Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons

Is Ozu Slow?

146 Is Ozu Slow? The following is a lecture delivered at a symposium, ‘‘Yasujiro Ozu in the World,’’ organized by Shigehiko Hasumi in Tokyo on December ∞∞, ∞ΩΩ∫. The other participants, apart from Hasumi himself, were critic Jean Douchet (the keynote speaker), Hou Hsiao-hsien and his screenwriter, Chu Tien-wen, and critic Thierry Jousse. I’d like to preface these remarks by citing a moment from Ozu’s I Was Born, But . . . (1932) and the particular significance it has for me. During the home movie projection that marks the critical turning point in the film from comedy to tragedy, and shortly before the clowning of the father in front of his boss appears in one of the home movies, the father’s two little boys start having a debate about the zebra they see on the screen—does it have black stripes on white or white stripes on black?—creating a disturbance that momentarily halts the screening. In comparable fashion, a spurious, distracting, and no less innocent debate has persisted about Ozu for years: is he a realist or a formalist? What seems lamentable about this debate is that it fails to perceive that cinematic forms and social forms are not alternatives in the world of Ozu but opposite sides of the same coin, so that it should be impossible to speak about one without speaking about the other. I regard this fact as the linchpin of my argument, and I hope that the remainder of my discussion will bear this out. I was recently having dinner at one of my favorite Chinese restaurants in Chicago, where the waiter happens to be a passionate cinephile. While taking my order, the waiter was telling me about his enthusiasm for Tsai Ming-liang, and when I mentioned that I would be speaking shortly about Yasujiro Ozu in Tokyo, he said to me, ‘‘I don’t know about Ozu. His films are so slow.’’ The following remarks are an attempt to respond to his comment. My first response is to say that some of Ozu’s silent films—in particular, I Was Born, But . . . , one of my favorites—aren’t very slow at all, and it’s symptomatic of the limitations of global film culture today that silent cinema is often ruled out of order in advance. But my second response is to ask what we mean when we call a film slow—an adjective that’s frequently pejorative, even when it’s used in relation to films by Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Abbas Kiarostami, F. W. Murnau, Ozu, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, SPECIAL PROBLEMS 147 Andrei Tarkovsky, and Jacques Tati, among others. And to pose this question with particular reference to Japanese culture, I’d like to introduce a couple of hypotheses. One of these hypotheses comes from a provocative short essay by Karlheinz Stockhausen called ‘‘Ceremonial Japan’’ that I first read in the October 25, 1974, issue of the Times Literary Supplement a quarter of a century ago. Exploring his fascination with a diverse variety of Japanese ceremonial forms—the Noh theater, Omizutori (the Water Consecration Festival), Sumo wrestling, and the tea ceremony —Stockhausen has the following to say about what he calls Japanese timing: Where timing is concerned, the European is absolutely mediocre. Which means he has settled down somewhere in the middle of his range of potential tempi. It is a very narrow range, compared with the extremely fast reactions that a Japanese might have at a certain moment, and to the extremely slow reaction that he might show on another occasion. He has a poor middle range compared to the European. Stockhausen also implies that this distinction is in danger of being effaced or at least eroded by the Westernization and Americanization of Japan. This is a delicate matter, because we know from the persuasive arguments in Shigehiko Hasumi ’s book on Ozu, Yasujiro Ozu (available in its entirety only in Japanese and French, though the beautiful final chapter, ‘‘Sunny Skies,’’ can be found in David Desser’s 1997 collection of critical pieces devoted to Tokyo Story, published by Cambridge University Press), that Ozu’s work also reflects to some degree the impact of America on Japanese culture. But because Hasumi is a Japanese critic looking at American influence and I’m an American critic looking at Japanese elements, we see things with a somewhat different emphasis. In any case, I would like to suggest—and this is...