Peccary Gloves: An Ozu Blog

  Reading the Balázs excerpt, I was intrigued by the idea that film, because of the close-up, has the power to reveal previously invisible aspects of reality to us. “A multitude of close-ups,” he says, “can show us the very instant in which the general is transformed into the particular.” I didn’t understand this claim at first, but it became more clear when I considered it in reference to the close-ups from some of the movies we’ve watched.   The most obvious example of “a multitude of close-ups” is The Passion of Joan of Arc . Only considering the synopsis of the film, it seems to be a rendering of historical events, and thus bound to a specific time and place. However, when I watch the close-ups of Joan’s face, I don’t primarily see her as a particular person in a particular situation. I am struck first by the sheer depth of emotion in her face, with the historical context only coming as an afterthought. I don’t think this would’ve been the case if the movie had been sh...

 Hi everyone, follow up our conversation yesterday about how film elements (light, sound, setting, lens,etc) can manipulate our emotions, I watched a video about this awhile ago. It is made by the Nerdwriter, who is a very good and thorough YouTuber. In this video, he made an experiment about how Steven Spielberg uses sound to evoke feelings from the audience by showing us two scenes: one is the original scene from Spielberg and the other one is him editing out some sound effect. Putting these two side by side, you can clearly see the difference.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kavxsXhzD48

  ​ The  Passion of Joan of Arc   is a silent and cutting depiction of her trial. The camera angles highlight the sterile, disorienting, and solitary experience of Joan throughout her time being judged. The opening scene where she is among the judges demonstrates the hysterical quality of the trial. She walks into the bright and white-washed room filled with men of varying haircuts and facial expressions. The camera is situated above Joan’s head to emphasize the smallness of her existence in this room, as she is not taken seriously in her own trial. The camera when featuring the different faces of the judges begins to warp. Sometimes the judge is still and the camera pans across their unmoving face and sometimes the camera zooms in and out on a wide-eyed judge quickly having the clownish effect of being taunted.  The camera moves from judge to judge momentarily forcing us into the view of Joan simulating her experience of being in a room full of strange, vengeful men...

 I Bela Belazs saw in film the restoration of expressive movement, the language of gesture we lost to words. When I read the excerpt from Der Sichtbare Mensch , I was reminded of something Annie Dillard wrote and flipped through all of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to find it: A teen-aged boy, king of the world, will spend weeks in front of a mirror perfecting some difficult trick with a lighter, a muscle, a tennis ball, a coin. Why do we lose interest in physical mastery? ... We can't even sit straight or support our weary heads. Of the movies we've watched together, Yajimbo most persuades me of Belazs' hope. Yajimbo, like the best samurai or cowboy, appeals to the king of the world in any of us. He has style. He has sprezzatura . He has an absolute commitment to physical mastery. Yajimbo is the kind of figure we are compelled to imitate gesturally. I keep thinking of the scene where he sits all day in the small temple throwing his knife at leaves trapped inside and blowing in...

From Tokyo Story:     Eastern culture emphasizes the impermanence of nature. （Maybe grandpa realizes that his kids are supposed to move on.) The same impermanence happens in a family. Nonetheless, we expect that children will always play their roles as children even when they have their own families.        Life is impermanent but humans want to find regularity in this irregular world; that is why we assign roles to different people. But Ozu wants to capture this impermanence in his movie. Maybe parenthood and marriage are also in the realm of impermanence. Maybe everyone is disconnected. Parents in this movie only want to find their projections on their kids.      The relationship between mother and children seems to change according to age.               At the beginning of the movie, we see that the old couple is packing their items for their last trip in their life. But at the end of the movie,...

   In moments of extreme curiosity and eagerness, I typed this into the Google search engine bar. Dozens of results come back: a K-pop song by TWICE about three years ago (I heard the song, it is pretty fun), some suggestions to a therapy course, some philosophy or psychological videos, etc. Not what I was looking for, I thought. But I don’t think this is Google’s fault, I don’t think that there’s anything or anyone can give me a satisfying answer. This is not their fault also because love itself is so complicated and hard to define. I think that we do have a tendency to label things so that we can categorize (Aristotle is agreeing with me in his grave, I know that as a fact) and therefore, make sense of the world. It is easier to do so. Even Kant has categories for morality. When one of your annoying relative asks “what is that person to you?”, they expect to receive a definite answer. But the more that I see and experience love, the harder it is to think about what love ...

  Three things stood out to me in the movie: (1) The mother's forlorn expressions and unhappiness, (2) Conversations about money and indulging in little treats, (3) Family units collectively making decisions with a desire for the family to stay together.  Through marriage, the central family unit inevitably breaks apart. The scattering of this family is not only in Noriko leaving, but speaks of the loss of the late son. The breaking of a family unit is always expressed in the Ozu films and the parent child relationship in the film already mimics this. The children disobey their parents and aren't ideal. Noriko's mother expresses a similar betrayal when she says, 'She acts like she grew up all by herself.' The family wishes that Noriko had discussed her decision to marry Kenkichi with everyone. If, collectively, the family has agreed or disagreed, the understanding is that Noriko will naturally feel the same way too. It is as though the family unit is meant to think ...

