Detroit to a 5-1 win over Cleveland on Tuesday night to stop the Indians' winning streak at five and trim their lead in the AL Central.
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Lonely Planet Costa Rica Spanish Phrasebook (Lonely Planet Phrasebooks)by Lonely Planet
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Lounging around in a resort will make great use of your English. You could, however, grab this phrasebook and trade tiquismos with the Ticos, chase the best beach break, track down a toucan and go home knowing you"ve had an all-round pura vida time.
-- essential guide to mastering the local Spanish idiom
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BLOOMINGTON, IND. – The Bowling Green State University tennis team posted eight total victories in second-day action at the adidas/IU Winter Invitational, including a 5-2 doubles record on Saturday (Jan. 12). The three-day, four-team event, hosted by Indiana University, is being held at the IU Tennis Center.
After winning just one total match on Friday, the Brown and Orange went 3-4 in singles and won five of seven doubles matches on Saturday.
Three Falcons went undefeated in Saturday action, as senior Katie Grubb and junior Nikki Chiricosta each were 3-0 while freshman Katie Brozovich was 2-0 on the day. Senior Jade Johnson won two of her three Saturday matches, while junior Emily Reuland went 1-1.
The Falcons had primarily competed against players from the host school, No. 49-ranked Indiana, on Friday. On Saturday, BGSU played all seven singles matches vs. Marquette competitors, while playing doubles matches vs. teams from both IU and MU.
The fourth school in the invite is No. 52 Missouri, but the Falcons have yet to play a match against the Tigers.
The tournament originally called for seven non-bracketed flights of singles play, along with one 16-spot doubles bracket. On Saturday, however, the doubles bracket was scrapped as too many matchups involved two teams from the same school
Saturday's singles highlights included a straight-sets win by Chiricosta over Marquette's Ana Pimienta at the top flight, and a fifth-flight victory -- also in straight sets -- by Brozovich against the Golden Eagles' Aina Hernandez. Grubb won her second singles match in as many days, defeating MU's Aleeza Kanner in a third-set super tiebreaker at the sixth flight.
Johnson and fellow senior Maddy Eccleston each lost narrow singles decisions. At the second flight, Eccleston fell to MU's Erin Gebes in a tiebreaker, while Johnson lost a heartbreaker at the fourth flight. Rocio Diaz of MU pulled out a 12-10 decision in the tiebreaking round of that match.
Doubles play saw seven of the eight Falcons record at least one victory, with Chiricosta, Grubb and Johnson each winning twice on Saturday. Head coach Penny Dean mixed and matched her doubles duos on the second day of the tournament, and Grubb combined with both Eccleston and Brozovich for 8-3 wins, with one victory vs. Marquette and the other against IU.
Chiricosta teamed up with Reuland for an 8-2 victory against an MU team, and Chiricosta then was paired with Johnson in an 8-1 dismantling of another MU tandem. Hill and Johnson won an 8-3 outcome vs. the Hoosiers.
Grubb has an overall record of 4-1 in the tourney to date, while Chiricosta is 3-2 and Brozovich 2-2 so far.


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2008-08-13 / People/Social
Bay Village Civic Association hosts an evening of music
An evening of entertainment, hosted by the Bay Village Civic Association (BVCA), was enjoyed by residents and friends on June 19. Bruce Jenney, wellknown musician and resident of Amityville, filled the air surrounding the Gazebo with "smooth jazz".
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I am about to get custody of Jace back! via @teenmomtruth
I am about to get custody of Jace back! via @teenmomtruth
Many fans have wondered WHEN I was going to regain custody of my son, Jace. It has taken longer than I expected, and the road has not been easy. My mom and I worked out a plan, and I've stuck with it, and 2014 will be the year I get him back! I am so excited about taking care of him, and the new baby! Check out the full story below on all the details, and WHY my mom is in full support of my caring for my son! www.teenmomtruth.com
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Saving the Milkshakes, a local group, will hold a Festival and Food Truck Rodeo on Saturday to recruit breast milk donors.
The group will collect the names of women willing to donate breast milk to nourish babies whose mothers cannot breast feed them because they are getting cancer treatments.
Saving the Milkshakes also is raising money to establish a milk depot for donations in Charleston.
There will be food trucks, jump castles, face painting, music, vendors and information booths. The free family event takes place 10 a.m.-2 p.m. behind the Cathedral of Praise, 3790 Ashley Phosphate Road, North Charleston.
For more information about the event or cause, visit www.savethemilkshakes.com.
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Fan Art
This is where we see how YOU see Randie and the gang!
click on art to see "the bigger picture."This is the Squid Row Gang a la Kristin…
Aidan Casserly's "Grace"… she looks positively monster-ous!
This is Squid Row according to Stick figure-er… I dig the art, Peter!
