silver nitrate notes

Tokyo Story During Lockdown

14 may 2020

I watched Tokyo Story (1953) again in early April. It was a strange month to watch any film, let alone an Ozu. I had taken to working from the kitchen table because the spare room felt too official for a job that had become provisional. Outside, the street was quiet in the new way streets had become quiet, the kind of quiet that is not peaceful because everyone knows what it is.

Yasujirō Ozu (1903-1963) made Tokyo Story at Shochiku with his regular cinematographer Yūharu Atsuta. The film follows an elderly couple, Shukichi and Tomi Hirayama, who travel from the seaside town of Onomichi to Tokyo to visit their adult children. The children are too busy. They fob the parents off on the daughter-in-law Noriko, the widow of a son killed in the war. Noriko is the only one who treats them with patience. The trip becomes a quiet measure of how far the family has drifted in the postwar years. Tomi falls ill on the way home. She dies. The children come to the funeral. Most of them leave the same day.

What I want to note about watching the film in April is that Ozu's pace, which I had always admired in the abstract, made physical sense for the first time. Tokyo Story is a film of shots held longer than anything in current cinema. The camera sits at tatami height, about three feet off the ground, and waits. People come into the frame, talk, leave. The camera does not follow. It does not cut on action. It cuts only when the scene changes, and even then it cuts to what Donald Richie called a pillow shot, an image of a hallway or a chimney or a curtain that has nothing to do with the story and gives the film a small breath before resuming.

In the months I have been writing about, I had time to sit with shots the way the camera does. The first time Tomi (Chieko Higashiyama) appears in the upstairs room at her son's house, a long shot through a doorway, I noticed something I had not noticed in earlier viewings. Atsuta has lit the doorframe so the wood matches the colour value of her grey kimono. She belongs to the room. When she leaves it for the last time we feel the room emptying, which is the entire effect Ozu spends two and a quarter hours preparing.

I am wary of the genre of writing where a critic says they understood a film better because of life conditions. It can shade quickly into self-regard. But I think there is something honest in saying that you cannot rush Tokyo Story and that for the first time in years I was not rushing. The film is about the gap between generations and the inadequacy of what we are able to give each other. It is not a hopeful film. It is a generous one. There is a difference.

Donald Richie's Ozu (1974) and David Bordwell's Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (1988) are both still in print. They are both worth your time.

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sources
[1] Richie, Donald. Ozu. University of California Press, 1974.
[2] Bordwell, David. Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. Princeton University Press, 1988.
[3] Schrader, Paul. Transcendental Style in Film. University of California Press, 1972.
[4] Criterion Collection essay by David Bordwell, 2003.