A Tribute to Ozu from Wim Wenders
August 11, 2007
Tokyo-Ga represents an attempt by the German director Wim Wenders to discover traces of the cinematic world of Yasujiro Ozu in the Tokyo of the mid 80s. Wenders shows up in Tokyo knowing little about Japan except what he had picked up from films.. and he is drawn to the visual absurdities of Japan: men sitting around playing colorful and loud games, men and women practicing their golf swing in an immense multi-level driving range, and a small workshop where plastic re-creations of real food are made. Wenders never really comes to terms with the eccentric visual culture of Japan and the conservative households portrayed by Ozu in his films. The easiest conclusion seems to be that the world of Ozu is just gone.
Wenders captures an interesting moment with Chishu Ryu, the actor who shows up in many Ozu films. A small crowd of women notice Ryu and gather around him to get their photos taken. For a moment it seems like the world of Ozu has a genuine constituency.. but then we are told that Ryu attributed this recognition to a television program he had recently appeared in.. and downplayed any contemporary fame from his work with Ozu. The world of Ozu again feels distant and disconnected from modern Tokyo.
I would call this the great failure of Tokyo-Ga: its inability to push beneath the surface of Japanese culture. A film like Yi-Yi by Edward Yang shows how many of the same human dramas exist even now in Japan (and Asia more broadly). Wenders is unable to give us that kind of cultural excavation.. filmmakers do not get training to do this!
Wenders takes us to the grave of Ozu, upon which is inscribed the single character that means "nothingness". Wenders goes on to provide a strong tribute to Ozu:
Each person knows for himself the extreme gap that often exists between personal experience and the depiction of that experience up there on the screen. We have learned to consider the vast distance separating cinema from life as so perfectly natural that we gasp and give a start when we suddenly discover something true or real in a movie, be it nothing more than the gesture of a child in the background or a bird flying across the frame or a cloud casting its shadow over a scene for but an instant. It is a rarity in today's cinema to find such objects of truth, for people or objects to show themselves as they really are. That's what was so unique in Ozu's films, and above all in his later ones. There were such moments of truth... no, not just moments... long range truth lasting from the first image to the last. Films which actually and continuously dealt with life itself, and in which the people and objects, the cities and the countryside, revealed themselves. Such a depiction of reality, such an art, is no longer to be found in the cinema. It was once.
An eloquent testimony to Ozu's art. Old Roads has often echoed this complaint about the way the films one encounters in theaters these days are utterly divorced from the actual world. For anyone sick of Hollywood and its generic reproductions of our world, Ozu is the antidote.
in addition to Chishu Ryu, Wenders interviews the man who became Ozu's cinematographer. In the picture above he is demonstrating the camera position favored by Ozu (a famously low angle). Listening to this interview I was impressed at the way Ozu gathered around himself intensely loyal craftsmen. The director who took up over and over again the dissolution of the Japanese family appears to have been quite good at building something very like a family among those who worked with him on these films. (At least that is the way it appears from the interviews as presented by Wenders.) I am not sure there is a greater tribute to an artist than to say that the humanism which suffuses his work shows up equally well in his daily life.