Pubbing with the Squid Row Gang…
Squiddy Antics by Stick-figure-r
Crow's take on Randie


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Time Code: The Mediocre Mike Figgis' Latest
The Idiots
Directed by Lars Von
The Idiots
The death of To give credit Watching the To give an A title at But, ultimately, Perhaps not. He is, after This much You keep a As for the Time Code How did Altman It can be argued His last movie, The Idiots Content-wise, In effect, How much does
film equals the decay of cinema–or its renewal? Though my generally skeptical
and downbeat prognostications on this subject are a matter of record, I remain
open to any emerging proof that we may be entering a bold new cinematic age.
Which is to say that I don't think the latest two examples of digital cinema,
Mike Figgis' Time Code and Lars von Trier's The Idiots,
are necessarily silly and inane because of the technology they involve. It could
just be that they come from silly, inane filmmakers. Yet the more realistic
possibility, I'm afraid, is that there's some truth on both sides
of the equation: at this early point in the conversion to digital, the technology
tends to attract that kind of filmmaker–and then inspires them to
new depths of silly inanity.
where a modicum is due, Time Code is by far the more esthetically ambitious
and interesting of these two movies. Figgis understands that moviemaking is
on the verge of tremendous changes with implications on every level of the creative
and viewing processes. Phrased as an attempt to explore some of the new realities,
Time Code may amount to little more than a stunt, but it's at least
a purposeful, forward-looking stunt.
movie, what you see is a screen divided into quadrants, each containing an image
that appears to have been shot simultaneously with the others. The four stories,
all transpiring on an afternoon in Hollywood, occasionally intersect with each
other, but mostly remain separate. Particularly striking for technically attuned
viewers is that all four cameras seem to run throughout the movie without a
single cut (something that's easily accomplished with video but impossible
in film, where reels must be changed every 10 or so minutes). The movie's
"editing," then, is accomplished by the viewer's eye as it roves
among the images. That process is determined both by the dramatic interest that
each frame offers at a given moment, and by Figgis' manipulation of the
sound, which alternates among the stories and often overlaps two or more.
idea of the intertwining narratives' content: When the picture opens, its
northeast quadrant shows a woman (Saffron Burrows) talking to a psychiatrist
(Glenne Headly) about her husband. The northwest pane observes two women (Salma
Hayek, Jeanne Tripplehorn) as they leave a residence, get in a limousine and
head downtown, occasionally snorting coke, making out and arguing along the
way. The two southerly images, meanwhile, follow the action in and around the
ground floor of a building on Sunset Blvd., where, among various comings and
goings, a third-rate film director (Richard Edson) is attempting to cast a movie,
and a philandering studio head (Stellan Skarsgard) tries to balance his erotic
impulses and the demands of his busy office.
the movie's end reveals that the satiric comedy-melodrama we've just
witnessed wasn't scripted. Rather, it was improvised within a predetermined
structure, the basic story idea having been concocted by Figgis. From a purely
technical standpoint, Time Code's creative gamble is undeniably
fascinating–and impressive. The occasional improvised movie that comes
along (e.g., Blue in the Face) generally looks like what it is; the acting's
patchy and erratic. Time Code, on the other hand, seems like it might
have been scripted; the story and the performances flow much as they do in "normal"
movies. Even granting that Figgis shot the movie more than a dozen times on
consecutive days, finally choosing the last take for the end result, the work
of the actors and the production's intricate logistical choreography are
so what? Intricate logistical choreography and actors who can improvise in character
for 90 minutes have nothing essential to do with art. In fact, the nature of
Time Code's "achievements" is sadly more akin to a tap-dancing
horse or a guy who can keep 15 plates spinning at once than it is to any great
film you might care to name. Is such elaborate but empty trickery the only promise
the movies' new era holds?
The problem with Time Code is that all its technical wizardry is deployed
to convey little of real interest. The movie's characters are stock figures,
its action a series of cliches. Phony showbiz types blabbing about the biz,
screwing, doing drugs and acting vacuous–rather than being new, or in any
way compelling, what we have here is a load of tired old dreck tricked out in
a flashy package. But you can't really blame the medium for that, since
it's so obviously in line with the general run of Figgis' work.
all, a moviemaker whose pretensions are matched only by his consistent banality.