     WHILE Aya and Noriko was having a heated discussion regarding whether Noriko loves Kenkichi and what love is, Aya's mom came into the room and looked for a thing "this big and yellow". As absurd and confusing as it may seem, her (Aya's mom) search for this thing concludes the conversation in a highly metaphorical manner.       We are uncertain of what this big yellow thing is, just like we (as well as the characters in the film) are uncertain of what love is. Noriko's description of being able to trust Kenkichi and envision a happy life with him is taken by Aya as an evidence of love. However, there is a sense of dissatisfaction we get from this description of love. It is possible that the dissatisfaction arises not only because Noriko keeps refusing to call it love, but also because we would imagine love to be something with more romantic passion than simply a choice out of considerations for the mundane life. And clearly there is ...

     Apparently, just because a movie is in black and white does not mean it sucks.       And evidently, just because a movie came out in 1951 doesn't mean it has different values.      I guess I imagined because it was 1950s in Japan, lesbians weren't allowed or at least would not be directly alluded to in film. I imagined a culture so strict about heteronormativity that even mentioning the idea would be inappropriate. But then Noriko's boss straight up asks, with a laugh , if she likes women because she likes Audrey (not Katharine) Hepburn. He followed with a joke about Aya liking clam. I was so prejudiced against the 1950s culture that I never thought a thing about gayness during this entire movie. It wasn't until class (and some incredible memes) that it started to sink it.      I love it. Artists are awesome. Everything about this movie changed after hearing about the lesbian interpretation. Imagine me, thinking Norik...

 

They like clams.

 Then the devil took Him up into the holy city, set Him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to Him, “If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down. For it is written:  ‘He shall give His angels charge over you,’ and,  ‘In their hands they shall bear you up, Lest you dash your foot against a stone.’ ” Jesus said to him, “It is written again, ‘You shall not [a]tempt the Lord your God.’ ”    When Joan was asked about God's promise to her, she is forced to make a public announcement about her private agreement with God, which amounts to tempt her God. If Joan names a specific day and time of God's fulfilling his promise, then there will be a room full of witnesses counting on God's miracle. She consequently will lose her faith, because in this fashion, instead of letting faith producing miracle, she is using the promised miracle as a leverage to prove the righteousness of her God. Thereby Joan answers, "That has nothing to do with your trail."  Then the de...

     In the last class, while watching The Passion of Joan Arc we as a class talked about the importance of editing and cuts as well as how they interact with each other.  I found a few videos about editing and cutting in hopes of casting more light on the importance of these in creating good films. These two videos should help remind or expand your vocabulary about the language of editing and cuts in movies. You should definitely give them a shot as they are both about 8 minutes long and very helpful. This first video is called Language of Editing: Basic Cuts which goes over different types of cuts and how scenes are cut together. The second one is called The Kuleshov Effect which breaks down the Kuleshov effect and how it is used in film. You should definitely watch both of these videos as they can be very helpful. 

While the historical background and setting of this film do have some importance, I would like to make the argument that it is primarily a film about the internal lives of human beings,  not a historical drama. To me, this is most clearly true because of the style in which it is filmed. The camera rarely ever focuses on anyt hing other than a person’s face. There is almost no context at all, whether p hysically (showing where the characters are in the space ) or in terms of the plot. It is impossible to tell where the characters stand in relation to each other, what their bodies l ook like,  where they are in the room,  or  what the room looks like .  The only focus of the camera is the faces of the characters. This focus is so extreme that it is hard to even think of the characters as characters because  they are not actors in a story. T o the viewer, they are only faces expressing emotions. The plot, even though it’s simple, is hard to follow because...

            For me, one of the most interesting aspects of the movie I Was Born But  was the theme of a power hierarchy. The film's study into little boys' obsessions with power and hierarchies reminds me of my own childhood playing in the backyard. Power and the reality of who had it was always a fact that everyone as aware of. As one grows up, power hierarchies still remain. But as Ozu reminds us, they change. But what is the nature of a hierarchy? Can they be opted into, or do they represent an a priori fact of life? How are they formed? Do the hierarchies of children and adults differ meaningfully? And, what does Ozu himself think about them?  The film explores the nature of hierarchies, looking at them primarily through the eyes of the two young boys. But in doing so, the plot reveals their participation in a number of hierarchies, involuntarily thrust upon them.  They get their toy taken away and are threatened by Kamekichi, s...

     The most striking thing to me about the pair of silent films we just watched (besides the obvious lack of sound) was the distinctiveness of each of the films, something I hadn’t really thought about much, not being particularly well versed in silent films. I had kind of assumed that silent film was a monolith; rag time music played over unnaturally accelerated film. These two films showed why that was a mistake. Both of these films used characters, setting, psychology in completely different ways.       First, the quasi-comedy I Was Born, But… was a masterclass in using setting in an organic way such that it acted as an extension of the characters, indeed as a character in itself. The best way I can describe it is that it was empathetic. The setting was at turns warm and inviting, at others cold, infinite, and isolating, reflecting where the characters were psychologically. The setting acted as a visual sign of the moods of the characters....

In the last few seconds of the movie, we see the sign 'Relapsed Heretic, Apostate, Idolater' burn away completely.  In contrast to the rest of the movie, the last 30 seconds or so, depicts chaos in numerous ways. Movement is seen in the flames, the lashing, people screaming, and scrambling to bring themselves to safety. The flame dictates the ending scenes and we return to it repeatedly. We also return to the wooden peg with the nail hammered in, and this image stays steady.  In the final image, this is brought in line with the cross. We see the signage burn away and this represents a burning away of the accusations put on Joan. Images of the cross are seen throughout the movie and has been comforting to Joan. Although Joan's suffering is presented in the flames, the cross perhaps shows that Joan might still be comforted in some way.  Another aspect of the last 30-ish seconds of the movie is the close up faces of normal people. We see soldiers in helmets and mostly from a...