He fancies himself a musical as well as a cinematic whiz, so that when Time
Code opens, you groan to hear the first noodling notes of yet another deeply
vapid Figgis jazz score (which, in this brazenly postmodern context, feels ridiculously
anachronistic). The high point of his career to date, the vastly overrated Leaving
Las Vegas, provides a compellingly gritty, atmospheric surface to a story
that might have been written by computer. His nadir, the risibly self-important
Loss of Sexual Innocence, manages to be pornographic and tedious at once.
can be said for Time Code: its hectic, four-things-happening-at-once
flux does capture something of the current moment's media zeitgeist, with
its atomized attention spans and vaunting of copious information over art's
careful discrimination. Yet this accomplishment, if you want to call it that,
is ambiguous at best, since it uncritically furthers the very qualities that
a better film would bracket and question. And by implication–one which
becomes explicit in the movie's press notes–it likewise furthers the
preposterous myths that this new technology is leading us to more "truthful"
and "democratic" moviemaking.
camera focused on an actor for 90 minutes without a cut and that somehow makes
the movie more truthful? On the contrary, this is simply the pernicious lie
that perennially attaches itself to naturalism. It can't be said often
enough: actors and their emoting may be the sine qua non of tv soap operas,
but they're the least important elements of true cinema, the real value
(and truth) of which depends primarily on ideas, writing and directorial
"democratizing" canard, that's more laughable still. First off,
there's nothing democratic about Time Code itself. Its essential
content and final shape were controlled entirely by Figgis, an established moviemaker
working under the auspices of a major Hollywood studio, Sony Pictures. Second,
even if digital cameras eventually allow every democratic Joe to make his own
movie, where can this lead except to a flood of undifferentiated mediocrity?
Art, by its nature, has little truck with tepid egalitarianism. We all crave
to bow under the tyrannical yoke of a Shakespeare, a Mahler, a whip-cracking
and its publicity invoke all manner of storied precedents, from Eisenstein to
Rope to Cassavetes. But the figure who looms most noticeably over Figgis'
enterprise is Robert Altman. Much like P.T. Anderson's Magnolia,
Time Code would like to be taken as a latter-day Nashville or
Short Cuts, films dense with incident, idiosyncrasy and cool irony.
become the patron saint and template-giver for vacuous posers like Anderson
and Figgis? The answer, I think, begins with the fact that he's the director
of the American cinema's modernist renaissance most associated with television,
which gave him formal tropes that he ingeniously adapted to movies. Yet the
sensibility underneath his televisual style always remained cussedly literary.
Remove the foundations of content, feeling and analysis from his work and you
get what Figgis and Anderson give us: movies that are essentially pretentious
tv soaps, woozy with self-infatuation and the misguided sense that style is
that television (including most digital movies) actively corrodes the content
and substantial thought that we traditionally associate not only with cinema
but also with theater and fiction. If so, Figgis appears not to have the first
inkling of it. Lars von Trier does. His work consciously reflects–though
it offers little to remedy–the European art cinema's crisis of meaning.
the fascinating and deservedly acclaimed Breaking the Waves, adverted
to Europe's great cornerstone of meaning: Christianity. Yet the film wasn't
a wrestling-with-the-rigors-of-faith such as you would get in Bergman or von
Trier's great Danish antecedent, Dreyer; it was more like an airy wish
that such wrestling were still possible, here in the postmodern swamp of Whatever.
And if the final certainties of faith evaporate, what's left? Only the
acrid comedy of utter fraudulence, The Idiots seems to answer. Problem
is, von Trier's movie–like Figgis'–ends up merely aping
and augmenting the fraudulence it should blast.
is the latest movie released under the banner of Dogma 95, a tongue-in-cheek
manifesto cum publicity stunt that got accepted as real by the cinema world's
equivalent of fairground rubes. (In a mark of our film culture's decline,
the Film Society of Lincoln Center even devoted a symposium to this nonidea.)
Though Dogma can't and shouldn't be taken seriously, its emphasis
on style and shooting methods inadvertently betrays what it really is at its
heart: a gnawing dearth of ideas, of solid subjects and authorial vision.
every Dogma film so far is the same bundle of cliches: inanely caricatured dysfunctional
families, sluts and morons. The latter provide the narrative keystone of The
Idiots, in which a bunch of very boring middle-class Danes form a de facto
commune attempt to discover their "inner idiots" by acting with programmatic
foolishness, even when their displays mock real-life retarded people. Some may
find these parts of the movie offensive. I didn't. I found the whole thing
so tedious that it was only through heroic effort that I managed to stay awake
during the screening.
von Trier's video-shot jape is a movie by, about and for idiots: if you
waste your money on it, you're one too. Intended or not, its one deep subject
is the state of auteur cinema in Europe. It wouldn't have been made, with
funding sources from all over the Continent, if von Trier weren't a famous
auteur. Take away everything interesting and worthwhile about The Idiots–i.e.,
nothing–and that's what you have left: von Trier's fame, the
overblown reputation of a moviemaker trying to eke laughs out of the fact that
he has nothing to believe in.
tv have to do with this willing surrender of seriousness and significance? Is
"digital cinema" an oxymoron? Stay tuned.
The death of
To give credit
Watching the
To give an
A title at
But, ultimately,
Perhaps not.
He is, after
This much
You keep a
As for the
Time Code
How did Altman
It can be argued
His last movie,
The Idiots
In effect,
How much does